A Welcoming Community
VERY worrying news:
But it is unlikely that Kennedy will remain on the court for the full four years of the Trump presidency. While he long ago hired his law clerks for the coming term, he has not done so for the following term (beginning Oct. 2018), and has let applicants for those positions know he is considering retirement.
Kennedy is the fifth vote in Obergefell and to sustain Roe.
Neither will likely survive the Trump Presidency.
Back in April, when the BBC talked to Thomas Homer-Dixon, chair of global systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Canada, about the prospects for the collapse of Western Civilization, they were told that things do not look good.
The Syrian case aside, another sign that we’re entering into a danger zone, Homer-Dixon says, is the increasing occurrence of what experts call nonlinearities, or sudden, unexpected changes in the world’s order, such as the 2008 economic crisis, the rise of ISIS, Brexit, or Donald Trump’s election.
I guess you can call that an updated version of the four signs of the Apocalypse. These nonlinearities aren’t so much causes of our current problems as they are consequences of them. Many have noted how the invasion of Iraq cascaded into the Syrian civil war, and also how a drought brought on by climate change contributed to the disintegration of Syria’s political consensus. The financial collapse of 2008 was foreseen by relatively few experts but came about as a natural consequence of a failure to adequately regulate financial instruments. And both Brexit and the election of Donald Trump are widely regarded as hard to foresee consequences of growing income inequality and anxiety about immigration and refugee patterns.
For Homer-Dixon, there are echoes in all of this of the end state of the Western Roman Empire:
Also paralleling Rome, Homer-Dixon predicts that Western societies’ collapse will be preceded by a retraction of people and resources back to their core homelands. As poorer nations continue to disintegrate amid conflicts and natural disasters, enormous waves of migrants will stream out of failing regions, seeking refuge in more stable states. Western societies will respond with restrictions and even bans on immigration; multi-billion dollar walls and border-patrolling drones and troops; heightened security on who and what gets in; and more authoritarian, populist styles of governing. “It’s almost an immunological attempt by countries to sustain a periphery and push pressure back,” Homer-Dixon says.
Maybe this is the very definition of alarmist, but it doesn’t feel like something we can afford to be complacent about. It seems more like an invitation to awaken from the dream-state most progressives (including myself) were living in during the Obama years when things appeared to be stressed by moving methodically in a generally positive direction. Of course, there was a lot of concern about all of these issues and whether we were reacting with enough coordination and urgency to meet our challenges. Efforts to mitigate Climate Change were criticized as inadequate, and the same could be said for regulating Wall Street. The Occupy Movement was a visible expression that income inequality was not improving. And the Middle East continued to disintegrate causing a massive refugee crisis that Europe was struggling to manage. Nonetheless, we had leadership that understood these challenges and was working on them with varying degrees of success. We weren’t ready for the nonlinearities that were hidden just off the horizon. Perhaps the clouds looked ominous, but almost no one forecast how quickly the storm would arrive.
Of course, there were exceptions and we can now point to a few individuals who were especially prescient. I liken these people to the folks who were early in seeing the direction Europe was headed in the 1930’s. Back then, the progressive view was shaped by the experience of the First World War which looked in retrospect like a lot of death and expense for what was ultimately a spat among elite royal families, rapacious imperialists, and nationalist shit-stirrers. The default position in the United States was of isolationism and non-intervention.
Franklin Roosevelt had an appropriate level of foresight and alarm but he didn’t have unity within his own party. Once he decided that the challenge required him to run for an unprecedented third term in office, he began to move beyond traditional partisanship in an effort to rally the country to the challenge. To give one example, he asked for the resignation of his Secretary of War, Harry Hines Woodring, because he opposed helping supply the United Kingdom for their fight against the Nazis.
A strict non-interventionist, Woodring came under pressure from other cabinet members to resign in the first year of World War II. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes met with Roosevelt at least twice to call for Woodring’s firing, but FDR was at first unwilling to do so, instead appointing outspoken interventionist Louis A. Johnson as Woodring’s assistant secretary of war. Woodring and Johnson were immediately at odds, and quickly reached the point where they refused to speak to each other.[8] On June 20, 1940, Roosevelt ended the struggle by finally firing Woodring, replacing him with long-time Republican politician Henry Stimson.
Even more strikingly, FDR hired Frank Knox to serve as the Secretary of the Navy. This was remarkable because Knox had been Alf Landon’s running mate four years earlier. To put this in today’s terms, imagine if Barack Obama had been sufficiently alarmed about the foreign policy myopia in his own party and the need to unify the country for a coming struggle that he had put Sarah Palin in charge of our naval fleets.
On one level, this comparison is ludicrous. Frank Knox was a capable person. Sarah Palin is not a capable person. Still, on another level, it is a one-to-one comparison.
It might be more useful to imagine what a newly-minted President Mike Pence might do to reunify the country. If he tapped Joe Biden or Tim Kaine to serve in his cabinet we’d begin to see a more appropriate parallel.
I’m fully aware that Mike Pence is no more Franklin Roosevelt than Sarah Palin is Frank Knox, but that shouldn’t prevent me from pointing out how a previous president responded to a situation where the country wasn’t prepared for the coming storm and elements of his party were living in denial.
If this country still has enough of a pulse to rid itself of Donald Trump before it is too late, it will be Mike Pence’s job to try to patch something together from what is left. If he acts like everyone expects him to, he’ll only be a modest improvement. If he’s smart, he’ll realize that he needs to unify the country. He’ll see how climate change and income inequality are contributing to disintegration and conflict and resource wars.
I know it’s more likely that he’ll do none of this. Gerald Ford tried to bring the country together by putting people like Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in charge of his administration. That’s about what I’d expect from Pence, with retrograde attitudes about human sexuality thrown in to make things maximally divisive.
Still, we’re in a deep hole and our commander in chief is clearly insane. We can’t go on like this, and we have to take one small step after another to climb out. If he gets the chance, and I hope he soon does, Pence should look back at FDR to find a role model for how to act in a situation of similar national and civilizational peril.
More shenanigans: from Texas and North Carolina. But coming to a red state near you soon.
Tom Sullivan, Hullabaloo: The only good local democracy
As far as politicians are concerned, you know what the rest of that sentence is.
The alternative ending is “one that elects me again and again.”
Both the Irish Independent and the Irish Times (scroll down the page) have published my letter criticising the hypocrisy of Judges criticising elected politicians for commenting on the suitability of Judges on the grounds of the separation of powers between the legislative and judicial branches of government, and then in almost the same breath seeking to influence the legislature in its deliberations:
Sir, – Chief Justice Susan Denham saw fit to rebuke Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin over his Dáil comments about former attorney general Máire Whelan and reminded us of the separation of powers between the branches of government and the necessity to maintain some distance between them.
Just days later, Mr Justice Peter Kelly is reported (“Leading judge says Government moves to reform judicial appointments `ill advised'”, June 24th) as criticising Shane Ross’s proposals for reforming the judicial appointments process as “ill conceived” and “ill advised”, and the way in which they were being rushed through the Dáil when (in his view) other matters before the courts warranted a higher priority from legislators.
Could it be that our esteemed learned friends are trying to have it both ways, telling legislators how and when to do their jobs whilst being extremely sensitive about any comments directed towards them by our parliamentarians?
Whatever the merits of Shane Ross’s proposals, surely it is right and proper that the process of appointing judges should be debated and decided by our democratically elected representatives at a time of their choosing, and not by those who are the primary beneficiaries of the process? – Yours, etc,
FRANK SCHNITTGER,
Another letter writer then took up the cudgels to explain why the Judges’ intervention was ill advised in the extreme:
Sir, – Whatever the constitutional propriety of senior serving judges attempting to influence the passage of a proposed Bill through the Oireachtas, the Association of Judges of Ireland’s press release of June 26th is a matter of pronounced disquiet. Frank Schnittger’s letter (June 26th) rightly points to the hypocrisy of senior judiciary standing on their judicial prerogatives to scold publicly politicians for their comments in the Whelan controversy, and, in the next breath, interfering in the legislative process.
Moreover, the separation of powers is a settled constitutional principle, repeatedly affirmed in case law, and the intervention of the Association of Judges of Ireland is a clear breach of this principle by a body that should know better.
Were the proposed Bill enacted and subsequently challenged in the courts, it is not clear how members of the association could sit impartially on the case after their representative body has publicly exposed their bias against the law.
How many judges will be available to hear such a challenge after those tainted by this ill-judged public intervention have been obliged to recuse themselves? – Yours, etc,
J VIVIAN COOKE,
My letter in the Irish Times was published just below a letter from Minister Shane Ross himself, making it appear that I was writing in support of the Minister’s proposals, even though my letter referred only to the matter of judges advocating the separation of powers only when it suited them. However, in fact I believe Shane Ross’s proposed legislation only scratches the surface of the problem, and much more fundamental reform is need, as I made clear in a subsequent letter (not yet published):
Our learned judges appear to be horrified at the notion that “lay people” should be involved in the process of interviewing and selecting our judges and moreover seem emboldened to make their case most forcibly to our elected representatives.
This is despite the fact that Chief Justice, Susan Denham, has only recently reprimanded our elected leaders for commenting on the suitability of an appointee, reminding our elected leaders of the separation of powers in our Constitution, and of the need to keep some distance between our branches of government.
One would be forgiven for thinking that all was well with our system of justice, and that only a fool would consider tinkering with it. This is not the experience of many who look to the Courts to dispense justice in Ireland.
For a start, our system of civil justice is one of the most expensive in the world, to the point where only rich individuals and large corporations can fully vindicate their rights under the constitution. What’s worse, is that the system incentivises our solicitors and barristers to make the process of justice as convoluted and drawn out as possible, as a means of maximising their earnings.
I used to work for one such large corporation, and even there the policy was never to contest even the most frivolous and vexatious of claims, because the costs of doing so outweighed what little benefit could be gained even when succeeding in contesting the claim. In this way our legal system has greatly damaged our economy and ability to attract new businesses to Ireland. Businesses simply chose to invest elsewhere rather than endure such systemic, and legally enabled, fraud.
We look to our judges to ensure that Court time and client expenses are not abused in this way, but too few judges seem inclined to curb the earning power of their former colleagues and learned friends at the bar.
The primary purpose of our system of criminal justice is to protect our citizens from criminal actions, and yet when one looks at our crime statistics, one could be forgiven for thinking that it is not very good at that job, or perhaps that it is in fact serving another purpose altogether. Again all the financial incentives are there to protect criminals from the consequences of their actions, and by comparison almost no resources are expended on repairing the harm to victims of crime in a timely manner.
None of the above is intended to impugn the integrity of our judges as the primary custodians of our legal system, and indeed many of them work extremely hard and have served the nation with honour and distinction.
It is, however, necessary to point out that the financial incentives are all wrong, and that the primary beneficiaries of both crime and civil disputes are all to often members of the legal industry itself. No wonder crime is so endemic in our society and the rich prosper while the rights of those who cannot afford expensive legal proceedings are trampled on with impunity.
Added to this one must observe that the members of the legal industry are all too often drawn from just one rather well healed class in our society, and even from quite a restricted number of families within that class. It all leads to a rather cosy, inbred, consensus as to what is good for the “laity”, and, dare one say it, to a degree of arrogance and conceit. Access to the profession is largely controlled by private bodies, and progress within it all too often all about “contacts” with the right sort of people within it.
Shane Ross’s proposed reforms are modest indeed, and barely touch on the above issues – such is the political lobbying power of what is supposed to be a separate branch of Government. But anything which introduces an element of lay participation in the appointment of Judges is to be welcomed, even if it only opens up the profession to a small window of what life is like for lay people and the victims of crime and injustice under the gavel of legal rule in Ireland.
I doubt my much longer second letter will be published, but I wrote it anyway just to get some things off my chest. The legal profession in Ireland is indeed almost a closed shop for privileged middle class families with the necessary connections, especially for barristers and Judges, and their perceptions of what is normal and acceptable can be quite obscene. Barristers charge in excess of €2,000 per day, and cases are routinely postponed again and again with “refresher fees” charged every time. Everyone in the legal profession gets paid, plus expenses, every time, whilst the victims of crime and witnesses get virtually nothing.
My work for Restorative Justice Services brings me into contact with many front-line workers in the field, and the reality on the ground can often be quite harrowing. Victims of crime aren’t formally represented in Court – the State prosecutes where it deems to have enough evidence – and the perpetrators generally get free legal aid – at enormous expense to the taxpayer.
But victims are often not even informed of the outcome of trials, and their perpetrators are generally paroled or released without the victim being informed. Although the Judge may take a “Victim impact statement” into account when sentencing, no attempt is generally made to repair the harm suffered by the victim – either by the perpetrator or by the state.
The legal profession in general, and Judges in particular, are often sublimely indifferent to the suffering of victims, and the inconvenience and risks for witnesses, as they simply aren’t players in a legal game which is effectively designed to maximise legal earnings, rather than societal benefit.
The sense of self-importance and conceit prevalent in the Judiciary is perhaps best illustrated by their opposition to paying taxes on their income on the same basis as everyone else. In 2011 the Irish Government and people even has to initiate and pass the 29th. amendment to the Constitution to overcome judicial claims that a tax introduced for everyone in the wake of the 2008 crash should not apply to them as it might interfere with their independence. In reality, it interfered only with their conceit that they should somehow be above the law applying to everyone else.
In the meantime the Irish judicial system is clogged up with cases taken to force less well off parties to concede because they cannot afford the legal fees involved, and because it is in the interest of lawyers to overcomplicate and drag out those cases as much as possible in order to maximise their earnings. Cases can drag on for years by which time it is often much too late to mitigate the harm done by a crime or a dispute.
Car insurance premiums sky-rocket because the cost of legal fees often exceeds the compensation paid to the injured party in a car crash, to the point that many younger drivers cannot afford to get insurance at all and consequently break the law and drive without insurance. Simple legal transactions can take an age and cost a small fortune. In essence, the legal profession have hijacked the law to their own benefit. It is time that “the laity” claimed it back to work for the benefit of the people as a whole, and in particular for the benefit of the victims of crime and injustice.
The Mad Chase For RussiaGate Prey
In his June 8 testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Comey conceded that the FBI never checked the DNC’s servers to confirm that they had truly been hacked. [Transcript]
« click for more info »
Former FBI Director James Comey about the FBI forensics that never happened!
COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN RICHARD BURR: 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 [i.e. the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee], 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.
Stanford scholars offer their thoughts on former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony
○ Comey: Russian hacking ‘massive effort’ against US elections | CNet |
○ The Trail of VP Alperovitch @CrowdStrike
○ NATO and Soros Crossed Russia’s Red Line in Europe
At last some sanity from the pond …
For the record, I do the exact same thing I’ve always done.
It’s just that my neighborhood has gone to shit. Actually,
my whole country has gone mad, so I guess I shouldn’t
complain that much that my audience has as well.
○ Since November by TarheelDem
For the record, I do the exact same thing I’ve always done. It’s just that my neighborhood has gone to shit. Actually, my whole country has gone mad, so I guess I shouldn’t complain that much that my audience has as well.
Update-1 [Some links added in articles are mine – Oui]
Trump Data Gurus Leave Long Trail of Subterfuge, Dubious Dealing | Bloomberg |
Last fall, the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica gained fame as the group of nerdy British data scientists that helped Donald Trump get elected. The firm says it’s able to use its “psychographic data models” to sway undecided voters by targeting people’s social media profiles and serving up messages and ads based on their perceived biases.
Cambridge Analytica now hopes to leverage that success–and its ties to Trump–to do more business with the U.S. government. Working from offices just blocks from the White House, it’s been pitching itself to defense and national security agencies. In February it signed a $500,000 U.S. State Department contract to fight radicalization of young people abroad.
While Cambridge Analytica has faced scrutiny before over whether its data models actually work, a closer look at the past practices of its London-based affiliate, SCL Group Ltd., reveals a corporate DNA less predisposed to dazzling technologies to sway voters than to using old-fashioned tricks and political subterfuge.
Alexander Nix set up Cambridge Analytica in 2013 to target the U.S. market, installing himself as chief executive officer after 14 years as a director of SCL. In the past year, Nix, 41, has become a darling in tech and marketing circles, popping up on the international speaking circuit to promote the firm’s data-driven approach.
The Power of Big Data and Psychographics
In a presentation at the 2016 Concordia Summit, Mr. Alexander Nix discusses the power of big data in global elections. Cambridge Analytica’s revolutionary approach to audience targeting, data modeling, and psychographic profiling has made them a leader in behavioral microtargeting for election processes around the world.
Senator Cruz campaign competitive primary supported by Cambridge Analytica – Ocean Model PsychoGraphics
Was Britain’s EU referendum hijacked by the American alt-right using a technique known as psychographics? BBC Newsnight’s Gabriel Gatehouse reports on the data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica.
Cambridge Analytica: manipulation of voters through social media
I’ve been studying this area for a long while; when I talk about perceptive media people always ask how this would work for news? I mean manipulate of feelings and what you see, can be used for good and obviously for very bad! Dare I say those words… Fake news?
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○ Cambridge analytica: The Rise of the Weaponized AI Propaganda
Some insight into the connection between Dr. Michal Kosinski and Cambridge Analytica
Any company can aggregate and purchase big data, but Cambridge Analytica has developed a model to translate that data into a personality profile used to predict, then ultimately change your behavior. That model itself was developed by paying a Cambridge psychology professor to copy the groundbreaking original research of his colleague through questionable methods that violated Amazon’s Terms of Service. Based on its origins, Cambridge Analytica appears ready to capture and buy whatever data it needs to accomplish its ends.
In 2013, Dr. Michal Kosinski, then a PhD. candidate at the University of Cambridge’s Psychometrics Center, released a groundbreaking study announcing a new model he and his colleagues had spent years developing. By correlating subjects’ Facebook Likes with their OCEAN scores
What they did with that rich data. Dark postings!
Dark posts were also used to depress voter turnout among key groups of democratic voters. “In this election, dark posts were used to try to suppress the African-American vote,” wrote journalist and Open Society fellow McKenzie Funk in a New York Times editorial. “According to Bloomberg, the Trump campaign sent ads reminding certain selected black voters of Hillary Clinton’s infamous `super predator’ line. It targeted Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood with messages about the Clinton Foundation’s troubles in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.'”
○ How big data mines personal info to craft fake news and manipulate voters | Newsweek |
From my diaries …
○ Bots Generated Election News Coverage
○ Brexit: Putin Did It
The Dark Web is infested by spooks, fbi dragnet and hardened criminals.
○ Is the Government Destroying ‘the Wild West of the Internet?’ | Rolling Stones |
Where is the evidence, where is the proof? Matt Tait, a former hacker, a former informant for GCHQ does not provide any analytical evidence but vents his own observations and expresses confidence in the statements from U.S. intelligence. This UK resident is another spook who involved himself in the U.S. election campaign of Trump en Clinton. After the British dodgy dossier on Trump and Louise Mensch as a Murdoch propagandist, I’m not falling for this guy.
Peter W. Smith, 81, of Lake Forest, Ill,, passed away on May 14, 2017. He is survived by his wife Janet, three children, Linda (Ransom), William and David Smith, and three grandchildren Tommy, Sara, and Ryan Ransom. For more than 40 years, Peter directed private equity firms in corporate acquisitions and venture investments. As Managing Member of DigaComm, LLC, from 1997 to 2014, he led or co-led 15 early-stage venture investments, including iPIX and L-90, Inc.
The Time I Got Recruited to Collude with *** [?] | Lawfare | by Matthew Tait on June 30, 2017, 10:50 PM
My role in these events began last spring, when I spent a great deal of time studying the series of Freedom of Information disclosures by the State Department of Hillary Clinton’s emails, and posting the parts I found most interesting–especially those relevant to computer security–on my public Twitter account.
A while later, on June 14, the Washington Post reported on a hack of the DNC ostensibly by Russian intelligence. When material from this hack began appearing online, courtesy of the “Guccifer 2” [FAQ] online persona, I turned my attention to looking at these stolen documents. This time, my purpose was to try and understand who broke into the DNC, and why.
…
Yet Smith had not contacted me about the DNC hack, but rather about his conviction that Clinton’s private email server had been hacked–in his view almost certainly both by the Russian government and likely by multiple other hackers too–and his desire to ensure that the fruits of those hacks were exposed prior to the election. Over the course of a long phone call, he mentioned that he had been contacted by someone on the “Dark Web” who claimed to have a copy of emails from Secretary Clinton’s private server, and this was why he had contacted me; he wanted me to help validate whether or not the emails were genuine.I never found out who Smith’s contact on the “Dark Web” was. It was never clear to me whether this person was merely someone trying to dupe Smith out of his money, or a Russian front, and it was never clear to me how they represented their own credentials to Smith.
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…
Then, a few weeks into my interactions with Smith, he sent me a document, ostensibly a cover page for a dossier of opposition research to be compiled by Smith’s group, and which purported to clear up who was involved. The document was entitled “A Demonstrative Pedagogical Summary to be Developed and Released Prior to November 8, 2016,” and dated September 7. It detailed a company Smith and his colleagues had set up as a vehicle to conduct the research: “KLS Research“, set up as a Delaware LLC “to avoid campaign reporting,” and listing four groups who were involved in one way or another.KLS Research, LLC is a Delaware Limited-Liability Company filed on September 2, 2016 . The company’s File Number is listed as 6140091. The Registered Agent on file for this company is The Company Corporation and is located at 2711 Centerville Rd Ste 400, Wilmington, DE 19808.
The first group, entitled “Trump Campaign (in coordination to the extent permitted as an independent expenditure)” listed a number of senior campaign officials: Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Sam Clovis, Lt. Gen. Flynn and Lisa Nelson.
By the middle of September, all contact between us ended.
…
The story just didn’t make much sense–that is, until the Journal yesterday published the critical fact that U.S. intelligence has reported that Russian hackers were looking to get emails to Flynn through a cut-out during the Summer of 2016, and this was no idle speculation on my part.Suddenly, my story seemed important–and ominous.
That Time The FBI Phished A Cop With Poisoned Microsoft Docs | Forbes – May 30, 2017 |
In an investigation into a Irondequoit, New York cop accused of stalking and harassing an ex-girlfriend, the FBI used techniques it often sees deployed by cybercriminals it investigates. It sent emails to the suspect containing Microsoft Word and Excel documents that, once clicked, would help them unmask the identity of the officer, William Rosica.
A warrant detailing the hacking methods – known amongst law enforcement as Network Investigative Techniques – provided rare insight into the FBI’s digital techniques. While previous reporting of Rosica’s case has focused on the disturbing nature of the alleged crimes of the now-former policeman, it ignored the technical and ethical questions around such methods. In this case, though, security experts and privacy activists agree: the use of targeted phishing with the right warrants showed law enforcement could hack responsibly.
Cyber stalking
The FBI sent the phishing emails after agents learned of allegations that Rosica had used multiple email accounts and phone numbers to harass an unnamed former partner. Amongst the stronger allegations were that he attempted to hack into her medical records held by the University of Rochester’s MyChart, as well as her personal and work emails. His communications became increasingly aggressive, according to prosecutors, who claimed Rosica sent the ex-girlfriend messages about how to commit suicide.
Throughout, the ex-cop used the Tor network to mask his original IP address, whilst setting up a range of email addresses to further hide his identity, the government alleged. And he used the Text’em service, which allows users to send free texts without needing a phone number, prosecutors said.
With all the attempts at dissimulation, the government opted for tools in its digital arsenal to find out who was behind the emails. On January 31st, the FBI was granted a warrant to send phishing mails to email addresses hosted by hotdak.net, Yandex and mail2actor.com.
○ Law Enforcement and the Dark Web: A Never-Ending Battle
Ooops … Matt Tait wrote an article about the DNC hack while in contact with Peter Smith and John Szobocsan! One can count the number of contradictions with yesterday’s story. Interesting to say the least …
Continued below the fold …
On the Need for Official Attribution of Russia’s DNC Hack | Lawfare | by Matthew Tait on July 28, 2016, 10:57 AM
Yesterday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Adam Schiff—Vice Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and Ranking Member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, respectively—called on the Obama administration to consider declassifying and releasing any intelligence community assessments on the attribution and motives of the DNC hackers.
I wholeheartedly agree.
The intelligence community has powers and capabilities that far exceed that of the private sector for attribution, and do not suffer from the same conflicts of interest. Whereas private sector attribution tends to rely on technical forensics of the malware and infrastructure used by the hackers, the IC is able to draw upon a much more diverse set of capabilities—such as financial intelligence, human intelligence, and counter-intelligence—to bring together a wider set of facts with narrower bands of uncertainty than the private sector would normally have at its disposal.
…
About six weeks ago, on Tuesday June 14, the Washington Post ran a story on the DNC becoming the latest victim of state sponsored hacking.The story didn’t strike me as particularly interesting at first. Shocking news: foreign intelligence agencies collect intelligence on politicians, and in the 21st Century they sometimes do so by hacking.
It was, to be sure, a vindication of something various intelligence and ex-intelligence officials had been saying for a while. Just a few weeks earlier, DNI Director Clapper had openly warned that foreign intelligence agencies were targeting and hacking the US political campaigns.
The claim that the groups were “after Trump opposition research” felt a lot like a clever political deflection at first: sure, the group probably stole the Trump opposition research, but that doesn’t mean it was the objective of the breach. Casting the hack as being about Trump’s affiliation to Putin rather being about the DNC being hacked for a year without noticing felt like good, old fashioned political deflection. As did the attribution to Russia.
A couple of years ago every breach was China. Hacked because your website was misconfigured? China. Forgot to install Windows Updates for two years and someone ran off with your customers’ data? Definitely Chinese nation state hackers. Oops, ran some malware that came in as an email attachment? Those clever PLA hackers have done it again!
The industry-standard attribution in the past to China, then briefly to Iran, then to NSA, and then to the “Cyber Caliphate”, and most recently with Russia’s APT28 is often ill-founded and self-serving. For victims, knowing that you were hacked because the attackers were sophisticated rather than because your defences are woefully inadequate helps you sleep at night (and defend against lawsuits).
Intelligence chief calls Trump after his fury at spies over fake dossier:
○ President-elect says James Clapper got in touch to ‘denounce false and fictitious report’ | Daily Mail – Jan. 12, 2017 |
Prof. Matt Tait, Cybersecurity fellow at Univ. of Texas at Austin Robert Strauss Center
Today, Lawfare is far from a three-man operation. The masthead now features over 60 names, including a who’s who of top national security media analysts and law professors. Several of them are, like Chesney, members of The University of Texas at Austin community. Fellow Texas Law Prof. Steve Vladeck, who co-founded the other best-known national security law blog, Just Security, is a regular Lawfare contributor (and the blog also provides a home for the “National Security Law Podcast” that Chesney and Vladeck co-host). So, too, are Prof. Steve Slick, Director of UT’s Intelligence Studies Project, and Prof. Matt Tait, a British hacker who formerly worked for GCHQ (the British NSA) and Google Project Zero, and who will arrive in Austin this fall to teach cybersecurity courses at Texas Law.
I should have known that when the evidence began to come to light, it would reveal a second-rate operation. The most prized witness here is dead but presumably he didn’t take his electronic records with him. The FBI is going to be very interested in talking to this John Szobocsan fellow. Very interested. It looks like he and the recently deceased Peter W. Smith were partners in DigaComm LLC, “a private equity and venture capital firm specializing in seed, start ups, emerging growth, mature, growth capital, industry consolidation, buyout, and early stage investments” that is no longer actively trading. And Mr. Szobocsan is up to his ears in Russian collusion. He made a big mistake when he decided to get on a call with Matt Tait, an “information security specialist for GCHQ” and talk about getting stolen documents from Russian hackers.
It is no overstatement to say that my conversations with Smith shocked me. Given the amount of media attention given at the time to the likely involvement of the Russian government in the DNC hack, it seemed mind-boggling for the Trump campaign—or for this offshoot of it—to be actively seeking those emails. To me this felt really wrong.
In my conversations with Smith and his colleague, I tried to stress this point: if this dark web contact is a front for the Russian government, you really don’t want to play this game. But they were not discouraged. They appeared to be convinced of the need to obtain Clinton’s private emails and make them public, and they had a reckless lack of interest in whether the emails came from a Russian cut-out. Indeed, they made it quite clear to me that it made no difference to them who hacked the emails or why they did so, only that the emails be found and made public before the election.
Trump obviously felt the same way. Of course, there’s a total absence of evidence that Clinton’s server was hacked at all. But we do pretty much know now that this “offshoot” of the Trump campaign was working with the Russians.
The story just didn’t make much sense—that is, until the Journal yesterday published the critical fact that U.S. intelligence has reported that Russian hackers were looking to get emails to Flynn through a cut-out during the Summer of 2016, and this was no idle speculation on my part.
Suddenly, my story seemed important—and ominous.
Matt Tait has now spilled the beans. He’s made it clear that Peter W. Smith convincingly made the case that he was working in concert with the Trump campaign and was dialed into their operation at a very high level. This was evident from the keen insights he had about the internal operations and conflicts within the campaign, and also from his representations that he was working in concert with Michael Flynn and his son, Kellyanne Conway, Steve Bannon, and Sam Clovis. And, yes, there is documentary evidence that Smith made those representations.
The defense here will be that Smith was a rogue operator, but that defense will only stand up if there is no electronic trail to debunk it. All communications Smith had with principals in the campaign will now be subject to review.
A lot depends on what the investigators find.
And now we know why Trump wanted Comey to stop looking at Flynn, and why he fired Comey when he refused to comply.
Hello again painting fans.
This week I will be starting a new painting. The photo that I’m using is seen directly below. It is a photo of Heritage House in Kanab, Utah. I’ve been there several times and have a number of photos. However, this is not my own photo. It’s one I found that has much better shadows than any of mine. I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas.
I started with a pencil grid on both a print of the photo and the canvas. In this way I was able to transfer the elements to the canvas in an accurate pencil sketch. Things are off to a good start.
The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.
I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.
Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.
