Tag Archives: clinton

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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Spicer Is Spinning Flynngate As a "Matter of Trust, Pure and Simple"

by MaiDuggan290 Posted on February 14, 2017

Mother Jones

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From the White House briefing room:

The answer turns out to be January 26. That’s three weeks ago.

Spicer is insisting that Trump fired Flynn due to an “erosion” of trust. “It was a matter of trust, pure and simple,” he’s said over and over. And yet, oddly enough, Trump’s trust in Flynn didn’t crater when he was told about Flynn’s lies. It apparently cratered only after the Washington Post made Flynn’s lies public. Funny that.

Now Spicer is trying to blame the Obama Justice Department for withholding its information about Flynn for 13 days. Nice try, Sean.

Oh, and Spicer says the real story here is all the leaks. Sure, Flynn is a story, but the press should consider the source. They should investigate that. Oddly, back when all those hacked Russian emails were gnawing away at Hillary Clinton’s campaign, nobody on the right thought that was an issue. All that mattered was that this information was becoming public. I guess that’s no longer operative.

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Spicer Is Spinning Flynngate As a "Matter of Trust, Pure and Simple"

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Obama administration just gave a little breathing room to organic livestock.

by JosefF098836806 Posted on January 19, 2017

At his final press conference on Wednesday, the president said that some issues — for example, “how concerned are we about air pollution or climate change” — are just part of the “normal back-and-forth, ebb-and-flow of policy.”

Other issues, though, might get him riled up enough to speak out after he leaves office. “[T]here’s a difference between that normal functioning of politics and certain issues or certain moments where I think our core values may be at stake,” he said. He listed a few things that he would see as threats to those core values: “systematic discrimination,” “obstacles to people being able to vote,” “institutional efforts to silence dissent or the press,” and deportation of so-called Dreamers.

It sounded like an articulation of his priorities in the Trump era, and global warming didn’t make the cut. Likewise, in Obama’s farewell address last week, he mentioned climate change and clean energy, but his more passionate points were dedicated to sustaining a healthy democracy.

In September, Obama talked about focusing on climate change after he leaves office, but at that point, he thought Hillary Clinton would be succeeding him. Now that Donald Trump is moving into the Oval Office, Obama seems to be indicating that he’ll focus on other problems instead.

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Obama administration just gave a little breathing room to organic livestock.

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Heading to D.C. this week? There’s a climate-themed protest for you.

by DanielaGalvan Posted on January 18, 2017

At his final press conference on Wednesday, the president said that some issues — for example, “how concerned are we about air pollution or climate change” — are just part of the “normal back-and-forth, ebb-and-flow of policy.”

Other issues, though, might get him riled up enough to speak out after he leaves office. “[T]here’s a difference between that normal functioning of politics and certain issues or certain moments where I think our core values may be at stake,” he said. He listed a few things that he would see as threats to those core values: “systematic discrimination,” “obstacles to people being able to vote,” “institutional efforts to silence dissent or the press,” and deportation of so-called Dreamers.

It sounded like an articulation of his priorities in the Trump era, and global warming didn’t make the cut. Likewise, in Obama’s farewell address last week, he mentioned climate change and clean energy, but his more passionate points were dedicated to sustaining a healthy democracy.

In September, Obama talked about focusing on climate change after he leaves office, but at that point, he thought Hillary Clinton would be succeeding him. Now that Donald Trump is moving into the Oval Office, Obama seems to be indicating that he’ll focus on other problems instead.

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Heading to D.C. this week? There’s a climate-themed protest for you.

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Six Agencies Are Investigating Trump-Russia Ties

by Leesa78508779713 Posted on January 18, 2017

Mother Jones

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McClatchy has the latest on the investigation into ties between Russia and the Trump team:

The FBI and five other law enforcement and intelligence agencies have collaborated for months in an investigation into Russian attempts to influence the November election….The agencies involved in the inquiry are the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Justice Department, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and representatives of the director of national intelligence, the sources said.

….One of the allegations involves whether a system for routinely paying thousands of Russian-American pensioners may have been used to pay some email hackers in the United States or to supply money to intermediaries who would then pay the hackers, the two sources said….A key mission of the six-agency group has been to examine who financed the email hacks of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

….The working group is scrutinizing the activities of a few Americans who were affiliated with Trump’s campaign or his business empire and of multiple individuals from Russia and other former Soviet nations who had similar connections, the sources said.

….The BBC reported that the FBI had obtained a warrant on Oct. 15 from the highly secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court allowing investigators access to bank records and other documents about potential payments and money transfers related to Russia. One of McClatchy’s sources confirmed the report.

That’s an awful lot of agencies investigating an awful lot of allegations against an awful lot of people. And as the article says, you can’t get a warrant unless you can demonstrate at least some kind of plausible probable cause. That means these folks are working off a lot more than just the famous dossier produced by the ex-MI6 spy.

At this point, I flatly don’t know what I believe anymore. This is all crazy stuff, but a whole bunch of investigators don’t seem to be treating it as crazy. Either way, though, the guy at the center of all this is going to become president of the United States in two days.

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Six Agencies Are Investigating Trump-Russia Ties

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Get those Instagrams in now: Climate change is going to mess up good weather days.

by damioncio68 Posted on January 18, 2017

At his final press conference on Wednesday, the president said that some issues — for example, “how concerned are we about air pollution or climate change” — are just part of the “normal back-and-forth, ebb-and-flow of policy.”

Other issues, though, might get him riled up enough to speak out after he leaves office. “[T]here’s a difference between that normal functioning of politics and certain issues or certain moments where I think our core values may be at stake,” he said. He listed a few things that he would see as threats to those core values: “systematic discrimination,” “obstacles to people being able to vote,” “institutional efforts to silence dissent or the press,” and deportation of so-called Dreamers.

It sounded like an articulation of his priorities in the Trump era, and global warming didn’t make the cut. Likewise, in Obama’s farewell address last week, he mentioned climate change and clean energy, but his more passionate points were dedicated to sustaining a healthy democracy.

In September, Obama talked about focusing on climate change after he leaves office, but at that point, he thought Hillary Clinton would be succeeding him. Now that Donald Trump is moving into the Oval Office, Obama seems to be indicating that he’ll focus on other problems instead.

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Get those Instagrams in now: Climate change is going to mess up good weather days.

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Evidence of Bizarre Trump-Russia Ties Continues to Ooze Out

by KarriETKHijgayn Posted on January 15, 2017

Mother Jones

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So what’s new on the Trump-Russia front? First up, the Independent tells us that the former MI6 agent behind the now-famous dossier alleging close ties between Russia and the Trump team was dismayed that his findings didn’t generate more action during the presidential campaign:

Mr Steele became increasingly frustrated that the FBI was failing to take action on the intelligence from others as well as him. He came to believe there was a cover-up, that a cabal within the Bureau blocked a thorough inquiry into Mr Trump, focusing instead on the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.

….By late July and early August MI6 was also receiving information about Mr Trump. By September, information to the FBI began to grow in volume: Mr Steele compiled a set of his memos into one document and passed it to his contacts at the FBI. But there seemed to be little progress in a proper inquiry into Mr Trump. The Bureau, instead, seemed to be devoting their resources in the pursuit of Hillary Clinton’s email transgressions.

The New York office, in particular, appeared to be on a crusade against Ms Clinton. Some of its agents had a long working relationship with Rudy Giuliani, by then a member of the Trump campaign, since his days as public prosecutor and then Mayor of the city.

In related news, BuzzFeed says Israel is extremely interested in the possibility of Trump-Russia ties:

“You can trust me that many intelligence agencies are trying to evaluate the extent to which Trump might have ties, or a weakness of some type, to Russia,” one of the intelligence officers said….The officer said part of Israel’s interest in the dossier — and in other intelligence on Trump’s ties to Russia — stems from concern that secrets Israel shares with the Unites States might be fed to Russia.

Earlier this week, Israel’s Yediot Ahronot newspaper reported that Israeli intelligence officials were questioning whether to continue sharing intelligence with the incoming Trump administration. The report said that during a recent meeting with US intelligence officials, Israel was told that the Russians had “leverages of pressure” to use against Trump. BuzzFeed News could not independently confirm that a meeting had taken place.

Other reports suggest that British intelligence is thinking along the same lines as Israel. And the Daily Beast reports that a group dedicated to hacking the NSA and releasing its prize malware has suddenly gone out of business a few days before Trump’s inauguration:

The Shadow Brokers emerged in August with the announcement that they’d stolen the hacking tools used by a sophisticated computer-intrusion operation known as the Equation Group, and were putting them up for sale to the highest bidder. It was a remarkable claim, because the Equation Group is generally understood to be part of the NSA’s elite Tailored Access Operations program.

….It soon emerged that the Shadow Brokers really had the goods….Virtually nobody, though, believed the Shadow Brokers’ claim that they were mere hackers trying to sell the exploits for a quick fortune.

The more persuasive theory, supported by no less than Edward Snowden, is that the Shadow Brokers are one of the same Russian government hacking groups now accused of targeting the U.S. election….Under this theory, the Shadow Brokers were part of a tit-for-tat in the intelligence world. The group emerged just as the U.S. began confronting Russia over its election hacking, and then seemed to release its secrets in time with the public thrusts and parries between the two countries….Now, with a new, friendlier administration coming in, Vladimir Putin may be pressing the reset button.

The more I read about this stuff, the harder I find it to believe. It just seems wildly ridiculous, the kind of thing that would barely pass muster on a TV potboiler, let alone in real life. The truth is that I’d probably dismiss it entirely if it weren’t for the vast amount of very public and very strange evidence that Team Trump and Team Putin are very close.

I don’t know. This is all completely outlandish, and I can hardly bring myself to credit it. And yet, there’s an awful lot of evidence that points in the direction of it being true—or at least partly true, anyway. Strange days.

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Evidence of Bizarre Trump-Russia Ties Continues to Ooze Out

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Trump Says Climate Change Is a Hoax. Rex Tillerson Just Disagreed.

by NamMcPheegzzqy Posted on January 11, 2017

Mother Jones

At his confirmation hearing Wednesday to become secretary of state, Rex Tillerson contradicted President-elect Donald Trump’s positions on climate change and his promise to withdraw the United States from global climate action.

Although Exxon Mobil, where Tillerson served as CEO, has been accused of impeding efforts to address global warming, Tillerson has acknowledged the threat posed by climate change. When Ben Cardin (D-Md.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, asked Tillerson whether the United States should lead international efforts to address climate change, Tillerson responded, “I think it’s important that the United States maintain its seat at the table on the conversations around how to address the threats of climate change, which do require a global response. No one country is going to solve this alone.”

One of the most important places where this conversation took place was during negotiations for the United Nations’ 2015 Paris climate agreement, which Trump disparaged on the campaign trail. Trump promised in a May campaign energy speech to “cancel the Paris Climate Agreement.” After winning the election, he told the New York Times that he’s “looking at it very closely” and said, “I have an open mind to it.” But his appointment of climate change deniers to lead the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy indicates that Trump is unlikely to reconsider his views.

“The president-elect has invited my views on climate change,” Tillerson said. “He knows I am on the public record with my views. I look forward to providing those, if confirmed, to him and policies around how the United States should carry it out in these areas.”

Trump has also pledged to “stop all payments of US tax dollars to UN global warming programs.” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) asked Tillerson if he would suspend State Department funding to the Green Climate Fund, a major feature of the Paris agreement. Tillerson replied only that he would conduct a thorough review from the “bottom up.”

Tillerson hedged in his assessment of the threat of climate change, but his stance clearly differed from Trump’s claims that climate change is a “hoax.”

“I came to the decision a few years ago that the risk of climate change does exist and the consequences could be serious enough that it warrants action,” Tillerson said. “The increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are having an effect. Our ability to predict that effect are very limited.”

Pressed on his past statements in favor of a carbon tax, Tillerson, who at first suggested that the issue would be outside his purview at the State Department, said it would be better to replace “the hodgepodge of approaches we have today” on climate policy.

Compare Tillerson’s stance with the one taken by Trump three years ago:

In a debate with Hillary Clinton last year, Trump denied ever calling climate change a hoax.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) asked Tillerson about reporting from the Los Angeles Times and Inside Climate News that Exxon Mobil had internally acknowledged climate science while publicly waging a campaign to undermine it. Tillerson demurred. “Since I’m no longer CEO of Exxon Mobil, I can’t speak on their behalf,” he said. “You’ll have to ask them.” Asked if he was refusing to answer or simply lacked the knowledge to do so, Tillerson quipped, “A little of both.”

In his opening statement, Tillerson made no mention of the climate change, despite military experts’ view that climate change is a threat to national security. Russia was the main focus at the hearing’s morning session, but protesters occasionally interrupted the questioning to bring up climate change. “My home was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy,” one said as she was escorted out of the room. “Rex Tillerson, I reject you.”

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Trump Says Climate Change Is a Hoax. Rex Tillerson Just Disagreed.

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Did Putin Swing the Election to Trump? Of Course He Did.

by FannieCrabtree Posted on January 8, 2017

Mother Jones

Did Russian hacking during the 2016 campaign tip the election to Donald Trump? In the LA Times today, Noah Bierman and Brian Bennett have this to say:

The truth is no one knows for sure because the election was so close in so many states that no one factor can be credited or blamed, especially in last year’s highly combustible campaign.

This is exactly backward. The fact that the election was so close means that lots of things might have tipped the election all by themselves. The Russian hacking is one of them. Consider Bierman and Bennett’s own case:

Extensive news coverage of the how the leaked emails showed political machinations by Democratic Party operatives often drowned out Clinton’s agenda….English-language news channel Russia Today…posted a video on YouTube in early November, for example. Called “Trump Will Not Be Permitted to Win,” it featured Julian Assange, the fugitive founder of WikiLeaks, and was watched 2.2 million times….U.S. intelligence officials say anti-Clinton stories and posts flooded social media from the Internet Research Agency near St. Petersburg, which the report described as a network of “professional trolls” led by a Putin ally.

Putin’s most tangible victory may have come last summer. On the eve of the Democratic National Convention in July, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) was forced to quit her post as Democratic National Committee chairwoman after emails posted on Wikileaks showed that supposedly neutral DNC officials had backed Clinton over her rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, in the primaries.

….In October, Trump similarly seized on leaked emails from Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. They showed that Donna Brazile, a former CNN commentator who replaced Wasserman Schultz at the DNC, had shared a pair of questions with Clinton’s team before a televised candidates’ forum and debate….The leak showed nothing illegal. But it bolstered the idea that Clinton was a Washington insider who benefited from fellow elites.

….The most damaging leaks for Clinton may have been transcripts of excerpts of her highly paid speeches to Wall Street bankers, released in October….There were no smoking guns in the leaks. But they included her admission that her growing wealth since she and Bill Clinton left the White House in 2001 had made her “kind of far removed” from the anger and frustration many Americans felt after the 2008 recession. She also called for “a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future, with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it.”

That’s a lot of stuff! Does it seem likely that all of this, plus the fact that it kept Clinton’s email woes front and center, made a difference of 1 percent in a few swing states? Sure, I’d say so. Did other things make a difference too? Yes indeed. But given how close the election was, there’s a pretty good chance that Putin’s campaign of cyber-chaos had enough oomph to swing things all by itself.

I’m a little surprised this hasn’t produced more panic. In the United States I understand why it hasn’t: Democrats don’t want to sound like sore losers and Republicans don’t care as long as their guy won. But what about the rest of the world? It’s been common knowledge for a while that Russia does this kind of stuff, but their actions in the US election represent a quantum leap in how far they’re willing to go. And there’s not much doubt that Putin will keep at it.

After all, it worked a treat. And thanks to a gullible press and normal partisan politics, it’ll keep working. The next leak will get as much attention as these did, and the one after that too. We have no societal defense against this stuff.

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Did Putin Swing the Election to Trump? Of Course He Did.

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Maybe RT Has a Bigger Influence on American Politics Than We Think

by TammaraVeilleux Posted on January 7, 2017

Mother Jones

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Yesterday I noted that the intelligence report on Russian hacking devoted an awful lot of space to RT America, the Kremlin-funded cable TV network. That struck me as odd since I don’t think RT had much influence on the election. Shortly after I wrote that, I got this tweet:

And this email:

I think you underestimate the influence of RT on the Jill Stein and “Never Hillary” crowd among Bernie supporters. This is only one aspect of delegitimizing the center. A leftist progressive friend who works on Syrian refugee issues was really disturbed by how many on that part of the spectrum think Putin is just dandy.

And this from Vox’s Zack Beauchamp:

The ODNI report focuses, to an almost surprising degree, on RT — the Kremlin’s international, English-language propaganda media outlet. The report contains several striking observations about RT’s reach, message, and proximity to the Russian government.

….According to the report, RT — as well as Sputnik, another Russian government–funded English-language propaganda outlet — began aggressively producing pro-Trump and anti-Clinton content starting in March 2016. That just so happens to be the exact same time the Russian hacking campaign targeting Democrats began.

….During the 2016 campaign, RT aired a number of weird, conspiratorial segments — some starring WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange — that cast Clinton as corrupt and funded by ISIS and portrayed the US electoral system as rigged.

Put this all together and you have a portrait of a sometimes Alex Jones-esque “alternative channel” that appeals to fringe elements on both the left and right and successfully hides its identity from them. As the charts from the ODNI report show, it’s also one with a growing social media presence, even if the precise numbers in the report aren’t wholly reliable. I still don’t know whether this translated into more than a negligible impact on the race, but I thought it was worth passing along. It may be that RT is more important than I give it credit for.

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Maybe RT Has a Bigger Influence on American Politics Than We Think

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