Category Archives: Cyber

2016 Was a Really Bad Year. These Folks Made It Better.

by ZakHugheydrmlert Posted on December 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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2016 was certainly a bad year. The planet continued to get hotter (spelling doom for future habitants of Earth), natural disasters wreaked havoc all over the world, white nationalists and neo-Nazis stopped hiding on the fringes of society, and Prince, David Bowie, and Carrie Fisher left us way too soon. But before we consider 2016 as being totally bleak, let’s pause and remember a few folks who made a bad year better. From smart kids to activists and politicians, here are some of the bright spots.

Sarah McBride: Sarah McBride made history this year when she became the first transgender woman to speak at a major-party convention. “Will we be a nation where there is only one way to love, only one way to look, and only one way to live?” McBride, the national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, asked fellow Democrats gathered to nominate Hillary Clinton. “Or will we be a nation where everyone has the freedom to live openly and equally?” Growing up in Wilmington, Delaware, McBride didn’t think she could live authentically as herself while achieving her professional goals in politics. Since coming out in 2012, she’s been proving her younger self wrong, breaking down barriers and fighting for transgender rights. As an intern, McBride became one of the first transgender people to work in the White House, and she played an instrumental role in getting transgender rights legislation passed in Delaware. She also made waves this year when a bathroom selfie she took in North Carolina went viral after state lawmakers approved legislation barring transgender people from using the bathroom of their choice.

Mari Copeny: Mari Copeny is better known as Little Miss Flint. In 2014, her hometown’s water was poisoned with lead when the city of Flint, Michigan, changed to an improperly treated water supply. It took months to warn Flint residents, and as a result thousands of children in the city tested positive for high levels of lead in their blood. Mari sent a letter to the White House asking President Barack Obama to visit, and Obama responded and visited Flint a few weeks later. Mari’s mother operates a Twitter account for the young girl where she continues to tweet about the ongoing water crisis.

Lindy West: In a year when some of the worst corners of the internet gained new power, Lindy West’s accounts of confronting trolls provided badly needed evidence that you can stand up to cyberbullying and win. In her debut novel, Shrill, West describes what fat shaming really means, a perspective that This American Life host Ira Glass and others have noted changed their perspective on the issue. West’s book, which is a New York Times bestseller, is a delightful yet heart-wrenching collection of essays, spanning subjects from sexism in comedy to finding love. A columnist for the Guardian, she has also argued that objectifying men at the Olympics was not a real issue, and she’s called on everyone to dispense with verbal contortions and just call white nationalists Nazis. (West spoke to Mother Jones earlier this year about internet trolls, fat shaming, and rape culture.)

Tammy Duckworth: The 2016 election wasn’t kind to Democrats, but there were a few winners. Tammy Duckworth will move from the House of Representatives to the Senate, after her defeat of Republican Mark Kirk in the closely watched race for Illinois senator. She is a double amputee and a disabled Iraq War veteran, and she’ll be only the second Asian American to serve in the Senate. During the campaign, Kirk took flack for making a racist comment about his opponent’s family during a debate. Duckworth, who has an American father and a Thai mother, noted that her family has served in the military since the Revolutionary War. Kirk responded by saying, “I had forgotten your parents came all the way from Thailand to serve George Washington.” The Kirk campaign issued a statement attempting to defend his comments, but the embattled senator was met with a barrage of criticism before he tweeted out an apology. Duckworth has also supported accepting more Syrian refugees in the United States.

Michelle Obama: Real talk: Michelle Obama makes every year brighter. But this year especially, she was a force to be reckoned with on the campaign trail. Though she was a fierce critic of Donald Trump from the outset of the election, even the hot-headed president-elect knew better to go after the hugely popular first lady. In an impassioned speech after the release of an audio recording of Trump in which he talked about grabbing women “by the pussy,” Obama lambasted the Republican nominee for “actually bragging about sexually assaulting women.” Not only was she a champion on the campaign trail, but who can forget when Renaissance (her Secret Service code name) appeared on Carpool Karaoke?

The Reverend William Barber II: William Barber II, a charismatic orator and the founder of the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina, is probably best known for his work in voting rights and economic justice in the state. In 2013, Barber led a group of activists and clergy into the state Capitol building in Raleigh and blocked the doors to the Senate chambers to express his frustration with the Republican-majority Legislature for implementing voting restrictions, blocking Medicaid expansion, and cutting unemployment benefits. He was eventually arrested. This year, at the Democratic National Convention, Barber spoke out against injustice—from voter suppression to police brutality—and his movement has been credited with helping defeat Gov. Pat McCrory in North Carolina. The reverend shows no signs of stopping his work in voting rights and economic justice in 2017.

#NoDAPL activists: The water protectors of Standing Rock, as they call themselves, braved security guards using pepper spray, attack dogs, water cannons in freezing temperatures, and rubber bullets in order to stop the completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline and its threat to the water supply and cultural sites of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. The tribe opposed to the project and pointed out that pipeline developers had initially planned to follow a different route but rejected it due to concerns about contaminating the water supply to another community. It looked like nothing was going to stop the project, but in November the US Army Corps of Engineers halted construction of the pipeline, calling for research into environmental risks. The win is cause for celebration, but the final battle may lie ahead: President-elect Trump has invested between $500,000 and $1 million in the company with the contract to build the pipeline.

Marley Dias: Marley Dias is a 12-year-old girl who is already tired of reading books about white boys and their dogs. She impressed the world in January when Philly Voice reported that the New Jersey girl was starting a project called #1000BlackGirlBooks to collect books where black girls are the protagonists and not just background characters. The book drive was part of the GrassROOTS Community Foundation, an organization co-founded by Janice Johnson Dias, Marley’s mother, that she uses for a social action project every year. Marley hit her target of 1,000 books by February.

Chris Murphy: One lawmaker who confronted Republicans in Congress this year was Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn). After the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub last June, Murphy refused to let Republicans avoid voting on two gun control measures, one that banned suspected terrorists from buying guns and another that required background checks for sales at gun shows and over the internet. Murphy lead a 15-hour filibuster on an unrelated spending bill until the issue was brought to the floor. He has become one of the leading voices in the Democratic Party on gun control since the 2012 tragedy at Sandy Hook, Connecticut, in which 20 children and six adults were killed by an assailant with two guns. Prior to the election, Murphy explained to Mother Jones why Trump is more radical than the National Rifle Association.

Kamala Harris: The race to replace retiring California Sen. Barbara Boxer came down to two Democrats who were also women of color: Rep. Loretta Sanchez and state Attorney General Kamala Harris. After beating her opponent by 25 points, Harris, who was born to a Jamaican American father and an Indian American mother, became only the second black woman elected to the US Senate. (Carol Moseley-Braun represented Illinois from 1993 to 1999.) After the election, Harris spoke out for undocumented immigrants by vowing to fight Trump’s immigration policies at every turn. “You are not alone, you matter, and we’ve got your back,” she said to immigrants and activists at the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles after her victory.

Khizr and Ghazala Khan: The Khans’ son, Humayun Khan, was killed during the Iraq War in 2004. At the Democratic National Convention, Khizr Khan sharply and movingly criticized Trump for his proposal to ban Muslim immigration. “Donald Trump, you’re asking Americans to trust you with their future. Let me ask you, have you even read the United States Constitution?” Khan asked while pulling out a pocket-sized copy of the Constitution. “I will gladly lend you my copy. In this document, look for the words ‘liberty’ and ‘equal protection of law.'” Khan went on to note the sacrifice his family and other families like his have made:”Have you ever been to Arlington Cemetery? Go look at the graves of brave patriots who died defending the United States of America. You will see all faiths, genders, and ethnicities. You have sacrificed nothing—and no one.” Trump responded by criticizing Ghazala Khan for remaining silent while standing next to her husband, saying that she wasn’t allowed to speak because of the couple’s faith. He also claimed he made sacrifices by building “great structures.” His treatment of the Khans earned him widespread criticism from both sides of the aisle. Thanks to Khizr Khan, the American Civil Liberties Union ran out of pocket Constitutions less than a week after his speech.

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2016 Was a Really Bad Year. These Folks Made It Better.

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This May Be Trump’s Most Frightening and Dangerous Tweet Yet

by GracielaFitzwate Posted on December 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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With one tweet on Thursday, Donald Trump proved how dangerous and unstable his presidency could be.

Out of the blue, Trump weighed in on one of America’s most important national security issues: nuclear weapons. He tweeted:

In just 118 characters, Trump seemed to be reversing decades of bipartisan policy aimed at stopping the spread of nuclear weapons around the world. For decades, the United States has worked with Russia, the other major nuclear power, to reduce both nations’ nuclear arsenals. Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama have each negotiated treaties with Russia reducing nuclear stockpiles. Today, the United States and Russia each possess about 7,000 nuclear weapons, and there continue to be efforts to shrink these stockpiles.

Yet with a single tweet, Trump suggested he would move in the opposite direction and expand the US nuclear arsenal. To what end? Trump did not follow up with any other thoughts. But many experts contend that nuclear weapons will not bring greater security to the United States, given that the greatest risks these days come from nonstate actors, crises in the Middle East, and cyberwarfare.

Moreover, global efforts to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons—as enshrined in the international Non-Proliferation Treaty—are predicated on Washington and Moscow collaborating to downsize their nuclear arsenals. By declaring that the United States would enlarge its nuclear arms collection, Trump was undermining the attempts to stop the spread of these weapons throughout the world.

The Trump team’s response did not make the situation any better. Spokesman Jason Miller issued a statement saying Trump was referring to “the threat of nuclear proliferation and the critical need to prevent it—particularly to and among terrorist organizations and unstable and rogue regimes.”

Uh, no, he wasn’t. And, still, this was an illogical point. Adding more nukes to the US stockpile will hardly stop terrorists or rogue regimes from seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. Miller was replying with a non sequitur.

Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund and a nuclear arms expert, says, “Can a tweet start and arms race? This one just might have.” He adds, “There are groups like Heritage Foundation arguing to expand our nuclear arsenal. If Trump was reflecting their thinking for not just new weapons but more weapons and new missions, we are entering new and very dangerous territory.”

With this tweet, Trump gave new fuel to two questions: whether he intends to drastically change US policy on nuclear arms control, and whether he and his team are capable of handling serious matters. It doesn’t get much more serious than nuclear weapons, and here was Trump seemingly shooting from the hip, without any apparent deliberation, on a critical national security matter—and with his staffers then forced to issue a nonsensical statement to back him up. It was clown time…with nuclear weapons.

Trump has suggested in years past that he believes a nuclear war is inevitable. So any tweet from him on this subject deserves great scrutiny—at least as much as his tweets about Alec Baldwin, SNL, and the musical Hamilton. The posting of this tweet, and his staff’s inability to explain it, are frightening signs that Trump is not ready for the task of controlling weapons that can destroy the world.

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This May Be Trump’s Most Frightening and Dangerous Tweet Yet

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Help Me Understand the Republican View on Russia’s Election Hacking

by EdgarStinson Posted on December 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Just for the record, I want to make sure I understand something:

During the presidential campaign, Mitch McConnell and his fellow Republicans promised to raise hell if President Obama responded aggressively to Russia’s interference in the election.
Now that the election is over, Republicans are bashing Obama for not having a more aggressive response to a ruthless cyberattack by a hostile foreign power. It’s yet another example of Obama’s fecklessness on the foreign stage.

Do I have this right? Just curious.

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Help Me Understand the Republican View on Russia’s Election Hacking

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President Obama to Putin: "We Can Do Stuff to You"

by MelissaJrw Posted on December 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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In response to alleged Russian hacking of US political targets, President Barack Obama said during a press conference on Friday that the US government will “continue to send a message to Russia to not do this to us because we can do stuff to you.”

Obama, in his last press conference of 2016, defended his administration’s response to the hacks, saying that in the “hyperpartisan atmosphere” of the US presidential election “my primary concern was making sure that the integrity of the election process wasn’t damaged.” He told reporters that he wanted to ensure that the election proceeded without the impression that his administration was trying to tip the scales in favor of either candidate. “The truth of the matter is that everybody had the information,” he said. “It was out there, and we handled it the way we should have.”

Now that the election is over, Obama said his administration will fashion a response to the hacking that will send a message to the Russian government. He said some of this response would be public, but that part would play out “in a way they know but not everybody will.”

“At a point in time where we’ve taken certain actions that we can divulge properly, we will do so,” Obama said.

Obama also downplayed the value of an overt response: “The idea that somehow public shaming is going to be effective I think doesn’t read the thought process in Russia very well,” Obama said.

The press conference comes on the heels of numerous media reports, citing unnamed intelligence officials, detailing Russia’s alleged role in hacking US political targets, including the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. Last week, the Washington Post reported that the CIA had concluded that the Russian government had mounted the hacks in an effort to sway the election in favor of Donald Trump. The New York Times has laid out how the US government thinks the hacks played out. NBC has reported that intelligence officials believe that Vladimir Putin himself oversaw the hacking operation. Just before Obama spoke, the Post reported that the FBI now agrees with the CIA’s assessment that the Russian hacks were designed to help Trump.

Obama said the intelligence community will produce a final assessment on the hacks before he leaves office, and that he doesn’t want to get ahead of the report’s conclusions. But, when pressed, he alluded to Putin’s direct involvement.

“Not much happens in Russia without Vladimir Putin,” he said. “This is a pretty hierarchical operation. Last I checked, there’s not a lot of debate and democratic deliberation, particularly when it comes to policies directed at the United States.”

Trump has consistently downplayed the accusations against Putin and Russia, calling the CIA assessment “ridiculous,” and he has claimed the allegations of Russian political interference in the presidential election are politically driven.

At a dinner with donors on Thursday, Hillary Clinton said Putin directed the hacks “because he had a personal beef against me,” one that originated after she questioned the fairness of parliamentary elections held in Russia in 2011. “Putin publicly blamed me for the outpouring of outrage by his own people,” she said, “and that is a direct line between what he said back then and what he did in this election.” On Thursday night, Podesta published an op-ed in the Washington Post arguing that something is “deeply wrong with the FBI” and calling for an airing of as much evidence as can safely be made public about the hacks, along with a full, independent investigation into the matter.

In an interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep on Thursday, Obama vowed to retaliate against Russia.

“I think there is no doubt that when any foreign government tries to impact the integrity of our elections, that we need to take action,” he said in the interview. “And we will at a time and place of our own choosing. Some of it may well be explicit and publicized, some of it may not be.” Obama said his administration has “been working hard to make sure that what we do is proportional, that what we do is meaningful.”

It’s unclear what form US retribution could take. Michael Daniel, a special assistant to the president and the White House cybersecurity coordinator, told Cyber Scoop on Friday that “the US government is still pulling together” a response to the hacks.

Discussing the impact of the hacks during his press conference on Friday, Obama said Russia can only weaken the United States if Americans let it happen. “The Russians can’t change us or significantly weaken us,” Obama said. “They are a smaller country, they are a weaker county, their economy doesn’t produce anything that anyone wants to buy except oil, gas, and arms, they don’t innovate. But they can impact us if we lose track of who we are, if we abandon our values.”

This is a developing story.

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President Obama to Putin: "We Can Do Stuff to You"

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We Still Have 1,496 More Days of Trump to Go

by MizunoC36rm Posted on December 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump was eager this morning to fight back against the news that Vladimir Putin worked hard to get him elected:

Greg Sargent comments:

By referring to this episode, what Trump is inadvertently revealing here is that, yes, the complaint about Russian hacking to hurt Clinton did in fact precede the election, and this was widely and publicly known. Of course, there is ample other evidence that Trump is fully aware of this. The intel community had publicly declared it weeks before the election. Trump had reportedly been privately briefed on it by U.S. officials. Trump was confronted with evidence of the hack at a debate with Clinton that was watched by tens of millions of people. At the debate, he cast doubt on the notion that Russia had hacked the materials to hurt Clinton. And yet, as Mark Murray points out, Trump himself widely referenced the material dug up in the hacks at rallies, where he used that material to — wait for it — try to damage Clinton.

Yeah, Trump knows all this. He just doesn’t care. He knows that most people have poor memories for this kind of stuff and are likely to believe him if he says nobody talked about the Russian hacking during the campaign. Give him a few months and he’ll be tweeting about how no one brought up health care during the election, so why are they all so upset about it now?

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We Still Have 1,496 More Days of Trump to Go

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Why Are Democrats So Damn Timid About James Comey and the FBI?

by JodyLondon1 Posted on December 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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John Podesta, chair of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, is pissed:

The more we learn about the Russian plot to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign and elect Donald Trump, and the failure of the FBI to adequately respond, the more shocking it gets….I was surprised to read in the New York Times that when the FBI discovered the Russian attack in September 2015, it failed to send even a single agent to warn senior Democratic National Committee officials. Instead, messages were left with the DNC IT “help desk.”

….Comparing the FBI’s massive response to the overblown email scandal with the seemingly lackadaisical response to the very real Russian plot to subvert a national election shows that something is deeply broken at the FBI.

FBI Director James Comey justified his handling of the email case by citing “intense public interest.” He felt so strongly that he broke long-established precedent and disregarded strong guidance from the Justice Department with his infamous letter just 11 days before the election. Yet he refused to join the rest of the intelligence community in a statement about the Russian cyberattack because he reportedly didn’t want to appear “political.” And both before and after the election, the FBI has refused to say whether it is investigating Trump’s ties to Russia.

I’m surprised that Democrats have been so muted about the FBI’s role in the election. If something like this had happened to Republicans, it would be flogged daily on Rush, Drudge, Fox News, Breitbart, the Wall Street Journal, and the Facebook pages of everyone from Sarah Palin to Alex Jones. But Democrats have been almost pathologically afraid to talk about it, apparently cowed by the possibility that Republicans will mock them for making excuses about their election loss.

That’s crazy. Here’s a quick review:

Goaded by rabid congressional Republicans, the FBI spent prodigious resources on Hillary Clinton’s email server, even though there was never a shred of evidence that national security had been compromised in any way.

In July, Comey broke precedent by calling a press conference and delivering a self-righteous speech about Clinton’s “carelessness.” Why did he do this, when FBI protocol is to decline comment on cases after investigations are finished? The answer is almost certainly that he wanted to insulate himself from Republican criticism for not recommending charges against Clinton.

Weeks later, Comey finally released the investigation’s interview notes. Only the most devoted reader of bureaucratic prose was likely to suss out their real meaning: there had never been much of a case in the first place, and contrary to Comey’s accusation, Clinton had never been careless with classified material. Like everyone else, she and her staff worked hard to exchange only unclassified material on unclassified networks (state.gov, gmail, private servers, etc.). There was a difference of opinion between State and CIA about what counted as classified, but this squabbling had been going on forever, and had driven previous Secretaries of State nuts too.

As Podesta notes, the FBI took a preposterously lackadaisical attitude toward Russia’s hacking of the DNC server. Outside of a badly-written novel, it’s hard to believe that any law enforcement organization would do as little as the FBI did against a major assault from a hostile foreign power aimed at one of America’s main political parties.

Even when plenty of evidence was amassed about Russia’s actions, Comey downplayed it in private briefings. This gave Republicans the cover they needed to insist that Obama not mention anything about it during the campaign.

Two weeks before Election Day, Comey authorized a search of Anthony Weiner’s laptop, even though there was no reason to think any of the emails it contained were new, or that any of them posed a threat to national security. Then he issued a public letter making sure that everyone knew about the new evidence, and carefully phrased the letter in the most damaging possible way.

Any one of these things could be just an accident. Put them all together, and you need to be pretty obtuse not to see the partisan pattern. In every single case, Comey and the FBI did what was best for Republicans and worst for Democrats. In. Every. Single. Case.

If you want to believe this is just a coincidence, go ahead. But nobody with a room temperature IQ credits that. The FBI has spent the entire past year doing everything it could to favor one party over the other in a presidential campaign. Democrats ought to be in a seething fury about this. Instead, they’re arguing about a few thousand white rural voters in Wisconsin and whether Hillary Clinton should have visited Michigan a few more times in October.

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Why Are Democrats So Damn Timid About James Comey and the FBI?

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Did Russia Spy on Donald Trump When He Visited Moscow?

by WalterHua9800982 Posted on December 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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With the Washington Post‘s bombshell report that the CIA has assessed the Russian hacking of Democratic targets was done as part of a Kremlin operation to help Donald Trump win the election, here’s an intriguing question: has Russian intelligence spied on the president-elect and, if so, what private information has it collected on him? A counterintelligence veteran of a Western spy service in October told Mother Jones that he had uncovered information—and had sent it to the FBI—indicating Russian intelligence had mounted a years-long operation to cultivate or co-opt Trump and that this project included surveillance that gathered compromising material on the celebrity mogul. Yet there have been no indications from the FBI whether it has investigated this lead. Still, several intelligence professionals say that Trump would have indeed been a top priority for Russian intelligence surveillance—especially when he was in Moscow in November 2013 for the Miss Universe pageant, which he owned at the time.

To present the contest in the Russian capital, Trump, who had long tried to do real estate deals in Russia, had teamed up with Aras Agalarov, a billionaire oligarch close to Vladimir Putin (whose son is a popular pop singer). The glitzy event, which included a swanky after-party, drew various Russian notables, including a member of Putin’s inner circle and an alleged Russian mobster. Trump later boasted that he had mingled with “almost all of the oligarchs.” Trump had hoped that Putin would attend the pageant—tweeting months earlier, “if so, will he become my new best friend?”—but the Russian leader was a no-show.

During Trump’s stay in Moscow, US intelligence experts note, he would have been a natural and obvious target for Russian intelligence. At the time, Trump was a prominent American, an international businessman, and a celebrity. He was also deeply involved in US politics. He had almost run for president in 2000 and nearly did so again in 2012, and he had been a leading foe of President Barack Obama, having pushed the conspiracy theory that Obama had been born in Kenya.

A former high-ranking CIA official, who asked not to be identified, says in an email,

It is nearly certain that Russian intelligence would have done some sort of surveillance on him. Could have been low-key physical surveillance (following etc) or deeper surveillance, such as video/audio of hotel room and monitoring of electronics (your communications while in Moscow is on their network).

James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, points out, “It’s safe to assume that high-profile public figures and billionaires attract the attention of the Russian security services, including bugging any hotel rooms.” And Malcolm Nance, a terrorism and intelligence expert and author of The Plot To Hack America, says that the Russian version of the National Security Agency, the Spetssvyaz, manages specialized technical teams that would have been all over Trump:

These communications intercept units are designated for high-importance personages of political and diplomatic standing, such as Donald Trump. These units would’ve employed the most advanced intelligence collection systems in the nation. Anything short of a highly encrypted communications suite using military-grade technology would be simple for Russian intelligence to exploit. Donald Trump’s mobile phone would be among the easiest to exploit. His mobile phone, Bluetooth, and laptops were most likely not shielded and could have been intercepted and exploited any number of ways. This means virtually everything he said, everything he texted, everything he wrote, and every communication he had in the electronic spectrum would be in the possession of Russian intelligence then and now. His guest rooms in Moscow could have had virtually undetectable voice and video communications intercept devices planted in such a way that nothing could be done by Trump in private and would defy detection. The Spetssvyaz would also employ Russian military intelligence subunits as well as Federal Security Service (FSB) surveillance units which could follow him anywhere that he goes with seemingly normal people and detect, document, and provide a record of anything and anyone he met.

Trump could have attempted to take counter-measures to defeat any surveillance. “About the only way to ensure against electronic surveillance,” the former CIA official says, “is to use a burner phone—one you’re not going to use again—stay off your normal personal email (use a one-time address you will not use again), and keep communications on that one to routine, non-sensitive messages… That was my practice in Moscow…during which all I sent were innocuous text messages on a phone I never used again.” And Lewis remarks, “If you used a mobile phone with an encrypted app and kept that phone in your possession for the entire trip, you could make it harder for them. A lot of people use Signal or Telegram for encrypted texting, but the Russians could still have many ways around this when you are in Moscow.”

Mother Jones asked Trump—through his transition team, his spokeswoman, and his lawyer—what he did to secure his communications and to thwart surveillance during his Moscow trip. Did he use secured phones and text services? Did he sweep his hotel room for surveillance devices? Trump’s representatives did not respond. Nor did the spokeswoman for Miss Universe when presented with a similar set of questions.

While he was in Moscow, Trump did continue his normal practice of tweeting often. Here are several tweets he sent out:

According to the Trump Twitter Archive, all the tweets Trump zapped out from Moscow came from an Android phone. A 2016 analysis found that Trump’s personal tweets—as opposed to those written by staffers on his account—were generated by an Android phone. (His staff-composed tweets came from an iPhone.)

The intelligence experts agree: Trump would have been in the sights of Russian intelligence. But what might Moscow’s spies have found? There is no telling. In the famous Access Hollywood video, Trump boasted of committing lewd (and illegal) action. Any intelligence operative would be delighted to catch Trump in such an act. Nance speculates:”That some of this would be salacious or information he would not want exposed to the public is without question. This unknown to the US intelligence community makes Donald Trump not just a national security threat but potentially a victim of blackmail by our oppositions intelligence agencies.” Nance also points out that if Russian intelligence penetrated Trump’s phone when he was in Moscow, its officers could have continued to intercept Trump’s conversations once he was back in the United States.

During the campaign, Trump and his supporters railed about Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of her private email server and claimed she had jeopardized US secrets. Her actions—while never shown to have led to any compromise of classified information—were troubling. A related but different set of issues faces Trump. Did he fail to take precautions that would prevent the Russians from gaining access to his private personal and professional information? If so, might the Russians possess secret information on the next president of the United States? Should that be true, Nance adds, it could pose “a monumental potential intelligence crisis never before seen in American history.”

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Did Russia Spy on Donald Trump When He Visited Moscow?

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How Putin Got His Pet Game Show Host Elected President

by DianFritzsche Posted on December 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Over lunch I read today’s big New York Times story about the Russian cyberattacks aimed at disrupting the US election. It was mesmerizing even though I already knew a lot of it, and it was also depressing as hell. By the time I finished, I was pretty close to thinking that the right response would be a couple dozen cruise missiles aimed straight at Putin’s lone remaining aircraft carrier. I guess we’re all lucky I’m not the president.

There are a dozen depressing things I could highlight, but somehow I found this the most depressing of all:

By last summer, Democrats watched in helpless fury as their private emails and confidential documents appeared online day after day — procured by Russian intelligence agents, posted on WikiLeaks and other websites, then eagerly reported on by the American media, including The Times….Every major publication, including The Times, published multiple stories citing the D.N.C. and Podesta emails posted by WikiLeaks, becoming a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence.

I know: news is news. Somehow, though, that doesn’t seem sufficient. I’m still not entirely sure what the right response is to leaks like this, but simply publishing everything no matter where it came from or what its motivation no longer seems tenable. There has to be something more to editorial judgment than that.

Anyway, Putin won this round. He didn’t do it all by himself—he had plenty of help from the FBI and the media—but in the end, he got his pet game show host elected president of the United States. I hope we all live through it.

Link: 

How Putin Got His Pet Game Show Host Elected President

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Time to Fight Like Hell

by IJKMisty230991 Posted on December 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Decades from now, when the election of 2016 is distilled to its essence, what will that be? Many hoped the central lesson would be a shattered glass ceiling and a cementing of the Obama legacy. An expansion of rights and tolerance.

Instead, a small electoral majority chose a candidate who openly embraced bigotry, who slurred war heroes and mocked the disabled, who bragged of sexual assault, who said he’d roll back the protections of a free press, who was cheered on by white supremacists, who said he’d upend our alliances and the world’s long-overdue climate deal, and who is ignorant and cavalier about the basics of safeguarding a nuclear arsenal.

There is no way to sugarcoat it. The election of Donald Trump is a brutal affront to women, people of color, Jews and Muslims, and all who value kindness and tolerance. Paranoia and divisiveness won the day. If we feared that the Trump campaign would give white nationalists and other political predators a road map for a lasting presence as a disruptive opposition, we have instead handed them the keys to the Oval Office, and the nuclear codes.

In the horrible months leading up to the election, there were moments we all crossed our fingers and hoped the Trump campaign’s predilection for inflaming bigotry might, ultimately, improve the health of the body politic. Maybe he represented a high fever that, once broken, would leave us more immune to old hatreds. Maybe, just as videos of police shootings shoved the most heinous forms of structural racism into the social-media feeds of white America, so would the actions of Trump and his most virulent supporters cast a light on an ugliness that needed to be confronted to be at last overcome.

January/February 2017 Issue

Except, it seems this ugliness was far, far more pervasive than we had let ourselves imagine. With every chant of “build the wall,” with every racist tweet, with every “Trump that bitch” T-shirt, his supporters hardened—to the horror of more than half of those who voted (and many who didn’t), and despite the entreaties of political, diplomatic, scientific, and economic experts.

It would be counterproductive to say, as some have, that all those who voted for Trump are stone-cold racists. People voted for him for various and complicated reasons. But it must be said that all who voted for Trump did not find naked bigotry and misogyny to be disqualifying. Some discounted it, and some thrilled to it. That is gutting.

The next weeks and months and years will be spent analyzing how we got here. It will be a grim accounting for every institution, and a painful airing of recriminations among families and friends.

As the author and comedian Baratunde Thurston put it, Trump’s campaign is best understood as a denial-of-service attack on our political system. Despite or perhaps because he is a thin-skinned, shallow narcissist, he instinctively found weaknesses in our national firewall. He knew that with 16 primary opponents, each would happily support his attacks on the manhood, looks, and dignity of the others, until it was too late and the momentum was on his side.

He realized that his bombastic, bigoted statements would be heralded by some corners of the media, mocked by others, and given wall-to-wall coverage by all. Newsroom traditions of putting separate teams of reporters on each candidate also helped ensure that Hillary Clinton’s email scandals were given the same weight as the mountain of evidence of Trump’s wrongdoing. The nation’s great newspapers and networks did vital work, but when it came to proportionality, they utterly failed. And the obsession with polling aggregators and fancy widgets, coupled with the failings of the polls themselves, lulled people into slacktivism, inaction, or even showy obstructionism.

And social media failed us most of all. Even as armies of Trump’s toxic trolls—some real, some bots—started harassing reporters, activists, and ordinary people with racist and anti-Semitic images and general filth, Twitter twiddled its thumbs. Even as Macedonian teens eager for ad revenue exploited Facebook’s algorithm by flooding the zone with fake news designed to appeal to Trump supporters, Facebook did nothing. Actually, it did do something: It repeatedly changed its algorithm and protocols in ways that may have enabled fake news. And oh yeah, the founder of virtual-reality pioneer Oculus went so far as to gleefully fund a “shitpost” factory to promote Trump. Deliberately or not, tech tools were used to pervert our political dialogue, and a good chunk of the tech elite either didn’t care or relished it in the name of “disruption.” Consider, too, that venture capitalist (and Facebook board member) Peter Thiel’s yearslong secret campaign to eviscerate Gawker Media took out the news organization best positioned to challenge the tech titans and root out organized trolling, just months before the election.

Some—maybe a lot—of the social-media cesspool can be laid at the feet of Vladimir Putin, known for using similar tactics to destabilize Ukraine and other European countries. The Department of Homeland Security says Russia was behind the hack that allowed WikiLeaks to air the emails of Democratic National Committee officials, which enraged Bernie Sanders supporters. Days after the election, a former State Duma member linked to cyberattacks on Estonia said the Kremlin “maybe helped a bit with WikiLeaks.” A few days ago the CIA presented lawmakers with a new analysis: Putin had intervened in our election with the express intent of helping Trump and harming Clinton. The revelation prompted Trump to attack the CIA, which in turn helped prompt senior Senators of both parties to a call for a bipartisan investigation. How far back into the election cycle do fake news and organized disinformation go? And who is responsible for what? We don’t yet know, but in retrospect, those who shouted down concerns over Russian involvement as “neo-McCarthyism” might have better directed their fact-finding at these questions.

In any case, WikiLeaks and the trolls found fertile ground after 30-plus years of GOP Hillary hate, and in a country in as much denial about sexism as it is about racism. Trump was also aided by FBI Director James Comey and his bizarre letter to Congress that seemed to reopen the Clinton email investigation. Comey, for his part, may have been dealing with a clique of agents determined to keep digging into the allegations laid out in Clinton Cash, a book written by an editor at Breitbart News, the site that hails itself as “the platform for the alt-right,” whose former executive chairman, Stephen Bannon, is now one of Trump’s senior White House advisers.

And then there was Trump himself. He deftly wove fears of the left together with fears of the right. He stoked fear of loss in status, fear of economic marginalization, fear of the other. He never ever, not once, offered us anything but fear. He made all of us—even those who fought valiantly—smaller by dragging us into his swamp of hate and depravity.

And if we let him, he will continue to do so. The circular firing squads on the left have lined up. The reasonable right—and yes, many did distinguish themselves by repudiating Trump—is abandoned to an uncertain fate. Those who didn’t vote or protest-voted have all come under fire, as have those who helped champion Clinton.

Constructive postmortems are great. There’s a lot to chew on. But in the weeks following the election, the analysis has been dominated by hot takes based on incomplete exit poll data or ax-grinding to fit various agendas. That really needs to stop. There is no time, no room, no space to do anything but make common cause—on the left and beyond it—and push back against what, in part, this seems to be: not just a protest vote by rural whites who feel left behind, but the coming out of an authoritarian nationalist movement eager to stir racial discord. And the dawn of an era of nepotism and graft on a scale that could leave future historians gobsmacked.

Authoritarian movements rise by dividing us and can only last so long as they do. My heart broke on election night to see my Twitter feed full of quotes like “I knew my country hated me, but I didn’t know how much,” or “I don’t recognize my country.” In the days after the election, there was a surge of hate crimes. Parents had to answer questions like: What will happen to my friends? What will happen to us? Why does he hate us?

This is a dark hour, and to say otherwise would be a lie. It is—by orders of magnitude—the worst electoral outcome our country has faced in many generations. But let us not forget those who have pushed back already. The women born before the passage of the 19th Amendment, who struggled against infirmity and efforts to suppress their vote to get to the polls. The myriad Latinos and Asian Americans who registered for the first time to repel the hate that too many whites voted for. The African Americans who stood up for equality at a far greater rate than any other group, as they always have.

Trump appealed to America’s worst impulses. Now it’s on all of us to show, to prove, that this is not all that America is. This is a time when we’re called on to do things we may not have done before. To face down bigotry and hate, and to reach beyond our Facebook feeds in trying to do so. To fight disinformation instead of meeting it with the same. To listen to the anxieties of Trump supporters and the critiques of allies and to learn.

As for those of us at Mother Jones, we will continue to do what we always strive to do: shine light into dark corners, expose abuses of power, call out cronyism and corruption, and, in the words of our namesake, fight like hell for the living.

We’ve got our work cut out for us. All of us.

This essay expands and updates an original version that was written on election night and can be found here.

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Time to Fight Like Hell

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"False Flag" Is About to Become the New Benghazi

by Emely18Ajlw Posted on December 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here’s the latest from the New York Times correspondent in Moscow:

Carter Page, you may recall, was the guy who was a Trump advisor, and then he wasn’t, and then maybe he was. Or maybe not. It all seemed to depend on whether he was in Trump’s good graces at the time. In any case, he’s now the second Trump supporter to suggest that the hacks of Democratic Party emails were actually part of a false flag operation. And he goes even further than John Bolton, suggesting that the CIA orchestrated the whole thing.

So…is this about to become a standard talking point on the right? Is “false flag operation” going to be the new Benghazi? Stay tuned.

Link to article: 

"False Flag" Is About to Become the New Benghazi

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