Tag Archives: intelligence

The Dead Pool – 10 February 2017

by MargaretaDycus7 Posted on February 11, 2017

Mother Jones

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As if National Security Advisor Michael Flynn doesn’t already have enough bad news on his plate, today he got some more:

On Friday, one of Flynn’s closest deputies on the National Security Council, senior director for Africa Robin Townley, was informed that the Central Intelligence Agency had rejected his request for an elite security clearance required for service on the NSC, according to two people with direct knowledge of the situation.

That forced Townley, a former Marine intelligence officer who had long maintained a top secret-level security clearance, out of his NSC post, explained the sources, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters. One of the sources said that the rejection was approved by Trump’s CIA director Mike Pompeo and that it infuriated Flynn and his allies.

Flynn has been sharply critical of the CIA, and apparently he’s regarded by some in the White House as waging “a jihad against the intelligence community.” So was this a little chin music by the CIA to warn Flynn to back off? Or was there really some kind of problem with Townley? Maybe someday we’ll find out.

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The Dead Pool – 10 February 2017

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A New Report Finds America Is No Longer a "Full Democracy"

by LillianaConey5 Posted on January 26, 2017

Mother Jones

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For the first time, the United States has been downgraded from a “full democracy” to a “flawed democracy” by the Economic Intelligence Unit, a group that annually measures the strength of democracies across the world. According to the EIU, the country’s decline as a liberal democracy can be attributed to the “further erosion of trust in government and elected officials”—the same factors that led to the election of President Donald Trump.

The report found similar score declines and patterns of lower “popular confidence in political elites and institution” throughout Europe, especially in eastern Europe. Shortly after the US presidential election, one Harvard lecturer warned that the United States and European liberal democracies were under such a serious threat of a democratic decline that current trends resembled Venezuela’s political climate before its own crisis.

The findings, which were released on Wednesday, come amid increased alarm over Trump’s continued demonstration of authoritarian tendencies, as he issues gag orders across federal agencies and signs an expanding list of executive orders during his first few days in office.

The new commander-in-chief added fuel to such concerns this week when he repeated the debunked claim that voter fraud led him to lose the 2016 popular vote. Government officials and voting experts slammed the president for the assertion, saying any investigation into the falsehood will only further undermine voter confidence in future elections and will likely lead the new administration to make policy changes that make it even more difficult for many people to vote.

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A New Report Finds America Is No Longer a "Full Democracy"

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Trump Is Reportedly Considering Reopening CIA "Black Site" Prisons

by CarsonBrownell Posted on January 25, 2017

Mother Jones

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President Donald Trump is considering reopening the notorious CIA “black site” prisons, undoing the ban imposed by President Barack Obama, after his new CIA director suggested he’d be open to using torture methods on detainees.

The administration’s plans were reported by the New York Times on Wednesday after the paper obtained a draft executive order titled “Detention and Interrogation of Enemy Combatants.” The order would roll back many of the restrictions on detainee interrogations and detention that Obama put in place, including one that gave the International Committee of the Red Cross access to all detainees in US custody. But in his daily press briefing on Wednesday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said the draft was “not a White House document.”

The CIA’s black sites were a series of facilities located in various countries around the world where the CIA detained, questioned, and often tortured detainees with practices including waterboarding, confinement in small boxes, beatings, and extreme sleep deprivation. They were exposed in 2005 by the Washington Post’s Dana Priest.

The draft doesn’t direct the CIA to reopen the sites immediately, but it requests policy reviews to make recommendations to Trump. As the Times‘ Charlie Savage notes, Trump pledged during the presidential campaign to reinstate waterboarding and a “hell of a lot worse” and said that even if torture tactics didn’t work, the detainees “deserve it anyway.”

Throughout the draft, phrases such as “jihadist” and “global war on terrorism” are crossed out and replaced with “Islamist,” “radical Islamist terrorism,” and similar phrases.

Shortly after news of the order broke, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) released a statement condemning the use of torture. “The President can sign whatever executive orders he likes,” McCain said. “But the law is the law. We are not bringing back torture in the United States of America.”

The draft order comes five days after Mike Pompeo, since confirmed as CIA director, suggested he was open to torture techniques. In written answers to the Senate Intelligence Committee after his January 12 confirmation hearing, Pompeo seemed to leave the door open for a review of the ban on torture methods such as waterboarding. During his hearing, Pompeo had given a seemingly contradictory answer, saying he would “absolutely not” restart the CIA’s use of such techniques and adding that he couldn’t “imagine he would be asked by the president-elect or then-president” to have the CIA torture someone.

The full three-page draft, posted in full by the Washington Post later Wednesday morning (and later by the Times), lays out the rationale for the review:

Our Nation remains engaged in a global armed conflict with ISIS, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other associated international jihadistIslamist terrorist groups. This conflict is not of our choosing, but was declared against us by the jihadistterrorist organizations groups that have plotted and carried out mass attacks against the United States, its citizens, and its allies beginning well before the atrocities of September 11, 2001, and continuing to this day…Experience has also shown that obtaining critical intelligence information is vital to taking determined offensive action, including military action, against those groups that make war on us and that are actively plotting further attacks.

While there have been continuity in many of the military and intelligence policies of the United States in the global war on terrorism,fight against radical Islam, the United States has refrained from exercising certain authorities critical to its defense.

The draft, which contains extensive editing notes, would rescind two of Obama’s executive orders: one to close the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and the other to give the Red Cross access to all detainees. It also orders the director of national intelligence, the attorney general, and the director of the CIA to “recommend to the President whether to reinitiate a program of interrogation of high-value alien terrorists to be operated outside the United States and whether such program should include the use of detention facilities operated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).”

This story has been updated to include the statement from McCain and the comment from Spicer.

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Trump Is Reportedly Considering Reopening CIA "Black Site" Prisons

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Donald Trump Demands an Apology From You

by ElvinEwers9297 Posted on January 16, 2017

Mother Jones

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Just out of curiosity, I did a quick check to see how many people/organizations Donald Trump has demanded an apology from since he began his presidential campaign. The answer is 21:

Intelligence chiefs
Cast and producers of Hamilton
Mika Brzezinski
The media
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
CNN
Wall Street Journal
Vicente Fox
Mark Halperin
Hillary Clinton
Rachel Maddow
Chuck Todd
Chris Christie
The liberal media
The Washington Post
Carly Fiorina
Fox News
Tom Llamas
Charles Krauthammer
John McCain
Univision

For a guy who never apologizes himself, he sure does demand a lot of apologies from others, doesn’t he?

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Donald Trump Demands an Apology From You

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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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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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Spy Agencies Say: Yeah, Russia Did It

by RandallBabbidge Posted on January 7, 2017

Mother Jones

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The intelligence community released its unclassified assessment of Russian hacking activity today. However, anyone who was hoping to learn more about how they collected their information will be sorely disappointed. There’s none of that at all. It’s just a series of assessments, and you either believe them or you don’t.

If you want to read the whole report, we have it here. Oddly, it includes a lengthy annex about the actions of the RT television network, which is a public organ of Russian influence. But RT probably played virtually no role in the 2016 election. The real damage was done via email hacking, and helped along by anonymous twitter trolls who spread ugly anti-Hillary memes. Placing that much weight on RT really makes no sense, and I don’t know why they did it.

In any case, if you don’t want to read the whole thing, the executive summary is below. The intelligence community seems pretty sure that (a) Putin directed the influence campaign, (b) he did it to discredit Hillary Clinton, (c) Russian military intelligence carried out the hacking and relayed information to WikiLeaks, (d) they also hacked Republican sites but didn’t make any of it public, and (e) this all worked really well, so Russia will probably do it again.

Donald Trump, of course, brushed it all off. Minutes after meeting with the intelligence chiefs and hearing the classified version of all this, he released an obviously prewritten statement saying that lots of countries try to hack us; it had absolutely no effect on the election—zilch, Zero, NADA, NOTHING!; and from now on we shouldn’t talk about any of this publicly because we don’t want to give anything away to our enemies.

Seriously. That’s what he said.

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Spy Agencies Say: Yeah, Russia Did It

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It Turns Out That Trump Knows Nothing New About Russia’s Hacking

by JanisWhatley Posted on January 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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Just to keep everyone up to date, here’s the latest on Donald Trump’s claim that he knows “things that other people don’t know” regarding Russia’s hacking during the election. As you recall, he promised to fill us in on Tuesday (or Wednesday), but you will be unsurprised to learn that this didn’t happen. Why? Trump claims it’s because the CIA failed to come through with the goods:

Very strange indeed! Needless to say, Trump is lying. The CIA briefing was scheduled for Friday all along. The New York Times reports that Trump’s tweet was posted “as senior national security officials — including the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, and the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr. — were completing plans to travel to New York on Friday to brief him about their findings.”

Of course, if this briefing is what Trump was waiting for, then he doesn’t know anything more than the rest of us about the Russian hacking. He’s just waiting until he gets briefed, at which point he will presumably announce that the last-minute dossier the CIA cobbled together is crap and he doesn’t believe it.

In related news, Trump is apparently planning to reorganize and cut back the CIA. This would be very convenient, since Trump could then say anything he wants. If the CIA leaks conflicting information, Trump can just say it’s coming from bitter executives who are angry about his budget cutbacks.

Only 16 days until this guy is president. Tick tick tick.

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It Turns Out That Trump Knows Nothing New About Russia’s Hacking

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Trump Promises New Episode of The Donald Show on Tuesday (or Maybe Wednesday)

by FrederickWilloug Posted on January 1, 2017

Mother Jones

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Happy New Year!

Here is the president-elect of the United States on the last day of the old year, offering his skepticism that Russia was behind the hacks of the DNC and other political organizations during the election:

“I just want them to be sure because it’s a pretty serious charge,” Mr. Trump said of the intelligence agencies….He added: “And I know a lot about hacking. And hacking is a very hard thing to prove. So it could be somebody else. And I also know things that other people don’t know, and so they cannot be sure of the situation.”

When asked what he knew that others did not, Mr. Trump demurred, saying only, “You’ll find out on Tuesday or Wednesday.”

Here’s what I think Donald Trump knows about hacking: nothing. In movies, the stereotypical hacking nerd can blow through any cyber defense in about 30 seconds of whirlwind typing. So this is what Trump believes: There are lots of 19-year-old kids who can type furiously for about 30 seconds and break into any computer in the world.

I don’t imagine anyone is going to argue with me about that, so let’s move on to Trump’s statement that he knows things “that other people don’t know.” Intriguing! What could that be?

Well, America’s intelligence agencies think Russia is behind the hacking, so Trump doesn’t have any secret knowledge from them. Where else could he have gotten it? There are two obvious possibilities. The first is that Trump’s team did it, and he’s going to confess on Tuesday (or Wednesday). Wouldn’t that be great? The second possibility is that Putin has provided Trump with some kind of plausible misdirection, which he’s going to parrot on Tuesday (or Wednesday).

Actually, of course, there’s a third possibility, and it’s the most likely of all: Trump is just blathering as usual, and he will provide no new information on either Tuesday or Wednesday. He’s just playing the press the way he always does, and we’ll all turn out for the show, just like we did for the birther show in September.

We’ve got at least four years and 20 days of this stuff still ahead of us, folks. Take a deep breath.

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Trump Promises New Episode of The Donald Show on Tuesday (or Maybe Wednesday)

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Donald Trump Really, Really Doesn’t Want to Hear About How Russia Got Him Elected

by TrudyBunton Posted on December 10, 2016

Mother Jones

Guess what? It turns out that Vladimir Putin really did think that the best way to cripple America was to get an incompetent buffoon like Donald Trump elected president. Smart man. Here’s the Washington Post: “The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.”

The New York Times adds this: “They based that conclusion, in part, on another finding — which they say was also reached with high confidence — that the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.“

Donald Trump’s transition team thinks the intelligence community is full of crap, and we should ignore them and move on. “The election ended a long time ago,” they said in a statement, “in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history.”

Oh really? Let’s interrupt our story about the greatest act of ratfucking in history for an aside about how Trump really did:

The good news, I guess, is that Trump has given up on claiming that he won a great victory in the popular vote. The bad news is that he’s simply switched to lying about his Electoral College victory.

Now back to Putin. I’d say that given Trump’s apparent inability to ever utter the truth—along with the odd coincidence that Trump just happens to be pro-Russia on nearly every issue Russia cares about—it might be smart to at least take a peek at what the intelligence folks have to say. Especially since the Post story also says this:

In September, during a secret briefing for congressional leaders, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) voiced doubts about the veracity of the intelligence…and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics.

So McConnell really did Trump a solid, didn’t he? And guess what? It turns out that Trump thinks McConnell’s wife is the best qualified person in the whole country to be his Secretary of Transportation! Just another coincidence, I’m sure.

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Donald Trump Really, Really Doesn’t Want to Hear About How Russia Got Him Elected

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