Category Archives: Cyber

Russian Hackers May Now Be Mucking With European Elections

by FloydHeady Posted on February 27, 2017

Mother Jones

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When the US intelligence community released a report in early January laying out the evidence for Russian meddling in the US election, US officials warned that this wasn’t a one-off attack, and that Russia could soon set its hacker corps loose to disrupt elections in other countries. “Moscow will apply lessons learned from its Putin-ordered campaign aimed at the US presidential election to future efforts worldwide,” the report said, “including against US allies and their election processes.”

Putin didn’t wait long to fulfill that prediction. On February 22, the Moscow Times reported that the Russian government had “created a new military unit to conduct ‘information operations’ against Russia’s foes.” Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said, when announcing the unit, that “propaganda should be smart, competent and effective.” There’s no concrete evidence yet, but it appears that Russia may be now attempting to weaken NATO and to divide Europe by destabilizing elections in France and Germany, two of the EU’s strongest members.

“This form of interference in French democratic life is unacceptable and I denounce it,” Jean-Marc Ayrault, France’s minister of foreign affairs, said on February 19 in an interview with Le Journal du Dimanche, a French newspaper. “The French will not accept that their choices are dictated to them,” he said while discussing Russian actions in Europe and attempts to weaken non pro-Russian candidates ahead of the country’s presidential election in May.

Ayrault was responding to reports that the Russian government may have been targeting the campaign of Emmanuel Macron, a centrist “pro-liberal and pro-Europe” candidate who has a chance of defeating Marine Le Pen, a right-wing nationalist, in the hotly contested French presidential elections this May. Le Pen has promised to pull France out of the European Union, and, much like Donald Trump, has advocated a better relationship with the Russian government. Macron’s campaign has said its computer systems have been attacked, and that “fake news”—that include allegations of a homosexual affair and attempts to connect Macron with American financial interests and Hillary Clinton—has been spread throughout France by Russian-owned media, such as Sputnik and RT.

Daniel Treisman, a professor of political science at UCLA and an expert on Russian politics, says “it certainly seems plausible” that the Russian government would attempt to interfere in the European elections, as it’s alleged to have done in the US.

“Putin is quite skeptical about the possibility of building strong friendships or cooperation in the future with the elites of western Europe,” Treisman tells Mother Jones. “He feels that they’ve taken a very anti-Russian line, so he’s reaching out to other forces who are also opposed to the European elites.” Among those so-called Western European elites, are German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Netherlands Prime Minister Mark Rutte, and Macron in France. Part of Putin’s plan could be to keep the west distracted “with its own problems” so it is “less able to cohesively oppose what he’s done in Ukraine,” Treisman says.

The French government’s top figures reportedly had internal discussions about cyber threats to its presidential election, and earlier this year the official in charge of security for the nation’s ruling party told Politico that the country’s leading politicians and political campaigns “have received no awareness training at all about espionage and hacking,” and that “we are not at all up to the level of the potential threat.” The Russian government has denied that it is working to meddle in the French elections, just as it denied meddling in the 2016 US presidential election.

“We didn’t have, and do not have, any intention of interfering in the internal affairs of other countries,” Kremlin spokesman Dmirtry Peskov told reporters on February 14. “That there is a hysterical anti-President Vladimir Putin campaign in certain countries abroad is an obvious fact.”

Worries aren’t limited to the French elections, which will be held in April and May. The head of the German foreign intelligence service said in November that its next election cycle could be buffeted with the same sort of misinformation and cyber-attacks that plagued the US elections. “We have evidence that cyber-attacks are taking place that have no purpose other than to elicit political uncertainty,” said Bruno Kahl, the president of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (the German foreign intelligence service), according to the Guardian. Angela Merkel said at the time that “such cyber-attacks, or hybrid conflicts as they are known in Russian doctrine, are now part of daily life and we must learn to cope with them.” Merkel’s hard line against Putin in the wake of the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 and strong support of the European Union are among the reasons that she could be targeted by Russia before her reelection vote in September.

And in the Netherlands, Dutch Foreign Minister Bert Koenders told Politico on January 12 that he didn’t have “concrete evidence” interference had taken place, but he wasn’t “naive” to the fact that it could happen at some point ahead of that country’s March 15 election, wherein Rutte is being challenged by Geert Wilders. Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that the Russian government, among other countries, had “tried hundreds of times in recent months to penetrate the computers of Dutch government agencies and businesses.”

Far-right MP Wilders—a vehement opponent of Islam and a strong contender to be the Netherlands next prime minister—has also called for leaving the EU, but he may not be as pro-Putin as Le Pen and Trump. Nevertheless, Dutch officials have said they will count all election ballots by hand due to worries about manipulation of electronic vote counting machines.

Treisman says what happens next in terms of Russia and the European elections is “all up in the air, in part because we don’t know what the US administration is going to end up doing” with regard to its policy toward Russia.

Trump has repeatedly said that he’s hoping for a good working relationship with Putin, but offered mixed and confusing signals during the campaign about what he thought about Putin’s actions in the Ukraine and his annexing of Crimea in 2014. During her first full day on the job, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley condemned Russian violence in eastern Ukraine and called for “an immediate end to the Russian occupation of Crimea.” Trump has rattled European allies by praising Brexit and calling NATO “obsolete,” but members of his cabinet have reaffirmed the US commitment to a strong NATO, which is one of Putin’s main points of contention with the west.

While it makes sense to watch all of this and try to discern a pattern in Putin’s strategy, Treisman says, “I don’t think he has this clear over-arching agenda, that he’s out to expand Russia’s borders or achieve anything very concrete. I think he’s just looking for ways to resist pressures he sees coming from the west and increase his influence, and his options, and his friends worldwide.”

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Russian Hackers May Now Be Mucking With European Elections

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Clinton Campaign Sent Fake Phishing Emails to Its Own Staff

by NestorButler564 Posted on February 16, 2017

Mother Jones

Hillary Clinton’s run for the White House will be remembered for many things, but information security isn’t likely to be one of them. Her campaign was buffeted by two major hacking episodes. First, the contents of Democratic National Committee servers were stolen and disseminated through WikiLeaks and other news organizations. Then campaign chairman John Podesta had his personal email account hacked and its contents passed to WikiLeaks, which subsequently released the 50,000-email set in chunks over a period of weeks as the presidential election reached fever pitch. The US government’s intelligence community went on to assert that the hacks had been orchestrated at the behest of the Russian government as a deliberate attempt to hurt Clinton’s chances and boost Donald Trump.

But Robby Mook, the Clinton campaign manager, said this week that the hacks didn’t hit the campaign itself, and that’s because the campaign conducted regular security training for staffers, including sending them fake phishing emails to see how they’d be handled.

“We sent out phishing emails of our own to test people and communicate back to team to see how far they were clicking, to educate people, and show their vulnerability and how much their choices matter,” Mook told Dark Reading, a cybersecurity news website, while attending an information security conference in San Francisco.

Mook said there were at least three phishing tests sent out to staffers, and there were also regular emails sent to staff preaching good IT practices. There were signs in the bathrooms “about not sharing passwords and ‘Don’t clink that link, stop and think,'” Mook said.

The Dark Reading piece doesn’t address when the training took place or whether Podesta and his aides were involved. Podesta and Mook did not respond to requests for comment about the IT training during the campaign.

A phishing attack is an attempt to trick a victim into giving up personal information, including logins for email accounts, bank accounts, and other sensitive information. In Podesta’s case, hackers sent a phony warning from Google alerting him that his Gmail password needed to be reset. According to the New York Times, a campaign IT staffer inadvertently advised Podesta and his aides that the warning was legitimate. By using the fake password reset page, Podesta gave the hackers access to his Gmail account and years’ worth of political communications that eventually found their way to WikiLeaks via the Russian operation, according to the US government.

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Clinton Campaign Sent Fake Phishing Emails to Its Own Staff

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Text Messages Might Be the New Way Hackers Try to Steal Your Info

by EttaMcReynolds0 Posted on February 14, 2017

Mother Jones

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Back in 2014, Mexico became the first nation to pass a sugary-drinks tax, overcoming massive pushback from the soda industry. Big Soda resisted the tax for good reason—Mexico boasts the globe’s second-highest per capita soda consumption (trailing only Chile), and Coca-Cola and Pepsi together account for more than 60 percent of the market.

And now, in a strange twist, comes the revelation that several of the most prominent public-health experts who promoted the tax were targeted last summer by malicious spyware from NSO Group—”an Israeli cyberarms dealer that sells its digital spy tools exclusively to governments and that has contracts with multiple agencies inside Mexico,” reports the New York Times.

The attacks came in the form of text messages from unknown numbers with compelling but fake appeals to click infected links: stuff like, “your daughter has been in a serious accident,” with a purported link to a hospital. Once the link is clicked and the phone is hacked, the spyware can “trace a target’s every phone call, text message, email, keystroke, location, sound and sight,” even capturing “live footage off their cameras.”

The cyberattacks, which occurred during the summer of 2016, came just as the researchers were engaged in an ultimately failed campaign to double the tax, the Times notes.

At this point, the source of the attacks is unclear. A spokesperson for ConMéxico, Big Soda’s powerful trade group in the country, told the Times that the industry had no knowledge of the hacks, adding that “frankly, it scares us, too.”

NSO Group, for its part, claims it sells its spyware only to governmental law enforcement agencies, and maintains “technical safeguards that prevent clients from sharing its spy tools,” the Times reports, adding that an NSO spokesman “reiterated those restrictions in a statement on Thursday, and said the company had no knowledge of the tracking of health researchers and advocates inside Mexico.”

While NSO Group says its spyware is designed to be used by governments to track terrorists, criminals, and drug lords, these revelations don’t mark the first time these tools have been turned on other targets, according to the Times: “NSO spyware was discovered on the phone of a human-rights activist in the United Arab Emirates and a prominent Mexican journalist in August.” That journalist, investigative reporter Rafael Cabrera—who has broken several embarrassing stories about President Enrique Peña Nieto—was the target of an unsuccessful hacking attempt with NSO software last year.

So just as Mexico has emerged as a policy laboratory for reducing soda consumption, it is also demonstrating some pretty innovative tools for keeping tabs on anti-soda agitators. And delivering an important reminder: Think hard before you click on a link texted to you from an unknown number, no matter how compelling the story is.

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Text Messages Might Be the New Way Hackers Try to Steal Your Info

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Nine People Say Mike Flynn Lied About His Phone Calls With the Russian Ambassador

by Mstyslava7ju Posted on February 10, 2017

Mother Jones

The routine lying by the Trump administration is just beyond belief. Mike Flynn has consistently denied that he talked to the Russian ambassador in December about President Obama’s sanctions against Russia, but apparently he did exactly that. Here are Greg Miller, Adam Entous and Ellen Nakashima in the Washington Post tonight:

Flynn on Wednesday denied that he had discussed sanctions with Sergey Kislyak. Asked in an interview whether he had ever done so, he twice said, “No.” On Thursday, Flynn, through his spokesman, backed away from the denial. The spokesman said Flynn “indicated that while he had no recollection of discussing sanctions, he couldn’t be certain that the topic never came up.”

….The emerging details contradict public statements by incoming senior administration officials including Mike Pence…Nine current and former officials, who were in senior positions at multiple agencies at the time of the calls, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

All of those officials said ­Flynn’s references to the election-related sanctions were explicit. Two of those officials went further, saying that Flynn urged Russia not to overreact to the penalties being imposed by President Barack Obama, making clear that the two sides would be in position to review the matter after Trump was sworn in as president. “Kislyak was left with the impression that the sanctions would be revisited at a later time,” said a former official.

A third official put it more bluntly, saying that either Flynn had misled Pence or that Pence misspoke. A spokesman for Pence did not respond to a request for comment. The sanctions in question have so far remained in place.

Nine officials! And every one of them says Flynn explicitly talked about the sanctions that Obama levied on Russia as retaliation for their cyber-hacking during the campaign. The message: don’t worry about it. We’ve got your back.

Do these guys ever tell the truth? About anything?

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Nine People Say Mike Flynn Lied About His Phone Calls With the Russian Ambassador

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How Trump’s USDA Could Hurt Puppies

by FannieNeville Posted on February 7, 2017

Mother Jones

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It may have just gotten a lot harder to spot puppy abusers: A section of the US Department of Agriculture’s website that provided documents detailing animal abuse was taken down last Friday, without warning. For more than 10 years, the government agency posted information on violators of the Animal Welfare Act and Horse Protection Act. Citizens, journalists, and animal advocacy organizations like the Humane Society relied on these reports to identify zoos, animal research labs, horse breeders, and dog breeders who violated the laws.

The USDA said in a statement last week that it had taken action after conducting a review of the types of information it posts, and stated that it is committed to the “privacy of individuals with whom we come into contact.” The agency said people will now have to file Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain the same information, though this process can take many months, if not years.

The Humane Society says three of its campaigns will be deeply affected by the change. John Goodwin, the senior director of the organization’s Stop Puppy Mill campaign, uses the reports to create the Horrible Hundred—a list of “puppy mills,” or producers who breed large numbers of dogs in unsanitary conditions. “Here we have a government action that benefits no one except people who are caught abusing animals and don’t want the public to know,” Goodwin said.

Marty Irby, a senior director of the Humane Society’s Rural Outreach and Equine Protection, likened the reports to the Department of Justice’s public information on sex offenders. “If your neighbor severely abuses a dog who is kept in a cage for breeding purposes and gets caught,” he said, now “that person is going to be protected.” Irby added that the USDA reports provided an easily accessible resource for people looking to buy or show horses. Now, he argues, violators of the Horse Protection Act can more easily hide.

The USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service stated that a review of this process has been going on for a year and cited the Privacy Act as a reason for removing the information. Yet the decision came at a time when people are paying extra attention to how Trump’s USDA will differ from his predecessor’s. As my colleague Tom Philpott reported last December, Brian Klippenstein, the leader of Trump’s USDA transition team, lobbied against Humane Society-backed initiatives in Massachusetts that would curb the use of pig gestation stalls and chicken cages in the state. Before he was appointed to the transition team, Klippenstein was the executive director of Protest the Harvest, a nonprofit that aims to “inform America’s consumers, businesses, and decision-makers about the threats posed by animal rights groups and anti-farming extremists.” The group makes its feelings about the Humane Society clear on its website, dubbing the organization a “fake charity” and claiming it wants to put breeders out of business by heavily regulating them.

Klippenstein stepped down as executive director of Protect the Harvest in December. A spokeswoman for the nonprofit told Mother Jones that while it had no involvement in the USDA’s decision to remove the reports, the nonprofit is “concerned about the privacy of people who obey the law” and that “all government agencies should be protecting the privacy of people who submit compelling information.” She later called back to say that Protect the Harvest has no position on the issue.

It’s still unclear whether the removal of the information on the USDA website is a permanent change. In the meantime, this isn’t just bad news for animal welfare advocates. Since 2011, pet store owners in seven states have been required to source puppies from companies that have no USDA violations. Without these reports, business owners will have a tougher time knowing whether their suppliers violate anti-puppy mill laws.

Investigative reporters have referenced the USDA’s documents to uncover and report on animal abuse in the past. Mother Jones senior editor James West used nearly 1,000 USDA documents to investigate severe animal negligence at a roadside zoo in Maine. The zoo owners were subjects of Yankee Jungle, a reality show on Animal Planet that was canceled after MoJo published West’s story.

The Humane Society of the United States filed legal action against the USDA on Monday. Goodwin said the organization plans to fight the USDA’s decision “all the way.” “The USDA has a lot to explain for denying public access to this information,” he said.

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How Trump’s USDA Could Hurt Puppies

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How the Black Lives Matter Movement Is Mobilizing Against Trump

by BrodieGetty6520 Posted on February 7, 2017

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump repeatedly expressed hostility towards Black Lives Matter activists during his presidential campaign, particularly for their efforts to confront police brutality. Now, faced with a Trump agenda whose repercussions for African Americans could reach far beyond policing, BLM organizers say they are broadly expanding their mission.

Ever since a police officer killed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the Black Lives Matter movement has grown into a loose-knit web of like-minded groups nationwide that focus primarily on ending police brutality and the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans. Last August, a coalition of nearly 30 BLM groups, known as the United Front, released a policy platform calling for comprehensive police and criminal justice reforms, economic investments in black communities, and the mobilization of black voters. The shock of Trump’s election has turbocharged their sense of urgency.

Trump’s immigration order barring refugees and immigrants in particular “changed the rules of engagement,” says Malkia Cyril, executive director of the Oakland-based Center for Media Justice, part of the United Front. The new president’s agenda, she says, represents “an escalation of the war on black bodies and lives.” Approximately a quarter of Muslims in America are black, she notes; Trump’s order blocked immigrants from the African countries of Sudan, Libya, and Somalia, among others. “The issue is the culture that gets created that is anti-Muslim, anti-black, anti-brown, anti-woman,” she says.

“We have tons of black folks that are going to be affected by the potential cutting of DACA,” says Dante Barry, director of New York City-based Million Hoodies for Justice, referring to Trump’s plan to crack down on undocumented residents. “We’re going to have black folk that are going to be impacted by the cut of the Affordable Care Act.”

Following Trump’s election, I interviewed leaders and local organizers with seven groups participating in the United Front about their plans for confronting the Trump era. I also talked to an organizer with an eighth group, Campaign Zero, whose cofounders include Deray McKesson, perhaps the movement’s most visible organizer. All of these activists reiterated that police and criminal justice reform will remain a priority, but that other issues have become equally urgent.

In the wake of Trump’s immigration order, BLM organizers mobilized their networks to turn out at airports to protest. The groups also fired up their social media networks to amplify calls for the release of detained travelers. BLM leaders say their strategy will evolve as more details become known about what Trump plans to do on matters ranging from policing and reproductive rights to climate change and LGBT issues. They will focus on combating what they see as Trump’s hostile, retrograde agenda—and that of right-wing politicians emboldened by Trump—primarily at the state and local levels.

Immigration concerns are squarely on the radar for Million Hoodies, Barry says. The six current members of the group’s chapter in Greensboro, North Carolina—all college students—are drafting sanctuary campus policies that they plan to pitch to school administrations. The group is also in talks with at least one other local group about how Million Hoodies can bolster their efforts to protect undocumented residents throughout Greensboro. Last fall, Million Hoodies Greensboro also supported a local campaign to repeal North Carolina’s infamous anti-LGBT bathroom bill. “We just show up when folks need support,” member Delaney Vandergrift told me. “Showing up at protests and community meetings. Amplifying on social media. Making signs. Anything that local organizations already doing the work are asking for.”

Patrisse Cullors, cofounder of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, said her organization of nearly 40 chapters plans to expand its work on reproductive rights from a handful of southern US cities to other parts of country. The network hopes to replicate work like that of its chapter in Louisville, Kentucky, which is part of a repro-rights coalition that meets monthly and includes Planned Parenthood and the ACLU of Kentucky. This week, following the opening of the Kentucky legislature’s next session, members from BLM Louisville and its partners plan to go to the statehouse in Frankfort to lobby against a bill that would require women to get an ultrasound before getting an abortion, according to Chanelle Helm, an organizer with the chapter. In the upcoming legislative session the group also plans to lobby against a Kentucky bill that would make assaulting a police officer a “hate crime.”

Shortly before Trump’s inauguration, Campaign Zero rolled out a Trump Resistance Manual, broadening its focus on data gathering beyond police reform. The site includes descriptions of various Trump policy proposals and assessments of their potential impact; it encourages users to crowd-source information about ways people can get involved in local organizing around more than a dozen issues, including police reform, LGBT rights, education, and climate change.

“The crises are so large that we have to have the capacity to address more than one thing at a time,” said Sam Sinyangwe, a co-founder of the group. “In this moment when they’re trying to take away health care from 30 million people, we simply cannot ignore that in the interest of focusing on one issue.”

Still, police reform remains crucial, and efforts at the state and local levels will be key. The new political reality of a Republican-controlled White House and Congress narrows the prospects for federal criminal justice reform, and leadership from the Department of Justice on police reform, as was the case under President Obama. “We have a federal government—and when I say the federal government I mean prospective Attorney General Jeff Sessions—who doesn’t believe in consent decrees,” said Barry, referring to the DOJ interventions mandating reform for troubled local police departments. “So I think particularly the Trump administration is not going to be useful or helpful for our communities.”

Trump has praised stop-and-frisk and the broken-windows policing strategy, both widely considered racially discriminatory. A budget blueprint for the next fiscal year prepared by the conservative Heritage Foundation—a plan mirrored by budget proposals made by the Trump administration, the Hill reported—would also cut $58 million dollars in funding from the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which handles police investigations.

Barry said he expects DOJ work on civil rights investigations into police shooting cases that weren’t finished under the Obama administration—such as the Eric Garner and John Crawford investigations—to stall. And worrisome for Campaign Zero’s Sinyangwe is the prospect that, under Trump, the DOJ might be more inclined to intervene in cases of police violence in support of law enforcement. “That’s a different situation that we’re not accustomed to in terms of the Civil Rights division,” he said.

This year, Campaign Zero will begin pushing for laws that empower state attorneys general to open civil rights investigations into local police departments, as is already the case in California, Sinyangwe said. The group will also push for local laws that require a vote by a city council before a police department can accept military equipment from the federal government. Trump has suggested that he will expand the DOJ program that transfers such equipment to local law enforcement.

BLM leaders aim to capitalize on the energy of the nationwide protests that have unfolded since Trump’s election. The local Sacramento chapter of the Black Lives Matter Global Network has canvassed neighborhoods and college campuses five times since the election and has a fast-growing email list, Tanya Faison, the founder of the chapter, told me.

In mid-January, Black Lives Matter groups around the country led multiple protests against pieces of Trump’s agenda that target immigrants, Muslims, and other people of color; the effort began on MLK Day and culminated with the mass anti-Trump protests on inauguration day. April Goggans, who is with the Black Lives Matter Global Network chapter in Washington, D.C., said BLM organizers have been “in awe” of the throng of supporters for their recent events. “It’s really important to us that every time we have a mobilization, that we have an intentional thing to call people into next,” Goggans said. “The days of just rallying and going home are over because there’s a lot of work that needs to be done.”

During the week of the inauguration, BLM groups hosted “Know Your Rights” trainings and “teach-ins” on Trump’s agenda, among other efforts to educate and involve more supporters. In collaboration with the ACLU and the National Lawyers Guild, Goggans’ chapter held trainings that walked attendees through everything from protest permit laws in DC to what a person’s rights are when police give a dispersal order, and how to conduct yourself in jail if you do ultimately get arrested.

Goggans’ chapter plans to rally supporters this month to canvas in neighborhoods in southeast D.C.—an area shaken by increased gun violence in recent years, and where Goggans lives—to encourage people to oppose a push by the city’s mayor to hire more police as a key solution to violent crime. The plan is to talk to residents about initiatives like after school programs and donating books to schools, and “to listen to folks and ask, ‘What is your biggest concern about this? Or what things do you think will be helpful for the issue happening on your block or in your community?’ So that it’s not just giving information, it’s a sharing of information.”

Building that people power will benefit from more collaboration and resource sharing with non-BLM groups. Even before Trump’s election, some BLM groups had begun to build such coalitions. Last fall, some sent members to North Dakota to support Native American activists fighting against the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline, while others raised money and provided supplies for native activists on the front lines there. The Black Lives Matter Global Network has raised nearly $14,000 in support of the protest efforts at Standing Rock.

The potential for powerful grassroots alliances has only grown since Trump entered the Oval Office, BLM leaders say. “What we saw during the inauguration weekend is going to continue,” said Barry of the historic marches around the country involving myriad activist groups. “We’re all under attack. Each of us might be impacted very differently, but we now share a very similar political fate, and so it’s incumbent on all of us to really be in full coordination and solidarity with other movements.”

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How the Black Lives Matter Movement Is Mobilizing Against Trump

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Trump Loosens Sanctions on Russian Security Service

by Raina286448 Posted on February 2, 2017

Mother Jones

Two years ago the Obama administration issued an executive order that allowed the Treasury Department to sanction any organization engaged in “cyber-enabled activities…that are reasonably likely to result in, or have materially contributed to, a significant threat to the national security, foreign policy, or economic health or financial stability of the United States.” (This was after the Sony hack.)

In late 2016, in retaliation for the Russian interference with the US election, Obama issued another executive order. This one added the Russian security service (FSB) and several other Russian actors to the list of sanctioned organizations.

Today, the Trump administration loosened these sanctions:

All transactions and activities otherwise prohibited pursuant to Executive Order (E.O.) 13694 of April 1, 2015…are authorized that are necessary and ordinarily incident to….

(1) Licenses, permits, certifications, or notifications issued or registered by the FSB for the importation, distribution, or use of information technology products in the Russian Federation….

(2) Complying with law enforcement or administrative actions or investigations involving the Federal Security Service; and

(3) Complying with rules and regulations administered by the Federal Security Service.

What does this mean? Payments are limited to $5,000 per calendar year, so the payments themselves are not what’s important. Nor does this order allow the sale or export of goods to the FSB itself. What it does is allow payments to the FSB for the licenses required to sell IT equipment in Russia.

How big a deal is this? What kinds of exports have been held up because it was illegal to pay for the FSB permits that were required? Is this just a minor fix for an unanticipated side-effect of the sanctions, or is it the first small step in loosening other sanctions on Russia? Good question. Perhaps some Russia expert will weigh in on this.

UPDATE: For what it’s worth, conservative sanctions expert Eric Lorber says this is probably just a benign fix to an “unintended consequence” of the original sanctions ordered by Obama.

UPDATE 2: Last year Russia passed a law requiring that metadata for all communications be stored for 3 years (by phone companies) and 1 year (by internet providers). In addition, the content of all communications must be stored for 6 months, and decryption keys have to be provided to the state security authorities. The new rules take effect in 2018.

A reader emails to say that the problem with the Obama sanctions is that they prevent Western companies from engaging with the FSB to understand exactly how the new law will be interpreted. I don’t entirely understand why that requires any money to change hands, but hey. It’s Russia. So maybe this wrinkle is what the easing of the sanctions is really about.

UPDATE 3: I’d sure be interested to hear from the folks who drafted the Obama sanctions. Did they deliberately want to cause Russia pain by preventing the import of IT equipment, or was this just an oversight? Who was responsible for writing and reviewing this stuff, anyway?

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Trump Loosens Sanctions on Russian Security Service

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California Mobilizes for War Against Trump

by BessieHatley Posted on January 13, 2017

Mother Jones

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Here in America’s most populous state, the wealthy pay the nation’s highest income tax rate, the minimum wage will soon rise to $15 an hour statewide, more than a quarter of the population is foreign born, and the economy is booming. California, the world’s sixth-largest economy and a bastion of progressivism, is now being hailed as a kind of great blue firewall—Democrats’ most important bulwark against the retrograde policies of Donald Trump.

“If you want to take on a forward-leaning state that is prepared to defend its rights and interests, then come at us,” Xavier Becerra, the state’s incoming attorney general, taunted the president-elect in December.

“One thing that should be made very clear is that one election won’t change the values of the state of California,” Kevin de León, the Senate president pro tempore, told Mother Jones. “What we would say to the incoming Trump administration is that we hope you find value in what we do in California—by growing the economy, creating real jobs that can be verified, reducing our carbon footprint, respecting immigrants for who they are, and recognizing that diversity, a rich mosaic of different hues, is actually a strength, not a weakness.”

Soon after Trump announced Cabinet nominees that “confirmed our worst fears about what a Trump presidency would look like,” says de León, he and his colleagues in the Statehouse retained former US Attorney General Eric Holder to advise on potential legal challenges from the next White House. “He brings a lot of legal firepower to do everything within our power to protect the policies, people, and progressive values of California.”

In a state where Democrats control all statewide elected offices and a supermajority of the Legislature, the economy grew 4.1 percent in 2015—the fastest in the country and nearly double the national average. Since 2011, when Democrat Jerry Brown replaced Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor, the state has turned a $26 billion budget deficit into a surplus that is projected to include upward of $8 billion for a rainy-day fund by the end of 2017. California has leveraged its booming economy to expand social services; since 2014, it has increased its budget for child care and preschool for low-income children by 24 percent, to $3.7 billion.

Trump’s bigoted rhetoric and alignment with far-right extremists during the presidential campaign alienated many people in California, which boasts an economy that in many ways is defined by immigrant labor, global free trade, and a progressive regulatory regime. A push to deport undocumented farmworkers could hurt the state’s agricultural sector. The green-energy sector fears a loss of subsidies and more drilling, maybe even in pristine federally protected waters just off the coast. Silicon Valley is suspicious of Trump on cybersecurity, trade protectionism, and the import of highly skilled tech workers. And then there is Hollywood: Meryl Streep’s condemnation of Trump at the Golden Globes this month underscored a deep antipathy for the president-elect among celebrities, many of whom have declined to perform at his inauguration.

But California’s leaders aren’t just engaging in a rhetorical war on Trump. Here’s what the Golden State is already doing to counter the president-elect on a range of major issues and defend its progressive achievements.

Climate Change

Trump famously suggested global warming is a Chinese hoax and has vowed to “cancel” the Paris Accord committing nearly every nation to curb emissions. His pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, is a climate change denier best known for suing the EPA in an effort to overturn its clean-energy policies. A darling of oil and coal interests, Pruitt has vowed as EPA chief to fight “unnecessary regulations” and promote “freedom for American business.”

But even if the Trump administration works to pull America back toward its carbon-spewing past, it will have little impact in California, which last year enacted a bill requiring the state to slash greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. Recently, Gov. Brown and other state leaders said they would bypass Trump and work directly with other nations and states to reduce emissions; California already trades emissions credits with Quebec, and in 2013 the state inked a pact with China committing to joint efforts to combat climate change and support clean energy—the only such agreement China has signed with a subnational government.

California plays a unique role in setting national energy policy: Section 209 of the Clean Air Act allows California, but not other states, to set its own stricter-than-federal emissions standards for automobiles if they address “compelling and extraordinary conditions.” Other states are then allowed to adopt those regulations. To date, 10 other states, representing 40 percent of the US population, have signed on to California’s tighter efficiency and emissions rules for cars, appliances, and automobiles. “The California standard actually governs in many cases rather than the federal standard,” notes Hal Harvey, president of Energy Innovation, a policy research group in San Francisco, “because nobody wants to make two product lines.”

California plays a less decisive role in directly supporting environmental sciences and energy research, which depend heavily on federal support, but Brown has signaled a desire to step in if Trump pulls the plug. “We’ve got the scientists, we’ve got the lawyers, and we’re ready to fight,” Brown said at the American Geophysical Union Conference in San Francisco. He even suggested that if Trump follows through on some advisers’ ambitions to end NASA’s role in climate science, California could step in and “launch its own damn satellite.”

Immigration

Though Trump campaigned on the idea of deporting America’s estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants, he has more recently said he will focus first on deporting 2 million to 3 million immigrants with criminal records—a number that would presumably include many people who’ve committed minor infractions. (Only about 820,000 undocumented immigrants have been convicted of crimes, according to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.) But pursuing mass deportations in California won’t be easy. A 2014 law bans state authorities from holding immigrants convicted of minor crimes for any longer than required by criminal law, thereby protecting them from being turned over to federal authorities for deportation. Many California cities have even broader “sanctuary city” policies.

Last month, state legislators introduced a package of bills that would go even further: Legislation authored by de León would bar state and local authorities from enforcing immigration laws, limit records sharing with federal immigration officials, and create “safe zones” at schools, hospitals, and courthouses where immigration enforcement would be prohibited. “To the millions of undocumented residents pursuing and contributing to the California Dream, the state of California will be your wall of justice should the incoming administration adopt an inhumane and overreaching mass-deportation policy,” de León said last month.

Other proposed bills would subsidize immigrant legal services by training public defenders in immigration law and setting up a fund to cover legal bills for immigrants caught up in deportation proceedings. Studies have shown that immigrants with a lawyer are far more likely to succeed in challenging deportation proceedings. Los Angeles last month announced a $10 million immigrant legal fund; the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office has proposed a similar $5 million fund.

More than a quarter of immigrants in the United States illegally live in California. In 1994, voters approved Proposition 187, a ballot measure making undocumented immigrants ineligible for public benefits. But since then, the state has moved sharply in the other direction. In 2011, Brown signed the California DREAM Act, allowing Californians who came to the country illegally when they were children to apply for financial aid from state colleges. In 2013, California allowed undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses, qualify for in-state tuition, and obtain law and other professional licenses. Last year, the state expanded its California-only Medicaid (Medi-Cal) program to undocumented children.

Anticipating that the Trump administration could use records collected through such programs to identify and round up undocumented immigrants, the American Civil Liberties Union is pushing for further safeguards here. “We’re concerned about ensuring that information is protected and can remain confidential,” says Jennie Pasquarella, the director of immigrant rights for the ACLU of California. “It is critical that California first show a model for the rest of the country—our values as a state that is filled with immigrants.” California’s Kamala Harris announced earlier this month that her first act as a US senator would be to co-sponsor legislation to protect the nation’s 744,000 “DREAMers” from deportation.

Health Care

Republicans and Trump have vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act—but in California the law is overwhelmingly popular and successful. The law has provided $20 billion for the Medi-Cal program and for insurance subsidies for 1.2 million Californians, helping to cut the state’s uninsured rate by half, from 6.5 million people in 2012 to 3.3 million in 2015. Patient advocacy groups don’t want to give up those gains. In December, the California Endowment announced that it would spend $25 million over three years to defend against federal cuts to Obamacare and other social programs. “California has made great progress both economically and on the health front over the past several years,” says Daniel Zingale, senior vice president of the Endowment’s Healthy California program. “We think it is important to defend that from threats in Washington.”

Several California leaders are even pushing Trump to replace Obamacare with “Medicare for All,” a.k.a. single-payer health care. “The one I am counting on the most to push nationalized health care is Trump,” RoseAnn DeMoro, the head of the Oakland-based National Nurses United union, told Politico, citing Trump’s “international perspective” as a businessman and the fact that his wife comes from Slovenia, which has a single-payer system. Another major backer of “Medicare for All” is California Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom, who as mayor of San Francisco in 2007 launched Healthy San Francisco, a health care plan available to all city residents regardless of their immigration status, employment, or preexisting conditions.

Marijuana

Trump’s pick for attorney general, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, last year killed a bipartisan bill that would have reduced prison sentences for some lower-level drug offenders. He said last April that “good people don’t smoke marijuana” and that “we need grown-ups in charge in Washington to say marijuana is not the kind of thing that ought to be legalized.”

Though Sessions moderated that rhetoric during his confirmation hearing this week, his nomination is staunchly opposed by California’s $3 billion legal marijuana industry and its representatives in Washington. “Sessions has a long history of opposing marijuana reform, and nothing he said at the hearing suggests he has changed his mind,” Bill Piper, senior director of the Drug Policy Alliance’s Office of National Affairs, said in a press release. The DPA was a major backer of November’s successful California Proposition 64, which legalizes recreational marijuana.

In an echo of the Proposition 64 campaign, drug policy reform groups have partnered with civil rights groups such as the NAACP and LatinoJustice to oppose Sessions on the grounds that the war on drugs has fueled mass incarcerations of people of color for nonviolent offenses. They want to make sure Trump stands by his 2015 statement to the Washington Post that marijuana legalization “should be a state issue.”

Marijuana industry leaders expect California to vigorously defend Proposition 64 from any federal court challenges. “We would expect a very, very strong pushback from the state, because the reality is it’s a public safety issue,” Nate Bradley, executive director of the California Cannabis Industry Association, told the Los Angeles Times. “They have decriminalized a product, so if you don’t allow any sort of regulation in place for people to access that product, the underground market is only going to grow.”

Guns

Enthusiastically endorsed by the National Rifle Association, Trump has vowed to diminish federal gun regulations, including eliminating gun-free zones at schools and on military bases, and he supports a national right-to-carry law for concealed guns. During the presidential campaign he also suggested he would appoint an explicitly anti-gun-control justice to the US Supreme Court.

But California this year further strengthened its gun laws, which were already among the toughest in the nation. In July, Brown signed off on legislation that outlawed the possession of ammunition magazines that hold more than 10 bullets, required background checks for the purchase of ammunition, and banned the sale of certain types of semi-automatic assault rifles. Proposition 63, approved by voters in November, added requirements for owners to report lost and stolen guns and created a system for confiscating guns from felons.

“The United States is a federal republic, not a monarchy, and California plays an outsized role in our nation’s success,” Lt. Governor Newsom, the architect of Proposition 63, said in a statement to Mother Jones. “The reduction of our state’s gun violence rate is a model for the nation and we’re resilient, flexible, and well prepared for any effort by the NRA and the President-elect to make California a Wild West again.”

One place where California hasn’t pushed back much against Trump since the election is Silicon Valley. A few rank-and-file tech workers have held meetings with civil rights groups, but tech CEOs have quietly sidled up to the president-elect. A few weeks ago, a handful of top tech names climbed Trump Tower for an awkward photo op with Trump and his children. “We definitely gave up a little stature now for possible benefit later,” one source told Recode’s Kara Swisher at the time. “It’s better to be quiet now and speak up later if we have to, and save our powder.”

The San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, which defends free speech and privacy on the internet, took out a full-page advertisement in Wired magazine in December, warning the technology community, “Your threat model has changed.” The ad calls upon tech companies to secure their networks against an incoming Trump administration by encrypting user data, scrubbing data logs, and disclosing government data requests while fighting them in court.

“For California, Trump is creating a lot of fronts where organizations and government are going to be fighting battles,” says Dave Maass, an investigative researcher at EFF. “We are focused on civil liberties and privacy, and we believe they are fundamental to whatever kind of activism battle that you want to fight. If you don’t have free speech and don’t have the ability to organize, then you can’t do anything.” He anticipates that California lawmakers will be generating a flurry of new bills, and that no small number of them “are going to be direct responses to Trump.”

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California Mobilizes for War Against Trump

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Trump Doesn’t Deny Contact Between His Team and Russia During Campaign

by MichealFeetham Posted on January 11, 2017

Mother Jones

In his first press conference in half a year, Donald Trump came close to acknowledging the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia had meddled in the election to benefit him, saying, “I think it was Russia.” But he quickly added that others are always trying to hack US targets and downplayed the Russian hack, asking why it received so much more attention than a Chinese cyber-attack on the US government several years ago. And when Trump was given a chance to rebut claims that his campaign team had been in communication with Russian intermediaries during the campaign, he did not deny those allegations.

At the end of the nearly hour-long press conference, Trump ignored a question from a reporter about contacts between people associated with him and Russians. The reporter asked, “Can you stand here today, once and for all, and say that no one connected to you or your campaign had any contact with Russia leading up to or during the presidential campaign? And if you do indeed believe that Russia was behind the hacking, what is your message to Vladimir Putin right now?”

But Trump chose only to answer the second part of the journalist’s query. “Russia will have much greater respect for our country when I’m leading it than when other people have led it,” he said. “You will see that. Russia will respect our country. He shouldn’t have done it, I don’t believe he’ll be doing it more now, we have to work something out. But it’s not just Russia.”

The press conference comes one day after CNN reported that the heads of the major US intelligence agencies had briefed Trump and President Barack Obama about claims that Moscow had mounted a secret operation to co-opt or cultivate Trump, that there were extensive communications between people close to Trump and Russians during the presidential campaign, and that Russia had collected compromising material on Trump during his travels to the country. After CNN’s story went live, BuzzFeed published a raw “dossier” of information used for that briefing, prompting a furious response from Trump during his press conference.

Both stories came months after Mother Jones first reported that a former spy working for a Western country had sent the FBI memos containing the Russian allegations.

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Trump Doesn’t Deny Contact Between His Team and Russia During Campaign

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Surprise! WikiLeaks’ Assange Backs Trump on Russia Hacking Report

by KaliSeton93839 Posted on January 9, 2017

Mother Jones

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During a live press conference broadcast from the Ecuadorian embassy in London via Twitter’s livestream app Persicope, WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange on Monday blasted the recent US intelligence report on Russian hacking during the 2016 election.

“It is, frankly, quite embarrassing to the reputation of the US intelligence services to be putting out something that claims to be a report like that,” Assange said. “This is a press release. It is clearly designed for political effect and US intelligence have been politicized by the Obama administration in the production of this report and a number of other statements.”

Assange called the report a “political attack cannon against Donald Trump” and a way “to defend the reason why the Democratic Party lost.” And he claimed that its true purpose was to bolster certain officials within the Democratic Party and “delegitimize the election of Donald Trump.”

Assange’s press conference comes three days after the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a declassified report outlining its assessment of alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign via hacks of US political targets, including the Democratic National Committee and the personal email account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. The materials were stolen from those organizations by Russian intelligence, according to the report, and then passed to WikiLeaks, but it does not specify whether this occurred through an intermediary. An online persona known as “Guccifer 2.0” claimed credit for the DNC hack and for passing the information along to WikiLeaks and also for providing the material to media outlets and reporters.

“Moscow most likely chose WikiLeaks because of its self-proclaimed reputation for authenticity,” the declassified report stated, adding that the material published by WikiLeaks did “not contain any evident forgeries.” The report stated that Russian intelligence fed the materials to WikiLeaks but didn’t say how, or whether it was through a third-party. The Washington Post reported Thursday night that US intelligence had identified the “actors” involved in getting the materials to WikiLeaks.

Assange has consistently denied that the materials came from the Russian government and addressed the issue again on Monday.

“We haven’t said we know or don’t know our sources,” he said. “We have made one statement, which is that our sources in the US election-related matter are not a state party.” Assange noted the “incredible care” with which WikiLeaks speaks about its sources, but this case “does not sufficiently threaten our sources to make this very bland disclosure.” With a “state” source, however, “we would have a lot less concern in attempting to protect them.”

Assange’s explanation seems to leave the door open that an intermediary passed the material from Russian intelligence to WikiLeaks.

Assange also discussed the penchant for outgoing administrations to destroy information on the way out the door and said WikiLeaks’ recent offer of $30,000 for information that leads to “the arrest or exposure of Obama admin sic officials destroying info sic,” is an effort to preserve information that belongs to the public. He implored government employees with access to data to grab it (not mentioning that doing so is a serious crime).

“Our request to system administrators in the Obama administration, and this goes for other administrations around the world, is take the data,” he said. “Just take it now, keep it under your bed, or with your mother, and then you can give that to WikiLeaks or other journalists at your leisure. Get a hold of that history and protect it because that is something that belongs to humanity and does not belong to a political party.”

Assange blasted President Obama for his administration’s treatment of whistleblowers but said that things weren’t likely to improve under a President Trump.

“While there are some anti-DC elements in the Trump cabinet and a lot in his base, very quickly, based on the history of all previous administrations, the Donald Trump administration will form its own establishment and enter into a power-sharing relationship with the existing powers in DC,” Assange said. “No system of authority likes those who undermine its authority.”

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Surprise! WikiLeaks’ Assange Backs Trump on Russia Hacking Report

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