Showing posts with label Espionage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Espionage. Show all posts

Monday, December 25, 2017

Assange"s Twitter Account Mysteriously Deleted, Reappears Hours Later

Update: as of 9:30am ET, the @JulianAssange accounts has returned, although it appears to be a truncated or restored one, which shortly after its reappearance shows just over 1,000 followers.



A "returned" Assange tweeted the following cartoon.



* * *


Julian Assange"s Twitter account was mysteriously deleted on Christmas Eve, leaving perhaps the most important witness in the Trump-Russia investigation cut off from the rest of the world while he sits in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. 



Attempting to access Assange"s Twitter account results in the following message:



This page only appears when an account has been deleted, not suspended - by either Twitter or the account owner. 


It wasn"t clear whether the account was suspended or deleted by Twitter or Assange himself -- or why or for how long. Twitter wasn"t commenting


This tweet by the WikiLeaks Task Force - an official WikiLeaks handle, suggested that people shouldn"t jump to conclusions, as "haters and conspiracy theorists rush to post the usual attention seeking rubbish," before wishing everyone a Merry Christmas.  



The official Wikileaks Twitter account was still live but wasn"t mentioning the Assange account.


According to CBS, an account purporting to be an alternative Assange account was claiming Twitter had deleted his official one ahead of a blockbuster story he"s preparing to break. There was no confirmation that Assange was authoring that alternative account -- and that account has now been suspended by Twitter.


Meanwhile, Journalist Charles Johnson - who traveled with Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) to London to meet with Assange in August, posted the following on Facebook after Assange"s Twitter account went down: 



Moreover, on December 1, WikiLeaks" official account tweeted "Merry Christmas from @WikiLeaks" with an embedded video referencing perpetual war, and the hashtags #Yemen #Libya #Iraq #Syria #Pakistan #Afghanistan #Somalia #Ukraine



Some have suggested that the events are part of some Christmas-linked plan, although so far there has been no confirmation. 


The account deletion comes on the heels of a break-in last Monday at the Madrid office of WikiLeaks lawyer Baltasar Garzon"s, in what police described as a "very professional" operation. Garzon told El Periodico and Ser magazine "They had not taken what they have been looking for," and client security "has not been affected," however police are analyzing his computer equipment to determine whether any files were taken or copied. 


Hours after the break-in, Julian Assange published a tweet calling a Jimmy Dore video "Brilliant" - prominently featuring Assange"s interview with a Dutch television host in which the WikiLeaks founder strongly implies that slain DNC IT staffer Seth Rich was the source of emails published by WikiLeaks during the 2016 election.  (Assange clip at 21:30)



During the clip, Assange can be seen nodding his head in response to a question about Rich:



In August, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher travelled to London with journalist Charles Johnson for a meeting with Assange, where Rohrabacher said the WikiLeaks founder offered "firsthand" information proving that the Trump campaign did not collude with Russia, and which would refute the Russian hacking theory.


Rohrabacher brought that message back to Trump"s Chief of Staff, John Kelly, to propose a deal. In exchange for a presidential pardon, Assange would share evidence that would refute the Russian hacking theory by proving they weren"t the source of the emails, according to the WSJ. 








“The possible “deal”—a term used by Mr. Rohrabacher during the Wednesday phone call—would involve a pardon of Mr. Assange or “something like that,” Mr. Rohrabacher said. In exchange, Mr. Assange would probably present a computer drive or other data-storage device that Mr. Rohrabacher said would exonerate Russia in the long-running controversy about who was the source of hacked and stolen material aimed at embarrassing the Democratic Party during the 2016 election.”


 


‘He would get nothing, obviously, if what he gave us was not proof,’ Mr. Rohrabacher said.



When Trump was asked in late September about the Assange proposal, he responded that he"d "never heard" of it, causing Rohrabacher to unleash on John Kelly, who he blamed for blocking the proposal from reaching the President, Rohrabacher told the Daily Caller: 








“I think the president’s answer indicates that there is a wall around him that is being created by people who do not want to expose this fraud that there was collusion between our intelligence community and the leaders of the Democratic Party,” Rohrabacher told The Daily Caller Tuesday in a phone interview.


 


“This would have to be a cooperative effort between his own staff and the leadership in the intelligence communities to try to prevent the president from making the decision as to whether or not he wants to take the steps necessary to expose this horrendous lie that was shoved down the American people’s throats so incredibly earlier this year,” Rohrabacher said.



Contributing to the notion of deep-state interference, CIA director Mike Pompeo referred to WikiLeaks as a "hostile intelligence service" in April, calling Julian Assange "a fraud, a coward hiding behind a screen" for exposing information about democratic governments rather than authoritarian regimes. This quite the ironic statement, considering Pompeo used leaked emails from WikiLeaks as proof "the fix was in" against President Trump. 



 Let"s also not forget Donald Trump proclaiming "I Love Wikileaks!" less than a month before the 2016 election.



So Julian Assange - ostensibly the most important witness in the Russia hacking investigation, offered to prove that Russia was not the source of the leaked emails in exchange for a pardon. This proposition was conveyed through Rep. Dana Rohrabacher to White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, who Rohrabacher says never allowed the deal to reach Trump for consideration.  Months later, WikiLeaks attorney Baltasar Garzon"s office was raided in a "very professional" operation which is being labeled an attempted robbery. Hours after the break-in, Julian Assange tweets a Jimmy Dore video containing his own strong implication that Seth Rich was the source of the leaked emails, and six days later his Twitter account is gone. 


That said, tweets directly from the WikiLeaks urge not to jump to conclusions.


Assange"s account deletion also comes on the heels of several new Twitter rules rolled out on December 18, which many feared was the beginning of a "purge" of conservative accounts over user behavior both on and off the platform. The rules are aimed at people who associate with hate groups that "use or promote violence against civilians to further their causes" - however nothing Assange has done comes close to fitting that description.


So did Julian Assange delete his Twitter account - and if so, why? Was this yet another rogue Twitter employee lashing out on their last day, as was the case with President Trump"s temporary account deletion in early November? Or did Twitter delete the account of one of the most important figures in the 2016 election. 









Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Tuesday, December 12, 2017

Yes, The FBI Is America"s Secret Police

Authored by James Bovard via TheHill.com,


Politifact delivered a “pants on fire” slam to Fox News on Friday because one of its commentators asserted that the Federal Bureau of Investigation “has become America"s secret police.”



The FBI has legions of new champions nowadays among liberals and Democrats who hope that its probes will end Donald Trump’s presidency.


This is a stunning reversal that may have J. Edgar Hoover spinning in his grave.


In order to boost the credibility of the FBI’s investigations of the Trump team, much of the media is whitewashing the bureau’s entire history. But the FBI has been out of control almost since its birth.


A 1924 American Civil Liberties Union report warned that the FBI had become “a secret police system of a political character.”


 


In the 1930s, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court feared that the FBI had bugged the conference room where justices privately wrangled over landmark cases, as Tim Weiner noted in his “Enemies: A History of the FBI.”


 


In 1945, President Harry Truman noted that “We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. FBI is tending in that direction.”


 


And FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover compiled a list of 20,000 “potentially or actually dangerous” Americans who could be rounded up and locked away in one of the six detention camps the federal government secretly built in the 1950s.


 


From 1956 through 1971, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program conducted thousands of covert operations to incite street warfare between violent groups, to get people fired, to smear innocent people by portraying them as government informants, to sic the IRS on people, and to cripple or destroy left-wing, communist, white racist, antiwar, and black organizations (including Martin Luther King Jr.). These operations involved vast numbers of warrantless wiretaps and illicit break-ins and resulted in the murder of some black militants. A Senate Committee chaired by liberal Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) issued a damning report on FBI abuses of power that should be mandatory reading for anyone who believes the bureau deserves deference today.



According to Politifact, the FBI is not a “secret police agency” because “the FBI is run by laws, not by whim.” But we learned five years ago that the FBI explicitly teaches its agents that “the FBI has the ability to bend or suspend the law to impinge on the freedom of others.” No FBI official was fired or punished when that factoid leaked out because this has been the Bureau’s tacit code for eons. Similarly, an FBI academy ethics course taught new agents that subjects of FBI investigations have "forfeited their right to the truth." Are liberals so anxious to get Trump that they have swept under the rug the 2015 Washington Post bombshell about false FBI trial testimony that may have sentenced 32 innocent people to death?


Politifact absolved the bureau because “The FBI doesn’t torture or carry out extrajudicial executions.” Tell that to the Branch Davidians — 80 of whom died after the FBI assaulted their ramshackle home with tanks and pyrotechnic devices and collapsed much of the building on their heads even before fires burst out.


Politifact quotes a professor who asserts that “any use of unnecessary violence (by the FBI) would be met with the full force of the criminal law." Is that why an internal FBI report claimed that every one of the 150 shootings by FBI agents between 1993 and 2011 was faultless?


FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi gunned down Vicki Weaver in 1992 as she stood in her Idaho cabin doorway holding her baby. After I accused the FBI of a coverup in a Wall Street Journal oped, FBI chief Louis Freeh denounced me for twisting the truth. But after a confidential Justice Department report leaked out revealing the FBI’s deceits and unconstitutional rules of engagement, the feds paid a $3 million wrongful death settlement to the Weaver family. When an Idaho County sought to prosecute the FBI sniper, the Justice Department invoked the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution to torpedo the case.


Politifact asserts that “just because the FBI sometimes operates in secret does not mean that it’s a ‘secret police.’" But the FBI’s secrecy is profoundly skewing American politics. More than a year after the 2016 election, Americans still have no idea the true extent of the FBI"s manipulation of the presidential campaign. Did the FBI wrongfully absolve Hillary Clinton on the email server issue? What role did the FBI have in financing or exploiting the Steele dossier? Will we ever learn the full truth?


The so-called fact checkers insists that any comparison of the FBI and KGB is “ridiculous” because the FBI is “subject to the rule of law and is democratically accountable.” But there is little or no accountability when few members of Congress have the courage to openly criticize or vigorously cross-examine FBI officials. House Majority Leader Hale Boggs admitted in 1971 that Congress was afraid of the FBI: “Our very fear of speaking out (against the FBI) ... has watered the roots and hastened the growth of a vine of tyranny ... which is ensnaring that Constitution and Bill of Rights which we are each sworn to uphold.” The FBI is currently scorning almost every congressional attempt at oversight. Thus far, members of Congress have responded with nothing except press releases and talk show bluster.


Politifact repeatedly scoffs at the notion that the FBI is “a secret police agency such as the old KGB.” And since the FBI is not as bad as the KGB, let’s mosey along and pretend no good citizen has a right to complain. A similar standard could exonerate any American president who was not as bad as Stalin.


In the 1960s, some conservatives adorned their cars with “Support Your Local Sheriff” bumper stickers. How long until we see Priuses with “Support Your Secretive All-Powerful Federal Agents” bumper stickers? But those who forget or deny past oppression help forge new shackles for the American people.









Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

‘The Atlantic’ Commits Malpractice, Selectively Edits To Smear WikiLeaks

Originally published on Medium by Caitlin Johnston (@Caitoz). This must-read rebuke of "The Atlantic" republished with permission.


—–


‘The Atlantic’ Commits Malpractice, Selectively Edits To Smear WikiLeaks



Everyone was buzzing about the shocking, bombshell new report by The Atlantic yesterday, which revealed that Donald Trump Jr. and the WikiLeaks Twitter account had engaged in a “largely one-sided” conversation in private messages over the course of several months.


Don Jr. actually comes off looking fairly normal in the report, while WikiLeaks comes off looking weird and sleazy in a way that will likely damage its reputation even further than the mainstream media campaign to smear the outlet already has. WikiLeaks is seen asking for favors Trump never fulfilled, making recommendations Trump Jr. didn’t act upon, and asking for leaks Trump Jr. never gave them, which when you step back and think about it are actually fairly normal things for a leak outlet to do, all things considered. But the following passage from the Atlantic report makes the whole thing look far darker:


It is the third reason, though, Wikileaks wrote, that “is the real kicker.” “If we publish them it will dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality,” Wikileaks explained. “That means that the vast amount of stuff that we are publishing on Clinton will have much higher impact, because it won’t be perceived as coming from a ‘pro-Trump’ ‘pro-Russia’ source.”



See that full stop at the end of the last sentence there? That’s journalistic malpractice. We learned this when Donald Trump Jr. published the entirety of his private messages with WikiLeaks in response to the Atlantic article:






The author of the Atlantic article, Julia Ioffe, put a period rather than a comma at the end of the text about not wanting to appear pro-Trump or pro-Russia, and completely omitted WikiLeaks’ statement following the comma that it considers those allegations slanderous. This completely changes the way the interaction is perceived.


This is malpractice. Putting an ellipsis (…) and then omitting the rest of the sentence would have been sleazy and disingenuous enough, because you’re leaving out crucial information but at least communicating to the reader that there is more to the sentence you’ve left out, but replacing the comma with a period obviously communicates to the reader that there is no more to the sentence. If you exclude important information while communicating that you have not, you are blatantly lying to your readers.


There is a big difference between “because it won’t be perceived as coming from a ‘pro-Trump’ ‘pro-Russia’ source” and “because it won’t be perceived as coming from a ‘pro-Trump’ ‘pro-Russia’ source, which the Clinton campaign is constantly slandering us with.” Those are not the same sentence. At all. Different meanings, different implications. One makes WikiLeaks look like it’s trying to hide a pro-Trump, pro-Russian agenda from the public, and the other conveys the exact opposite impression as WikiLeaks actively works to obtain Donald Trump’s tax returns. This is a big deal.


And it made a difference in the way WikiLeaks was perceived, as evidenced by the things people who read the article are saying about Ioffe’s version:





At first I wasn’t sure who was responsible for this highly egregious omission. It could have been Ioffe, an editor, the source of the leaked DMs or an intermediary deliverer who cut out the rest of the sentence. But then I read in The Guardian’s version of this story that Ioffe had actually tweeted to Don Jr. erroneously accusing him of excluding “a couple of missing pages” from his three-part release of his DMs with WikiLeaks. Ioffe eventually deleted the tweet, after it had been seen and reported on by many people, and clarified her error.



From The Guardian, http://archive.is/TWaqv#selection-2753.0-2761.62


 




 



“My bad,” she says. Cute.


What Ioffe’s tweets tell us is that she had full copies of the DMs, since she knew that there were more pages missing from the single tweet by Don Jr. that she had read. The deceitful omission that is the subject of this article was clarified in the first Don Jr. tweet she replied to. She read it, she analyzed it enough to figure out what was missing, but she said nothing about the fact that there were a lot more words in the sentence that she selectively edited out to convey the exact opposite of its meaning.


I’m no detective, but it sure looks like this was a willful omission on Ioffe’s part made deliberately with the intention of damaging WikiLeaks’ reputation. I have been attempting to contact Ioffe, whose other work for the Atlantic includes such titles as “The History of Russian Involvement in America’s Race Wars” and “The Russians Are Glad Trump Detests the New Sanctions”; I will update this article if she has anything she’d like to say.


Also worth noting is Ioffe’s omission of the fact that we’ve known since Julythat WikiLeaks had contacted Donald Trump Jr., as well as the fact that Julian Assange’s internet was cut at the time some of the Don Jr. messages were sent, meaning they may have been sent by someone else with access to the WikiLeaks account.




As happens every single time these pro-establishment manipulations take place, the rest of the mainstream media is picking up the Atlantic’s deceitful omission and running with it as fact. GQ ran with it quoting the selectively edited text. ABC and CBS both ran with the same fake quote even after including Don Jr.’s tweets which make it clear that text was omitted. The Guardian went so far as to use the Atlantic’s selectively edited quote, and then publish an update saying that Julian Assange had “suggested that the Atlantic had selectively edited the messages” without updating the original selectively edited quote or publishing the omitted text.


What percentage of Guardian readers do you think went and read the private messages published by Don Jr. for themselves and learned that they’d been manipulated? One percent? Half of one percent? Why would they go read the published DMs if their trusted Guardian was presenting itself as conveying the full truth?


The Atlantic’s senior editor is neocon David Frum, who is credited with coining the phrase “axis of evil” used in George W Bush’s jingoistic schtick, and its editor-in-chief is the neocon Jeffrey Goldberg. Its corporate owner, Atlantic Media Company, is chaired by New America’s David G. Bradley. New America is a DC think tank whose team includes representatives from Northrop Grumman and Raytheon along with big name media and corporate giants like CNN and Walmart, and whose top donors include Bill Gates, Google’s Eric Schmidt, and the US State Department.


So this immoral manipulation is not exactly surprising. These are virulently pro-establishment people.




 


Every time. This happens literally every single time there’s a new “bombshell” report on the Russiagate phenomenon, without exception. Twitter explodes, I’m bombarded with social media notifications telling me “HAHAHA I BET YOU FEEL LIKE AN IDIOT NOW”, then it turns out to be a basically innocuous revelation dishonestly blown up into something explosive by liars and manipulators in the establishment media. It’s fueled entirely by Trump derangement syndrome, not by facts.


And people ask why I’m skeptical of the establishment Russia narrative. I’m skeptical because we’re being lied to every single step of the way by the news media who claim to be helping the public discover the truth. Trump lies because he’s a corrupt billionaire who knows he can get away with it, but that doesn’t make him a Russian agent. The media lies because they’re bolstering the stranglehold of America’s unelected power establishment, and that makes them traitors to our species.


I stand with WikiLeaks. They’re doing more than anyone else to shake loose the nuts and bolts of the omnicidal death machine that is driving our species toward extinction, and that’s why that same death machine pours so much energy into tarnishing their reputation so their leaks will be dismissed. Even my fellow leftists have been largely won over by the ongoing psyop to paint Assange as an evil Nazi, and I simply have no respect for that perspective. When there’s such a massive, concerted effort by America’s unelected government to sabotage someone’s reputation, your belief that they’re bad is probably a deliberate and artificial construct.


The mainstream media is not your friend, America. It’s time to send them the way of the dinosaur before they do the same to us.


UPDATE 5 PM EST 11/14/17: Surprise, surprise, here’s Chris Hayes on MSNBC regurgitating Ioffe’s selectively edited quote on MSNBC. There will be others. There is no way to undo the damage that was done by this lie. At the end of the clip Ioffe actually asserts that her story confirms Russia-WikiLeaks collusion, without at any time acknowledging that the only thing in the story that makes it look that way is her selectively-edited quote.


 


If Russiagate was valid, the people selling it to us wouldn’t have to lie about it every single step of the way.


_________


Hey you, thanks for reading! My work is entirely reader-funded so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, and maybe throwing some money into my hat on Patreon , on Paypal, or with Bitcoin: 1DguEVyWJU1eVDei25RH4Xj1eTLnxiS562

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

How to Instantly Prove (Or Disprove) Russian Hacking of U.S. Election

It’s newsworthy that CIA head Mike Pompeo recently met with Bill Binney – who designed the NSA’s electronic surveillance system – about potential proof that the DNC emails were leaked rather than hacked.


It’s also noteworthy that the usual suspects – Neocon warmongers such as Max Boot – have tried to discredit both Binney and Pompeo.


But there’s a huge part of the story that the entire mainstream media is missing …


Specifically, Binney says that the NSA has long had in its computers information which can prove exactly who hacked the DNC … or instead prove that the DNC emails were leaked by a Democratic insider.


Remember – by way of background – that the NSA basically spies on everyone in America … and stores the data long-term.


After the story of Pompeo’s meeting with Binney broke, Binney told Washington’s Blog:


Here’s what they would have from the programs you list [i.e. NSA’s Fairview, Stormbrew and Blarney spying programs, which Edward Snowden revealed] plus hundreds if not thousands of trace route programs embedded in switches in the US and around the world.


 


First, from deep packet inspection, they would have the originator and ultimate recipient (IP) of the packets plus packet series 32 bit number identifier and all the housekeeping data showing the network segments/path and time to go though the network.  And, of course, the number of packet bits. With this they would know to where and when the data passed.


 


From the data collection, they would have all the data as it existed in the server taken from.  That’s why I originally said if the FBI wanted Hillary’s email, all they have to do is ask NSA for them.


 


All this is done by the Narus collection equipment in real time at line rates (620 mbps [mega bits per second,] for the STA-6400 and 10 gbps [giga bits per second] for the Insight equipment).



Binney explained what these numbers mean:  Each Narus Insight device can monitor and record around 1,250,000 emails each second … or more than 39 trillion emails per year.


Wired reported in 2006:


Whistle-blower Klein allegedly learned that AT&T was installing Narus boxes in secure, NSA-controlled rooms in switching centers around the country.



Binney told us there are probably 18 or so Narus recording systems throughout the U.S. deployed by the NSA at AT&T facilities, drawing our attention to the following NSA document leaked by Edward Snowden:


Fairview At a Glance - Snowden


And this AT&T graphic:


AT&T Global Internet Centers


(Binney has figured out their locations from publicly-available sources. He has also mapped out similar monitoring systems at Verizon facilities.)


Binney also sent me hard-to-find company literature for Narus.  Here are some interesting excerpts:


NarusInsight …


  • Provides full visibility into network traffic …

  • Analyzes at macro or micro level targeting specific or aggregate full-packet data for forensic analysis


And:


Universal data collection from links, routers, soft switches, IDS/IPS, databases, etc. provides total network view across the world’s largest IP networks.



Binney also pointed me towards a couple of network engineering principles that show that figuring out who hacked the emails (or proving they were leaked) is well within NSA’s capabilities.


Initially, when data is transmitted online, it is sent using the TCP/IP Packet format.  Put simply, data is not sent in a vacuum, but rather as part of a bundle containing a lot of other information.


Here’s the TCP part of the bundle:



And here’s the IP part of the bundle:



So any data analyst can learn a tremendous amount about the source address of the sender, the destination address of the receiver and a boatload of other information by using a “packet sniffer” to  inspect the “packets” of information being sent over the web.


Additionally, it’s simple to conduct “traceroute” searches. “Traceroute” is a computer network diagnostic tool for displaying the route and measuring transit delays of packets across an Internet Protocol network.


Wired reported in 2006:


“Anything that comes through (an internet protocol network), we can record,” says Steve Bannerman, marketing vice president of Narus, a Mountain View, California, company. “We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their (voice over internet protocol) calls.”



So NSA can easily basic packet sniffers and traceroutes, And see this.


Remember, Edward Snowden says the NSA could easily determine who hacked the Democratic National Committee’s emails:


If Russia hacked the #DNC, they should be condemned for it. But during the #Sony hack, the FBI presented evidence.


***


Even if the attackers try to obfuscate origin, #XKEYSCORE makes following exfiltrated data easy. I did this personally against Chinese ops. 5:58 AM - Jul 25, 2016


Binney told us:


Snowden is right and the MSM is clueless.


 


***


 


Do they have evidence that the Russians downloaded and later forwarded those emails to wikileaks? Seems to me that they need to answer those questions to be sure that their assertion is correct.


 


***



You can tell from the network log who is going into a site.  I used that on networks that I had.  I looked to see who came into my LAN, where they went, how long they stayed and what they did while in my network.


 


Further, if you needed to, you could trace back approaches through other servers etc. Trace Route and Trace Watch are good examples of monitoring software that help do these things.  Others of course exist … probably the best are in NSA/GCHQ and the other Five Eyes countries.  But, these countries have no monopoly on smart people that could do similar detection software.



He explained:


If it were the Russians, NSA would have a trace route to them and not equivocate on who did it.  It’s like using “Trace Route” to map the path of all the packets on the network.  In the program Treasuremap NSA has hundreds of trace route programs embedded in switches in Europe and hundreds more around the world.  So, this set-up should have detected where the packets went and when they went there.



He added:


As Edward Snowden said, once they have the IP’s and/or other signatures of 28/29 [the supposed Russian hacking groups] and DNC/HRC/etc. [i.e. the DNC and Hillary Rodham Clinton], NSA would use Xkeyscore to help trace data passing across the network and show where it went. [Background.]


 


In addition, since Wikileaks is (and has been) a cast iron target for NSA/GCHQ/etc for a number of years there should be no excuse for them missing data going to any one associated with Wikileaks.


 


***


 


Too many words means they don’t have clear evidence of how the data got to Wikileaks.



And he stressed:


If the idiots in the intelligence community expect us to believe them after all the crap they have told us (like WMD’s in Iraq and “no we don’t collect data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans”) then they need to give clear proof of what they say. So far, they have failed to prove anything.


 


Which suggests they don’t have proof and just want to war monger the US public into a second cold war with the Russians.


After all, there’s lots and lots of money in that for the military-industrial-intelligence-governmental complex of incestuous relationships.


 


***


 


If you recall, a few years ago they pointed to a specific building in China that was where hacks on the US were originating. So, let’s see the same from the Russians. They don’t have it. That’s why they don’t show it. They want to swindle us again and again and again. You can not trust these intelligence agencies period.



And he told Newsweek:


U.S. officials “know how many people [beyond the Russians] could have done this but they aren’t telling us anything. All they’re doing is promoting another cold war.”


 


Binney … compared allegations about Russian hacks to previous U.S. fabrications of intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the bombing of North Vietnam in 1964.


 


“This is a big mistake, another WMD or Tonkin Gulf affair that’s being created until they have absolute proof” of Russian complicity in the DNC hacks, he charged during a Newsweek interview. He noted that after the Kremlin denied complicity in the downing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1983, the U.S. “exposed the conversations where [Russian pilots] were ordered to shoot it down.” Obama officials “have the evidence now” of who hacked the DNC, he charged. “So let’s see it, guys.“



NSA either doesn’t have solid evidence of Russian hacking of DNC emails – which means the Russians didn’t do it – or those with the power to demand NSA produce the evidence simply haven’t asked the right questions.

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Sessions Rages, White House Leaks "Have Reached Epidemic Proportions"

While tesifying today to the House Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Jeff Sessions told the politicians that the Justice Department currently has 27 open investigations into leaks underway.









"We had about nine open investigations of classified leaks in the last three years,” Sessions said.


 


“We have 27 investigations open today. We intend to get to the bottom of these leaks.


 


I think it…has reached epidemic proportions. It cannot be allowed to continue and we will do our best effort to ensure it does not continue.”



As DailyCaller"s Alex Pfeifer notes, President Donald Trump has been enraged about the amount of national security leaks during his administration. These leaks have included transcripts of his phone calls with foreign leaders.



 


This admission comes just hours after Donald Trump Jr"s DM discussions with WikiLeaks were leaked to The Altlantic - having only been provided by his lawyer to congress - after which he released the entire chain...




Pointing out the selective leaks from the Congressional Committes.









Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Thursday, November 2, 2017

Twitter Admits It Buried "Podesta Email", DNC Tweets Ahead Of The Presidential Election

It was approximately one year ago, when angry tweeters alleged that Jack Dorsey et al., were purposefully censoring and "suppressing" certain content on Twitter, namely anything to do with the leaked DNC and John Podesta emails, as well as hashtags critical of Hillary Clinton while "shadow-banning" pro-Donald Trump content. We can now confirm that at least one part of the above was true, because during today"s Senate hearing, Twitter admitted it "buried", which is another word for censored, significant portions of tweets related to hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta in the months heading into the 2016 presidential campaign.



As Daily Caller"s Peter Hasson reports, Twitter’s systems hid 48 percent of tweets using the #DNCLeak hashtag and 25 percent of tweets using #PodestaEmails, Twitter general counsel Sean Edgett said in his written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.


Before the election, we also detected and took action on activity relating to hashtags that have since been reported as manifestations of efforts to interfere with the 2016 election. For example, our automated spam detection systems helped mitigate the impact of automated Tweets promoting the #PodestaEmails hashtag, which originated with Wikileaks’ publication of thousands of emails from the Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s Gmail account.


 


The core of the hashtag was propagated by Wikileaks, whose account sent out a series of 118 original Tweets containing variants on the hashtag #PodestaEmails referencing the daily installments of the emails released on the Wikileaks website. In the two months preceding the election, around 57,000 users posted approximately 426,000 unique Tweets containing variations of the #PodestaEmails hashtag.


 


Approximately one quarter (25%) of those Tweets received internal tags from our automation detection systems that hid them from searches.


 


As described in greater detail below, our systems detected and hid just under half (48%) of the Tweets relating to variants of another notable hashtag, #DNCLeak, which concerned the disclosure of leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee.




And yet, this glaring act of censorship was not aimed at the sources of the alleged propaganda, but the content: Just 2% of the tweets using the #DNCLeak hashtag came from “potentially Russian-linked accounts,” Edgett said.


He also explained that Twitter hid the tweets as “part of our general efforts at the time to fight automation and spam on our platform across all areas.”


...And Hillary still lost?



Just over a year ago, on the same day that Donald Trump"s "grab them by the pussy tape" was released, WikiLeaks dumped over 30,000 hacked Podesta emails, which were damaging to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, throughout the election. A prior Wikileak of DNC emails, which revealed party officials secretly aided Hillary Clinton during her primary battle against Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders , eventually cost then-DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Shultz her job. The leaks also exposed supposedly "neutral" journalists as pro-Clinton partisans.


The U.S. intelligence community concluded that Russian operatives were behind the original hacking of both the DNC and Podesta emails, which were part of Russian influence operations meant to disrupt the American electoral system.


*  *  *
A question emerges: did Jack Dorsey, with his arbitrary decision to censor specific content damaging to Democrats, interfere with the election, and a funnier question: if Hillary lost with Twitter censoring anti-Hillary content, what would the outcome have been if Twitter actually respected the First Amendment?









Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,

Saturday, October 28, 2017

Bombshell: Hillary Clinton, DNC Colluded With Russia In An Attempt To Steal The Election From Donald Trump

Authored by Alex Thomas via SHTFplan.com,


Fresh off the heels of a shocking report, published by the Washington Post, that confirmed that the infamous “Russia dossier” was actually funded by both the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee, an even more startling revelation has emerged – The Clinton-DNC machine colluded with the Russians to fabricate and spread serious disinformation about Donald Trump in a failed attempt at swaying the election in the favor of Hillary Clinton.


That’s right, in a literal reverse of what the entire mainstream media has fed the American people for over a year, we now have evidence that, either wittingly or unwittingly, the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid for what amounted to disinformation that came directly from “Russian sources”.


 


Obviously this may seem truly unbelievable to some, but the facts speak for themselves and there is no denying that Democrats paid a shady opposition research company to try and dig up dirt on Donald Trump who then subsequently hired former British spy Christopher Steele. Steele then openly used Russian sources for most of the serious allegations in the “Russia dossier”.


Clinton Lawyer Hires Fusion GPS For Disinformation


According to The Washington Post report, which was later confirmed by Politico, Clinton and DNC lawyer Marc Elias hired the “opposition research” (see disinformation) company Fusion GPS who then outsourced the work to former British spy Christopher Steele who eventually went on to release the “Russian dossier” which was chalked full of disinformation, including lurid sexual allegations against Donald Trump.


The fact that the Clinton campaign would hire Fusion GPS in the first place paints a clear picture of a campaign willing to pay for any dirt on then candidate Donald Trump whether it was true or not. This becomes even more clear when you consider the history of Fusion GPS itself.


As Breitbart reported, “Fusion GPS is not some usual-usual oppo-research firm. Among other things, the company has been accused of being a “Democrat-aligned misinformation firm” aligned with Russia. While refusing to cooperate with congressional investigations, including taking the fifth, Fusion GPS has also been accused of advocating for “the interests of corrupt Russian and Venezuelan officials while hiding its foreign work from federal authorities.”


The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway also noted the serious allegations against the company:


At a July hearing, Senate Judiciary members were told Fusion GPS helped advocate the interests of corrupt Russian and Venezuelan officials while hiding its foreign work from federal authorities.


 


Fusion GPS has been accused of illegally working as an undisclosed foreign agent and is currently refusing to comply with federal subpoenas for information on its foreign clients.



Fusion GPS also has deep connections to the mainstream media, including the fact that it was literally founded by a team of former mainstream media reporters who have deep connections to those currently in the profession.


Again Hemingway notes:


The principals at Fusion GPS are well-connected to mainstream media reporters. They are former journalists themselves, and know how to package stories and provide information to push narratives. They are, in fact, close friends with some of the top reporters who have covered the Russia-Trump collusion story.


 


Fusion GPS has placed stories with friendly reporters while fighting congressional investigators’ attempts to find out the group’s sources of funding. Fusion GPS leaders have taken the Fifth and fought subpoenas for information about the group’s involvement with Russia.


 


Their close friendships with key reporters on these stories have paid huge dividends for the firm, although these friendships and cooperative relationships have not served the public well.



Former Spy Used “Russian Sources” For Infamous Trump Dossier 


This is where the story turns from shocking to downright unbelievable, especially when you consider the year long mainstream media disinformation narrative that claims that the Russians helped Donald Trump win the election.


The spook working for Fusion GPS, (which was hired by the Clinton campaign) Christopher Steele, openly bragged about his sources being within the Russian government itself.


Buried deep in a report by Vanity Fair that spends thousands of words trying to pretend that the dossier could be legitimate, is this nugget that paints a picture of direct or indirect collusion between the Clinton team and Russia.


How good were these sources? Consider what Steele would write in the memos he filed with Simpson: Source A—to use the careful nomenclature of his dossier—was “a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure.” Source B was “a former top level intelligence officer still active in the Kremlin.” And both of these insiders, after “speaking to a trusted compatriot,” would claim that the Kremlin had spent years getting its hooks into Donald Trump.


 


Source E was “an ethnic Russian” and “close associate of Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump.”



After “gathering” the information, Steele was then directed by Fusion GPS to “brief” the media about the Russian government fueled allegations against Trump.


As The Daily Caller noted in July:


In one, dated May 18, Steele says that he was instructed by Fusion GPS to meet with reporters at various outlets in order to publicize some of the allegations made in the dossier.


 


It has been widely known that Fusion GPS and Steele were in contact with reporters to discuss the dossier. It has been reported that rumors of the dossier were floating around in Washington, D.C. political and journalist circles for months prior to BuzzFeed’s decision to publish it on Jan. 10.


 


[…]


 


In the response, Steele’s lawyers state that the former spook briefed several reporters at the end of September at the instruction of Fusion GPS, which was working on behalf of a Democratic ally of Hillary Clinton’s.


 


The outlets were The New York Times, The Washington Post, Yahoo! News, The New Yorker and CNN.


 


Steele met once more — and again at Fusion GPS’s instruction — with The Times, The Post, and Yahoo! News. Fusion GPS took part in all of those meetings, Steele’s lawyers say.


 


“In each of those cases the briefing was conducted verbally in person,” the document reads.


 


In October, Fusion GPS instructed Steele to brief a journalist from Mother Jones. The interview, which was conducted through Skype, was likely with reporter David Corn.



It doesn’t get any clearer than this. Fusion GPS was paid by Democrats to dig up dirt, that dirt was then supplied by the Russians, and subsequently became a major part of the narrative surrounding Donald Trump and Russia.


“What you clearly have here is the Clinton campaign openly COLLUDING with a foreign country, with the Russians, to fabricate scurrilous lies about Trump, which were then fed to a willing media as a means to affect their news coverage, and by extension, sway the election,” Breitbart’s John Nolte wrote.


Fusion GPS “Was Acting On Behalf Of Russia”


Amazingly, testimony and evidence already exists that Fusion GPS has in the past worked directly for Russia and may have been doing so with the Trump disinformation dossier.


At a Senate Judiciary Hearing in late July, Hermitage Capital Management chief William Browder testified that the company was acting on behalf of Russia after co-founder Glenn Simpson was hired by a person connected to lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya to lobby for the repeal of the  Magnitsky Act.



The following exchange between Browder and Senator Lindsey Graham is shocking to say the least.


SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: This whole story reads like some kind of novel that nobody would buy, it’s got to be fiction, but unfortunately maybe it’s true. Let’s just break down sort of why you’re here. You believe that Fusion GPS should of registered under FARA, because they were acting on the behalf of the Russians?


 


WILLIAM BROWDER: That’s correct.


 


SEN. GRAHAM: So, I just want to absorb that for a moment. The group that did the dossier on President Trump hired this British spy, wound up getting it to the FBI. You believe they were working for the Russians?


 


BROWDER: And in the Spring and Summer of 2016 they were receiving money indirectly from a senior Russian government official.


 


SEN. GRAHAM: Okay. So, these are the people that were trying to undermine Donald Trump by showing the nefarious ties to Russia. Is that what you’re saying?


 


BROWDER: Well, what I’m saying with 100% certainty is that they were working to undermine the Magnitsky act and the timing of that.


 


SEN. GRAHAM: But, the Fusion GPS products apparently as they hired a guy to look into Trump?


 


BROWDER: Yes.


 


SEN. GRAHAM: Right


 


BROWDER: Correct.



When you put all the evidence together, keeping in mind that this is only what has been released so far, you can see a clear picture of, at the very least, indirect collusion between the highest levels of the Democratic Party and unknown figures within the Russian government. The scheme was then directly propped up and spread by the mainstream media.


As Nolte so aptly notes, “If purchasing misinformation from Kremlin official as a means to manipulate media coverage and sway public opinion is not colluding with the Russians to rig an election, nothing is.”









Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Clinton, Assange, And The War On Truth

Authored by John Pilger via Counterpunch.org,


On 16 October, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation aired an interview with Hillary Clinton: one of many to promote her score-settling book about why she was not elected President of the United States.


Wading through the Clinton book, What Happened, is an unpleasant experience, like a stomach upset. Smears and tears. Threats and enemies. “They” (voters) were brainwashed and herded against her by the odious Donald Trump in cahoots with sinister Slavs sent from the great darkness known as Russia, assisted by an Australian “nihilist”, Julian Assange.


In The New York Times, there was a striking photograph of a female reporter consoling Clinton, having just interviewed her. The lost leader was, above all, “absolutely a feminist”. The thousands of women’s lives this “feminist” destroyed while in government - Libya, Syria, Honduras - were of no interest.


In New York magazine, Rebecca Traister wrote that Clinton was finally “expressing some righteous anger”. It was even hard for her to smile: “so hard that the muscles in her face ache”. Surely, she concluded, “if we allowed women’s resentments the same bearing we allow men’s grudges, America would be forced to reckon with the fact that all these angry women might just have a point”.


Drivel such as this, trivialising women’s struggles, marks the media hagiographies of Hillary Clinton. Her political extremism and warmongering are of no consequence. Her problem, wrote Traister, was a “damaging infatuation with the email story”. The truth, in other words.


The leaked emails of Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, revealed a direct connection between Clinton and the foundation and funding of organised jihadism in the Middle East and Islamic State (IS). The ultimate source of most Islamic terrorism, Saudi Arabia, was central to her career.


One email, in 2014, sent by Clinton to Podesta soon after she stepped down as US Secretary of State, discloses that Islamic State is funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Clinton accepted huge donations from both governments for the Clinton Foundation.


As Secretary of State, she approved the world’s biggest ever arms sale to her benefactors in Saudi Arabia, worth more than $80 billion. Thanks to her, US arms sales to the world – for use in stricken countries like Yemen – doubled.


This was revealed by WikiLeaks and published by The New York Times. No one doubts the emails are authentic. The subsequent campaign to smear WikiLeaks and its editor-in-chief, Julian Assange, as “agents of Russia”, has grown into a spectacular fantasy known as “Russiagate”. The “plot” is said to have been signed off by Vladimir Putin himself.  There is not a shred of evidence.


The ABC Australia interview with Clinton is an outstanding example of smear and censorship by omission. I would say it is a model.


“No one,” the interviewer, Sarah Ferguson, says to Clinton, “could fail to be moved by the pain on your face at that moment [of the inauguration of Trump] … Do you remember how visceral it was for you?”


Having established Clinton’s visceral suffering, Ferguson asks about “Russia’s role”.


CLINTON: I think Russia affected the perceptions and views of millions of voters, we now know. I think that their intention coming from the very top with Putin was to hurt me and to help Trump.


 


FERGUSON: How much of that was a personal vendetta by Vladimir Putin against you?


 


CLINTON: … I mean he wants to destabilise democracy. He wants to undermine America, he wants to go after the Atlantic Alliance and we consider Australia kind of a … an extension of that …



The opposite is true. It is Western armies that are massing on Russia’s border for the first time since the Russian Revolution 100 years ago.


FERGUSON: How much damage did [Julian Assange] do personally to you?


 


CLINTON: Well, I had a lot of history with him because I was Secretary of State when ah WikiLeaks published a lot of very sensitive ah information from our State Department and our Defence Department.



What Clinton fails to say – and her interviewer fails to remind her — is that in 2010, WikiLeaks revealed that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had ordered a secret intelligence campaign targeted at the United Nations leadership, including the Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon and the permanent Security Council representatives from China, Russia, France and the UK.


A classified directive, signed by Clinton, was issued to US diplomats in July 2009, demanding forensic technical details about the communications systems used by top UN officials, including passwords and personal encryption keys used in private and commercial networks.


This was known as Cablegate. It was lawless spying.


CLINTON:  He [Assange] is very clearly a tool of Russian intelligence. And ah, he has done their bidding.



Clinton offered no evidence to back up this serious accusation, nor did Ferguson challenge her.


CLINTON: You don’t see damaging negative information coming out about the Kremlin on WikiLeaks. You didn’t see any of that published.



This was false. WikiLeaks has published a massive number of documents on Russia – more than 800,000, most of them critical, many of them used in books and as evidence in court cases.


CLINTON:  So I think Assange has become a kind of nihilistic opportunist who does the bidding of a dictator.


 


FERGUSON:  Lots of people, including in Australia, think that Assange is a martyr for free speech and freedom of information. How would you describe him? Well, you’ve just described him as a nihilist


 


CLINTON:  Yeah, well, and a tool. I mean he’s a tool of Russian intelligence. And if he’s such a, you know, martyr of free speech, why doesn’t WikiLeaks ever publish anything coming out of Russia?



Again, Ferguson said nothing to challenge this or correct her.


CLINTON: There was a concerted operation between WikiLeaks and Russia and most likely people in the United States to weaponise that information, to make up stories … to help Trump.


 


FERGUSON: Now, along with some of those outlandish stories, there was information that was revealed about the Clinton Foundation that at least in some of the voters’ minds seemed to associate you ….


 


CLINTON: Yeah, but it was false!


 


FERGUSON: … with the peddling of information …


 


CLINTON: It was false! It was totally false!  …..


 


FERGUSON: Do you understand how difficult it was for some voters to understand the amounts of money that the [Clinton] Foundation is raising, the confusion with the consultancy that was also raising money, getting gifts and travel and so on for Bill Clinton that even Chelsea had some issues with? …


 


CLINTON: Well you know, I’m sorry, Sarah, I mean I, I know the facts ….



The ABC interviewer lauded Clinton as “the icon of your generation”. She asked her nothing about the enormous sums she creamed off from Wall Street, such as the $675,000 she received for speaking at Goldman Sachs, one of the banks at the centre of the 2008 crash. Clinton’s greed deeply upset the kind of voters she abused as “deplorables”.


Clearly looking for a cheap headline in the Australian press, Ferguson asked her if Trump was “a clear and present danger to Australia” and got her predictable response.


This high-profile journalist made no mention of Clinton’s own “clear and present danger” to the people of Iran whom she once threatened to “obliterate totally”, and the 40,000 Libyans who died in the attack on Libya in 2011 that Clinton orchestrated. Flushed with excitement, the Secretary of State rejoiced at the gruesome murder of the Libyan leader, Colonel Gaddafi.


“Libya was Hillary Clinton’s war”, Julian Assange said in a filmed interview with me last year. “Barack Obama initially opposed it. Who was the person championing it?  Hillary Clinton.  That’s documented throughout her emails … there’s more than 1700 emails out of the 33,000 Hillary Clinton emails that we’ve published, just about Libya. It’s not that Libya has cheap oil. She perceived the removal of Gaddafi and the overthrow of the Libyan state — something that she would use in her run-up to the general election for President.


 


“So in late 2011 there is an internal document called the Libya Tick Tock  that was produced for Hillary Clinton, and it’s the chronological description of how she was the central figure in the destruction of the Libyan state, which resulted in around 40,000 deaths within Libya; jihadists moved in, ISIS moved in, leading to the European refugee and migrant crisis.


 


“Not only did you have people fleeing Libya, people fleeing Syria, the destabilisation of other African countries as a result of arms flows, but the Libyan state itself was no longer able to control the movement of people through it.”



This – not Clinton’s “visceral” pain in losing to Trump nor the rest of the self-serving scuttlebutt in her ABC interview  - was the story. Clinton shared responsibility for massively de-stabilising the Middle East, which led to the death, suffering and flight of thousands of women, men and children.


Ferguson raised not a word of it.  Clinton repeatedly defamed Assange, who was neither defended nor offered a right of reply on his own country’s state broadcaster.


In a tweet from London, Assange cited the ABC’s own Code of Practice, which states: “Where allegations are made about a person or organisation, make reasonable efforts in the circumstances to provide a fair opportunity to respond.”


Following the ABC broadcast, Ferguson’s  executive producer, Sally Neighbour, re-tweeted the following: “Assange is Putin’s bitch. We all know it!”


The slander, since deleted, was even used as a link to the ABC interview captioned ‘Assange is Putins (sic) b****. We all know it!’


In the years I have known Julian Assange, I have watched a vituperative personal campaign try to stop him and WikiLeaks. It has been a frontal assault on whistleblowing, on free speech and free journalism, all of which are now under sustained attack from governments and corporate internet controllers.


The first serious attacks on Assange came from the Guardian which, like a spurned lover, turned on its besieged former source, having hugely profited from WikiLeaks’ disclosures. With not a penny going to Assange or WikiLeaks, a Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie deal. Assange was portrayed as “callous” and a “damaged personality”.


It was as if a rampant jealousy could not accept that his remarkable achievements stood in marked contrast to that of his detractors in the “mainstream” media. It is like watching the guardians of the status quo, regardless of age, struggling to silence real dissent and prevent the emergence of the new and hopeful.


Today, Assange remains a political refugee from the war-making dark state of which Donald Trump is a caricature and Hillary Clinton the embodiment. His resilience and courage are astonishing. Unlike him, his tormentors are cowards.









Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)