Saturday, December 17, 2016

How We Ended Up Here: A Brief History Of "Fake News", And The Role Of FaceBook

ORIGINAL LINK

With major media outlets having launched their campaign against fake news, which can be seen in in action in the screengrab below in which ABC News is disputing a news item...

You can see the Facebook "fake news" warning label in action here -- "disputed by ABC News" https://t.co/szQrgHj5yY pic.twitter.com/chGyZ1L8E2

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) December 17, 2016

... we wanted to share with our readers an insightful "tweetstorm" by Matt Stoller who goes through the history of not only the so-called "fake news" phenomenon, which is nothing new, but the recent evolution of the "news" business model, to observe how we ended up with Facebook effectively dictating what is and isn't news.

By Matt Stoller:

Fake news was a core concern of New Dealer media reformers. This is part of a statement I found in the Patman archives.

stoller%201_0.jpg

Newspapers owned by reactionary publishers constantly made things up about New Dealers. Like that Congressman didn't pay taxes.

stoller%202_0.jpg

Patman's particular newspaper was called the Paris News. It was, as he put it, 'absentee owned'. This is a core concept.

stoller%203_0.jpg

Absentee ownership meant that the owners didn't pay attention to how their institutions affected people where those owners didn't live.

It didn't matter to a New York news magnate whether info put out by his chain about Paris, TX was true. He didn't live there.

The basic idea behind media and telecom reforms was to keep institutions local, and keep them decentralized.

Multiple structural barriers were organized to preserve truth. Newspaper unions, for one, fought publishers over editorial independence

A diversity of news sources, like union newspapers and newspapers in lots of languages, was another.

The Communications Act of 1934 was a key law to block control of our telephone system by AT&T.

Victor Pickard's ( @VWPickard) book goes into fights at the FCC in the 1940s over the structure of radio and TV (link)

All of these fights created a structure of New Deal news that people think of as objective.

Nostalgia, like 'remember when Walter Cronkite told the truth?' When America was unified. But this was b/c of earlier political fights.

The 1930s to 1970s news industry was structured to avoid fake news. It wasn't totally successful. But some of the protections held.

There were other protections for media more broadly, like fin-syn rules for TV and the antitrust suit against the studios.

There were lots of newspapers for different communities, including ones that were key to the Civil Rights movement.

Fast forward to the 1980s and 1990s. Media consolidation, deregulation, attacks on newspaper unions.

Fox News and Rush Limbaugh emerge out of changes in regulatory policy by Reagan and Clinton. Financiers begin newspaper roll-ups.

Newspapers begin falling apart, though the financials don't reflect it yet. 1990s media landscape is insane with conspiracy theories.

In the mid-2000s, Google and Facebook begin their march to monopolizing the ad networks. Google buys Doubleclick.

As corrupted as news has become, it still exists, somewhat. But the platform monopolists begin chewing up all their revenue.

And the greatest absentee owned editor imaginable appears: The Algorithm

The Algorithm is scalable, automated, and seems totally value-neutral. Right? It delivers everything everyone wants.

Facebook and Google slowly become the editor for the planet through The Algorithm. New media outlets live and die by The Algorithm.

But odd problems start cropping up. Facebook's The Algorithm censors Pulitzer Prize winning Vietnam era photo from Norwegian news.

Turns out Facebook is misleading on traffic numbers for major news sites.

stoller%204_0.jpg

Optimization, aka gaming The Algorithm, becomes an industry. This opens the way for modern fake news.

Completely made up, riding on The Algorithm, perhaps foreign propaganda, crops up like barnacles on the bottom of a boat.

This is a function of the centralization of power in the hands of The Algorithm, aka Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page.

No matter how competent, no one person can be the editor for all of humanity. The Algorithm is the mother of all absentee ownership.

The response to the 'fake news' panic has been authoritarian. It has been 'why won't Facebook censor things I don't like!?!'

So Facebook announces it will censor. And it may engage in "policy enforcement actions" to cut off $$$ to media (link)

FB acts as a sovereign power unto itself. It outsources censorship to sites like Politifact, a site with clear policy biases.

Hoping that if it does this outsourcing, people won't notice FB's total control over our free speech commons via The Algorithm.

But fundamentally, such control is not consistent with a democracy, with a free press, or with freedom of association.

There are many policy approaches to this problem. But it is not a problem of 'fake news', it is a problem of concentrated monopoly power

Fake news is simply the barnacles that aren't being cleaned out of the system b/c Mark Zuckerberg can't get to them all.

It's worse today, but this is a longstanding issue. Fourteen years ago, it was fake news around the war in Iraq.

What we need to restore democracy is a wholesale anti-monopoly approach to our media ecosystem, starting but not ending w/ the platforms

Communities must have the ability to organize their own public commons for debate and speech, unmediated by private monopolies.

Otherwise, we will not be dealing just with Fake News, but with a Fake Democracy as well. There, that's my tweet storm.



via IFTTT

The Albuquerque Journal asks the relevant question: Just who is undermining election? Russians or CIA?

ORIGINAL LINK

Editorial: Just who is undermining election? Russians or CIA?
By Albuquerque Journal Editorial Board
Friday, December 16th, 2016 at 12:02am

Congress needs to dust off its Magic 8 Ball. At this point, how else are our elected representatives going to get to the bottom of allegations that Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, tried to influence the U.S. general election?

After all, the Central Intelligence Agency isn’t being very open – at least not with our elected representatives. Instead of briefing the House Intelligence Committee about the alleged Russian role in hacked emails made public during the campaign – which Democrats desperately seek to blame for Hillary Clinton’s loss – the agency is leaking conclusions without facts to the Washington Post, New York Times and television networks. The media, naturally, are quick to report the anonymous bits of “blame Putin” information to the public.

So to the extent Putin meddled, our own spies have at least matched his efforts to discredit our electoral system.

To recap: Private emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign were made public via WikiLeaks, allegedly through hacking, even though the FBI had tried to warn the DNC back in September 2015 of problems with its security system. The agency couldn’t get past the party’s technical help desk – harking back to Hillary’s email security problems on her own private server.

The media reported on the leaks daily – and if a reporter had obtained the same information from inside sources, there would be no controversy at all. Today’s uproar is over the source – not the substance.

But the CIA’s alleged conclusion – that Russia intervened to help Trump win – does not square with comments made Nov. 17 by James Clapper, director of National Intelligence. He said he lacked “good insight” about whether there was a connection between the WikiLeaks releases and Russia.

Congressional Republican leaders are taking the allegations seriously. “The Russians are not our friends,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said. House Speaker Paul Ryan called any Russian intervention “especially problematic because, under President Putin, Russia has been an aggressor that consistently undermines American interests.”

But Intelligence Committee member Peter King of New York flatly accused the U.S. intelligence community of waging a disinformation campaign aimed at undermining Trump’s credibility – if not changing the course of the Electoral College.

Not surprisingly, President Obama is seizing a newfound political opportunity and is taking a new interest despite earlier claims of knowing all along of Russian shenanigans but choosing not to go public with whatever evidence he had – none of which he has produced.

He has ordered an investigation into whether Russia has attempted to influence U.S. elections going back to 2008. He said the reported CIA findings should come as no surprise to anyone, as suspicions that Russia was trying to influence the election were widely reported before the general election. Clinton herself spoke frequently about the possibility.

President-elect Donald Trump rejected the idea that Russia helped him win as “ridiculous.” Concerning the source of the leaked emails, on Sunday he told Chris Wallace of Fox News, “Personally, it could be Russia. I don’t really think it is. But who knows? … They don’t know and I don’t know.”

The source of the campaign leaks remains an interesting question, but one unlikely to be answered credibly unless the CIA coughs up its findings to Congress. Cooperation also might help answer the question of possible Russian motives if it was involved: Was it to cast doubt on the U.S. election system? If so, it was highly successful with the help of our own intelligence community and desperate Democrats who simply can’t accept that Trump won 306 Electoral College votes.

Though the CIA based its supposed findings of pro-Trump intervention on the fact that no Republican emails were leaked before the election, the Republican National Committee says it wasn’t hacked.

And Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange stands firm in his claim the Russians were not the source of the leaks. Cyber hacking has become one of the mainstays of life – Yahoo most recently was hacked of more than one billion user accounts. And intervention into foreign elections is something many nations, including the United States, do regularly. Obama recently tried to influence the Brexit vote.

And while nobody should feel good about foreign interests intervening in U.S. elections, the reluctance of the U.S. intelligence community to share its information with official sources charged with making decisions about national security, while leaking information via media outlets, is very disturbing, raising the spectre of a political coup by our nation’s intelligence forces.

This editorial first appeared in the Albuquerque Journal. It was written by members of the editorial board and is unsigned as it represents the opinion of the newspaper rather than the writers.

https://www.abqjournal.com/910202/just-who-is-undermining-election-russians-or-cia.html

The post The Albuquerque Journal asks the relevant question: Just who is undermining election? Russians or CIA? appeared first on PaulCraigRoberts.org.



via IFTTT

Precedent Set — Germany to Fine Facebook $500K for Every ‘Fake News’ Post they Don’t Delete

ORIGINAL LINK
GermanyGermany just announced it will fine Facebook half a million dollars for every fake news and hate speech item that isn't removed within 24 hours.

via IFTTT

Here’s the Public Evidence Russia Hacked the DNC — It’s Not Enough

ORIGINAL LINK

There are some good reasons to believe Russians had something to do with the breaches into email accounts belonging to members of the Democratic party, which proved varyingly embarrassing or disruptive for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. But “good” doesn’t necessarily mean good enough to indict Russia’s head of state for sabotaging our democracy.

There’s a lot of evidence from the attack on the table, mostly detailing how the hack was perpetrated, and possibly the language of the perpetrators. It certainly remains plausible that Russians hacked the DNC, and remains possible that Russia itself ordered it. But the refrain of Russian attribution has been repeated so regularly and so emphatically that it’s become easy to forget that no one has ever truly proven the claim. There is strong evidence indicating that Democratic email accounts were breached via phishing messages, and that specific malware was spread across DNC computers. There’s even evidence that the attackers are the same group that’s been spotted attacking other targets in the past. But again: No one has actually proven that group is the Russian government (or works for it). This remains the enormous inductive leap that’s not been reckoned with, and Americans deserve better.

We should also bear in mind that private security firm CrowdStrike’s frequently cited findings of Russian responsibility were essentially paid for by the DNC, which contracted its services in June. It’s highly unusual for evidence of a crime to be assembled on the victim’s dime. If we’re going to blame the Russian government for disrupting our presidential election — easily construed as an act of war — we need to be damn sure of every single shred of evidence. Guesswork and assumption could be disastrous.

The gist of the Case Against Russia goes like this: The person or people who infiltrated the DNC’s email system and the account of John Podesta left behind clues of varying technical specificity indicating they have some connection to Russia, or at least speak Russian. Guccifer 2.0, the entity that originally distributed hacked materials from the Democratic party, is a deeply suspicious figure who has made statements and decisions that indicate some Russian connection. The website DCLeaks, which began publishing a great number of DNC emails, has some apparent ties to Guccifer and possibly Russia. And then there’s WikiLeaks, which after a long, sad slide into paranoia, conspiracy theorizing, and general internet toxicity has made no attempt to mask its affection for Vladimir Putin and its crazed contempt for Hillary Clinton. (Julian Assange has been stuck indoors for a very, very long time.) If you look at all of this and sort of squint, it looks quite strong indeed, an insurmountable heap of circumstantial evidence too great in volume to dismiss as just circumstantial or mere coincidence.

But look more closely at the above and you can’t help but notice all of the qualifying words: Possibly, appears, connects, indicates. It’s impossible (or at least dishonest) to present the evidence for Russian responsibility for hacking the Democrats without using language like this. The question, then, is this: Do we want to make major foreign policy decisions with a belligerent nuclear power based on suggestions alone, no matter how strong?

What We Know

So far, all of the evidence pointing to Russia’s involvement in the Democratic hacks (DNC, DCCC, Podesta, et al.) comes from either private security firms (like CrowdStrike or FireEye) who sell cyber-defense services to other companies, or independent researchers, some with university affiliations and serious credentials, and some who are basically just Guys on Twitter. Although some of these private firms groups had proprietary access to DNC computers or files from them, much of the evidence has been drawn from publicly available data like the hacked emails and documents.

Some of the malware found on DNC computers is believed to be the same as that used by two hacking groups believed to be Russian intelligence units, codenamed APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) 28/Fancy Bear and APT 29/Cozy Bear by industry researchers who track them.

  • The attacker or attackers registered a deliberately misspelled domain name used for email phishing attacks against DNC employees, connected to an IP address associated with APT 28/Fancy Bear.
  • Malware found on the DNC computers was programmed to communicate with an IP address associated with APT 28/Fancy Bear.
  • Metadata in a file leaked by “Guccifer 2.0″ shows it was modified by a user called, in cyrillic, “Felix Edmundovich,” a reference to the founder of a Soviet-era secret police force. Another document contained cyrillic metadata indicating it had been edited on a document with Russian language settings.
  • Peculiarities in a conversation with “Guccifer 2.0″ that Motherboard published in June suggests he is not Romanian, as he originally claimed.
  • The DCLeaks.com domain was registered by a person using the same email service as the person who registered a misspelled domain used to send phishing emails to DNC employees.
  • Some of the phishing emails were sent using Yandex, a Moscow-based webmail provider.
  • A bit.ly link believed to have been used by APT 28/Fancy Bear in the past was also used against Podesta.

Why That Isn’t Enough

Viewed as a whole, the above evidence looks strong, and maybe even damning. But view each piece on its own, and it’s hard to feel impressed.

For one, a lot of the so-called evidence above is no such thing. CrowdStrike, whose claims of Russian responsibility are perhaps most influential throughout the media, says APT 28/Fancy Bear “is known for its technique of registering domains that closely resemble domains of legitimate organizations they plan to target.” But this isn’t a Russian technique any more than using a computer is a Russian technique — misspelled domains are a cornerstone of phishing attacks all over the world. Is Yandex — the Russian equivalent of Google — some sort of giveaway? Anyone who claimed a hacker must be a CIA agent because they used a Gmail account would be laughed off the internet. We must also acknowledge that just because Guccifer 2.0 pretended to be Romanian, we can’t conclude he works for the Russian government — it just makes him a liar.

Next, consider the fact that CrowdStrike describes APT 28 and 29 like this:

Their tradecraft is superb, operational security second to none and the extensive usage of “living-off-the-land” techniques enables them to easily bypass many security solutions they encounter. In particular, we identified advanced methods consistent with nation-state level capabilities including deliberate targeting and “access management” tradecraft — both groups were constantly going back into the environment to change out their implants, modify persistent methods, move to new Command & Control channels and perform other tasks to try to stay ahead of being detected.

Compare that description to CrowdStrike’s claim it was able to finger APT 28 and 29, described above as digital spies par excellence, because they were so incredibly sloppy. Would a group whose “tradecraft is superb” with “operational security second to none” really leave behind the name of a Soviet spy chief imprinted on a document it sent to American journalists? Would these groups really be dumb enough to leave cyrillic comments on these documents? Would these groups that “constantly [go] back into the environment to change out their implants, modify persistent methods, move to new Command & Control channels” get caught because they precisely didn’t make sure not to use IP addresses they’d been associated before? It’s very hard to buy the argument that the Democrats were hacked by one of the most sophisticated, diabolical foreign intelligence services in history, and that we know this because they screwed up over and over again.

But how do we even know these oddly named groups are Russian? CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch himself describes APT 28 as a “Russian-based threat actor” whose modus operandi “closely mirrors the strategic interests of the Russian government” and “may indicate affiliation [Russia’s] Main Intelligence Department or GRU, Russia’s premier military intelligence service.” Security firm SecureWorks issued a report blaming Russia with “moderate confidence.” What constitutes moderate confidence? SecureWorks said it adopted the “grading system published by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence to indicate confidence in their assessments. … Moderate confidence generally means that the information is credibly sourced and plausible but not of sufficient quality or corroborated sufficiently to warrant a higher level of confidence.” All of this amounts to a very educated guess, at best.

Even the claim that APT 28/Fancy Bear itself is a group working for the Kremlin is speculative, a fact that’s been completely erased from this year’s discourse. In its 2014 reveal of the group, the high-profile security firm FireEye couldn’t even blame Russia without a question mark in the headline: “APT28: A Window into Russia’s Cyber Espionage Operations?” The blog post itself is remarkably similar to arguments about the DNC hack: technical but still largely speculative, presenting evidence the company “[believes] indicate a government sponsor based in Moscow.” Believe! Indicate! We should know already this is no smoking gun. FireEye’s argument that the malware used by APT 28 is connected to the Russian government is based on the belief that its “developers are Russian language speakers operating during business hours that are consistent with the time zone of Russia’s major cities.”

As security researcher Jeffrey Carr pointed out in June, FireEye’s 2014 report on APT 28 is questionable from the start:

To my surprise, the report’s authors declared that they deliberately excluded evidence that didn’t support their judgment that the Russian government was responsible for APT28’s activities:

“APT28 has targeted a variety of organizations that fall outside of the three themes we highlighted above. However, we are not profiling all of APT28’s targets with the same detail because they are not particularly indicative of a specific sponsor’s interests.” (emphasis added)

That is the very definition of confirmation bias. Had FireEye published a detailed picture of APT28’s activities including all of their known targets, other theories regarding this group could have emerged; for example, that the malware developers and the operators of that malware were not the same or even necessarily affiliated.

The notion that APT 28 has a narrow focus on American political targets is undermined in another SecureWorks paper, which shows that the hackers have a wide variety of interests: 10 percent of their targets are NGOs, 22 percent are journalists, 4 percent are aerospace researchers, and 8 percent are “government supply chain.” SecureWorks says that only 8 percent of APT 28/Fancy Bear’s targets are “government personnel” of any nationality — hardly the focused agenda described by CrowdStrike.

Truly, the argument that “Guccifer 2.0″ is a Kremlin agent or that GRU breached John Podesta’s email only works if you presume that APT 28/Fancy Bear is a unit of the Russian government, a fact that has never been proven beyond any reasonable doubt. According to Carr, “it’s an old assumption going back years to when any attack against a non-financial target was attributed to a state actor.” Without that premise, all we can truly conclude is that some email accounts at the DNC et al. appear to have been broken into by someone, and perhaps they speak Russian. Left ignored is the mammoth difference between Russians and Russia.

Security researcher Claudio Guarnieri put it this way:

[Private security firms] can’t produce anything conclusive. What they produce is speculative attribution that is pretty common to make in the threat research field. I do that same speculative attribution myself, but it is just circumstantial. At the very best it can only prove that the actor that perpetrated the attack is very likely located in Russia. As for government involvement, it can only speculate that it is plausible because of context and political motivations, as well as technical connections with previous (or following attacks) that appear to be perpetrated by the same group and that corroborate the analysis that it is a Russian state-sponsored actor (for example, hacking of institutions of other countries Russia has some geopolitical interests in).

Finally, one can’t be reminded enough that all of this evidence comes from private companies with a direct financial interest in making the internet seem as scary as possible, just as Lysol depends on making you believe your kitchen is crawling with E. Coli.

What Does the Government Know?

In October, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a joint statement blaming the Russian government for hacking the DNC. In it, they state their attribution plainly:

The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process.

What’s missing is any evidence at all. If this federal confidence is based on evidence that’s being withheld from the public for any reason, that’s one thing — secrecy is their game. But if the U.S. Intelligence Community is asking the American electorate to believe them, to accept as true their claim that our most important civic institution was compromised by a longtime geopolitical nemesis, we need them to show us why.

The same goes for the CIA, which is now squaring off directly against Trump, claiming (through leaks to the Washington Post and New York Times) that the Russian government conducted the hacks for the express purpose of helping defeat Clinton. Days later, Senator John McCain agreed with the assessment, deeming it “another form of warfare.” Again, it’s completely possible (and probable, really) that the CIA possesses hard evidence that could establish Russian attribution — it’s their job to have such evidence, and often to keep it secret.

But what we’re presented with isn’t just the idea that these hacks happened, and that someone is responsible, and, well, I guess it’s just a shame. Our lawmakers and intelligence agencies are asking us to react to an attack that is almost military in nature — this is, we’re being told, “warfare.” When a foreign government conducts (or supports) an act of warfare against another country, it’s entirely possible that there will be an equal response. What we’re looking at now is the distinct possibility that the United States will consider military retaliation (digital or otherwise) against Russia, based on nothing but private sector consultants and secret intelligence agency notes. If you care about the country enough to be angry at the prospect of election-meddling, you should be terrified of the prospect of military tensions with Russia based on hidden evidence. You need not look too far back in recent history to find an example of when wrongly blaming a foreign government for sponsoring an attack on the U.S. has tremendously backfired.

We Need the Real Evidence, Right Now

It must be stated plainly: The U.S. intelligence community must make its evidence against Russia public if they want us to believe their claims. The integrity of our presidential elections is vital to the country’s survival; blind trust in the CIA is not. A governmental disclosure like this is also not entirely without precedent: In 2014, the Department of Justice produced a 56-page indictment detailing their exact evidence against a team of Chinese hackers working for the People’s Liberation Army, accused of stealing American trade secrets; each member was accused by name. The 2014 trade secret theft was a crime of much lower magnitude than election meddling, but what the DOJ furnished is what we should demand today from our country’s spies.

If the CIA does show its hand, we should demand to see the evidence that matters (which, according to Edward Snowden, the government probably has, if it exists). I asked Jeffrey Carr what he would consider undeniable evidence of Russian governmental involvement: “Captured communications between a Russian government employee and the hackers,” adding that attribution “should solely be handled by government agencies because they have the legal authorization to do what it takes to get hard evidence.”

Claudio Guarnieri concurred:

All in all, technical circumstantial attribution is acceptable only so far as it is to explain an attack. It most definitely isn’t for the political repercussions that we’re observing now. For that, only documental evidence that is verifiable or intercepts of Russian officials would be convincing enough, I suspect.

Given that the U.S. routinely attempts to intercept the communications of heads of state around the world, it’s not impossible that the CIA or the NSA has exactly this kind of proof. Granted, these intelligence agencies will be loath to reveal any evidence that could compromise the method they used to gather it. But in times of extraordinary risk, with two enormous military powers placed in direct conflict over national sovereignty, we need an extraordinary disclosure. The stakes are simply too high to take anyone’s word for it.

The post Here’s the Public Evidence Russia Hacked the DNC — It’s Not Enough appeared first on The Intercept.



via IFTTT

Friday, December 16, 2016

NSA Whistleblower Destroys Obama's Russia Narrative - "Hard Evidence Points To An Inside Leak, Not Hacking"

ORIGINAL LINK

A group of retired senior intelligence officials, including the NSA whistleblower William Binney (former Technical Director, World Geopolitical & Military Analysis, NSA), have posted an open letter on consortiumnews.com that destroys the Obama administration's "Russian hacking" narrative.  Within the letter, Binney argues that, thanks to the NSA's "extensive domestic data-collection network," any data removed remotely from Hillary Clinton or DNC servers would have passed over fiber networks and therefore would have been captured by the NSA who could have then analyzed packet data to determine the origination point and destination address of those packets.  As Binney further notes, the only way the leaks could have avoided NSA detection is if they were never passed over fiber networks but rather downloaded to a thumb drive by someone with internal access to servers.

We have gone through the various claims about hacking. For us, it is child’s play to dismiss them. The email disclosures in question are the result of a leak, not a hack. Here’s the difference between leaking and hacking:

 

Leak: When someone physically takes data out of an organization and gives it to some other person or organization, as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning did.

 

Hack: When someone in a remote location electronically penetrates operating systems, firewalls or any other cyber-protection system and then extracts data.

 

All signs point to leaking, not hacking. If hacking were involved, the National Security Agency would know it – and know both sender and recipient.

 

In short, since leaking requires physically removing data – on a thumb drive, for example – the only way such data can be copied and removed, with no electronic trace of what has left the server, is via a physical storage device.

 

Again, NSA is able to identify both the sender and recipient when hacking is involved. Thanks largely to the material released by Edward Snowden, we can provide a full picture of NSA’s extensive domestic data-collection network including Upstream programs like Fairview, Stormbrew and Blarney. These include at least 30 companies in the U.S. operating the fiber networks that carry the Public Switched Telephone Network as well as the World Wide Web. This gives NSA unparalleled access to data flowing within the U.S. and data going out to the rest of the world, as well as data transiting the U.S.

 

In other words, any data that is passed from the servers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) or of Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC) – or any other server in the U.S. – is collected by the NSA.  These data transfers carry destination addresses in what are called packets, which enable the transfer to be traced and followed through the network.

Binney

 

Binney further notes that the manner in which the media's "sources" are equivocating by using phrases like "our best guess" implies that the NSA has not been able to trace the Hillary or DNC "hacks" across fiber networks.  And, since the NSA tracks basically every packet that travels across U.S. networks, Binney concludes that it's effectively impossible that the WikiLeaks data came from a "hack."

The bottom line is that the NSA would know where and how any “hacked” emails from the DNC, HRC or any other servers were routed through the network. This process can sometimes require a closer look into the routing to sort out intermediate clients, but in the end sender and recipient can be traced across the network.

 

The various ways in which usually anonymous spokespeople for U.S. intelligence agencies are equivocating – saying things like “our best guess” or “our opinion” or “our estimate” etc. – shows that the emails alleged to have been “hacked” cannot be traced across the network. Given NSA’s extensive trace capability, we conclude that DNC and HRC servers alleged to have been hacked were, in fact, not hacked.

 

The evidence that should be there is absent; otherwise, it would surely be brought forward, since this could be done without any danger to sources and methods. Thus, we conclude that the emails were leaked by an insider – as was the case with Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. Such an insider could be anyone in a government department or agency with access to NSA databases, or perhaps someone within the DNC.

Asked why intelligence sources would be leaking such dangerous allegations without proof, Binney echoed our thoughts that they're simply "concocting these things to support the existing administration and to also support the move toward a new Cold War.”  Per RT:

“Certainly, that’s behind some of it. Hillary Clinton and a number of people were going that way, and certainly the military intelligence complex fosters that because that means for a “new Cold War” trillions of dollars going into the coffers of those people, they would certainly be advocates for this thing. There is a lot of vested interest to keep this kind of thing going,” Binney added.

 

“If the CIA is alleging a different story, they need to produce the evidence like they did on the Chinese hack,” Binney said. “There is no reason to withhold this kind of information, especially if they can prove it and so far as I can see they won’t even brief the House Intelligence Committee on the evidence they are using to make this statement. That tells me that what they are saying is a pack of crap.”

 

“That are just concocting these things to support the existing administration and to also support the move toward a new Cold War.”

Alas, who needs "hard evidence" when baseless narratives are so much fun?



via IFTTT

Assange: Leaks Not from Russia, Insider Says Source Is Democratic Whistleblower

ORIGINAL LINK
Assange-Russia-HillaryWho should we believe?

via IFTTT

Why The Bill Of Rights Is Failing

ORIGINAL LINK

Submitted by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

225 years ago today, the first ten amendments were added to the new Constitution of 1787. Those amendments have come to be known as the Bill of Rights, and taken as a whole, these amendments represent what can only be described as one of the few parts of the Constitution worth applauding today. 

While most of the Constitution is concerned with centralizing government power, raising tax revenue, protecting the institution of chattel slavery, and hammering the independent states into a consolidated political union, the Bill of Rights, on the other hand, was concerned with limiting government power

Bizarrely revered by many as a "pro-freedom" document, the document now generally called "the Constitution" was originally devoted almost entirely toward creating a new, bigger, more coercive, more expensive version of the United States. The United States, of course, had already existed since 1777 under a functioning constitution that had allowed the United States to enter into numerous international alliances and win a war against the most powerful empire on earth.

 

That wasn't good enough for the oligarchs of the day, the crony capitalists with names like Washington, Madison, and, Hamilton. Hamilton and friends had long plotted for a more powerful United States government to allow the mega-rich of the time, like George Washington and James Madison, to more easily develop their lands and investments with the help of government infrastructure. Hamilton wanted to create a clone of the British empire to allow him to indulge his grandiose dreams of financial imperialism. 

Fortunately, there were some who stood in the way of the people we now refer to as "the Founding Fathers." They were the anti-federalists — the good guys who stood against Washington and his friends — and who demanded a Bill of Rights before they would even consider ratifying the new Constitution. 

In the end, however, the Bill of Rights was far weaker than it should have been. It was, essentially, just a bone the Federalists threw to the opposition in order to get the new Constitution ratified. The anti-Federalists, after all, couldn't even conceive of a federal government as enormous, bloated, and powerful as the US government is today. Living in a world where the individual state governments were both highly democratic and powerful in relation to the central government, the anti-Federalists figured they had enough tools at their disposal to prevent the sort of centralization that has taken place over the past two hundred years. The optimistic anti-Federalists were, unfortunately, wrong. 

But, there was much more than could have been done had the anti-Federalists insisted. William Watkins offers some insights today into what could have been: 

The state conventions that ratified the Constitution suggested over 200 amendments to the Constitution to cure structural problems. For example, Virginia offered a lengthy amendment on the judicial power. The proposal, in the main, would have limited the federal judiciary to the Supreme Court and various admiralty courts established by Congress. State courts would serve as the trial courts of the Union with the possibility of appeal to the Supreme Court. Virginians rightly feared that the federal judiciary would become an engine of consolidated government and sought to limit its power.

 

Massachusetts feared the new power of taxation in the federal government. Massachusetts, through the pen of John Hancock, offered a proposal that would have prohibited Congress from levying direct taxes ... As a check on the national government, Massachusetts wanted the states to retain some control on Congress’s demands for revenue.

 

Massachusetts also proposed an amendment dealing with concerns about inadequate representation. Massachusetts asked that the Constitution be amended to guarantee “one representative to every thirty thousand persons . . . A ratio in excess of one representative for every 30,000 people would not, in Massachusetts’s opinion, be a true and viable representation. How disappointed would Hancock and Company be to see that today we average 1 representative for about every 750,000 person. Do we have truly representative government? Not in the eyes of the patriots from Massachusetts who understood that true representation can only take place on a human scale.

 

Rather than sitting back today and mindlessly celebrating the “high temple” of our constitutional order, Americans should dust off copies of the substantive amendments proposed by the state ratifying conventions but ignored by Madison and the Federalist majority in the first Congress. (Massachusetts’ AmendmentsVirginia’s AmendmentsNew York’s AmendmentsNorth Carolina’s Amendments). 

The Bill of Rights Means Nothing Without the Liberal Ideology The Produced It 

Better, more limiting, and more numerous amendments may indeed have been helpful. 

But, no law written on parchment can control the size and scope of government if the population is willing to accept more state control over their lives. 

The fact remains that the American public generally tolerates countless violations of the Tenth Amendment, the Ninth Amendment, the Sixth Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, and the Second Amendment. The federal government routinely seizes private property without due process, fails to provide for speedy trials, passes federal gun control laws, and invents powers for itself that are reserved to the states and the citizens alone. Even the First Amendment is now being targeted by the feds who are the throes of limiting freedom of speech and freedom of the press by labeling objectionable ideas as "fake news" and thus not so-called protected speech. 

These attacks will be tolerated if the public is willing to go on doing so. After all, the Bill of Rights itself never actually limited government power. Government power — to the extent it has actually been limited — was limited because citizens valued the ideas reflected in the Bill of Rights. 

Once the public abandons the ideology behind the Bill of Rights, then the Bill of Rights will cease to mean anything, even if it still ostensibly remains in force. 

Not surprisingly, as the public ideological views have changed, the Constitution has failed to limit the power of the central government. Murray Rothbard observed this long ago when he wrote

From any libertarian, or even conservative, point of view, it has failed and failed abysmally; for let us never forget that every one of the despotic incursions on man’s rights in this century, before, during and after the New Deal, have received the official stamp of Constitutional blessing. 

Rothbard was echoing Lysander Spooner who wrote:

But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain — that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.

From a legal standpoint, this state of affairs was easy to bring about because in practice the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, means whatever the Supreme Court says it means. But, even the Court is limited by the public's ideological views and the public's willingness to tolerate the Court's rulings. If the public is willing to accept the seizure of private property in the name of the War on Drugs or the War on Terrorism, then we should not be surprised when government agencies do so. If the public is willing to grant the federal government powers that are clearly not found in the Constitution itself, the fact that the Bill of Rights legally prohibits such things will be of little consequence. 

As written, the Bill of Rights is a beneficial summary of many of the limitations that should be placed on government power. Without a public rooted in an ideology that supports and demands respect for the Bill of Rights, however, the words will ultimately mean nothing at all.



via IFTTT

Obama Vows to Exact Revenge Against Russia for Unsubstantiated Russian Hacking Claims

ORIGINAL LINK

Those who deny the assertions put forth by the Washington Post, citing unnamed and nefarious CIA sources, regarding Russian intervention in the US elections, are being labeled as traitors. Conservatives view all of the Russian hysteria business as the final stage of grief being played out in public, by a completely broken and mentally addled globalist movement left in shambles. The media is attempting to up the rhetoric by moving past the discovery phase of the investigation, without ever having to actually prove that Russia meddled with the elections, in order to attempt to implicate the GOP and of course Donald Trump. Nevermind the fact that Julian Assange plainly stated today that Wikileaks did not receive the data from any state source, and certainly not Russia.

Democrats are only capable of believing what they want to believe, which is that Russia helped Trump win. How else could they grasp the reality that America turned on them and their degradative policies that seek to annihilate the middle class?

In an NPR interview today, President Obama promised revenge against Putin for his meddling. Note that this is extremely uncouth and unseemly -- especially since he is a lame duck President. To start a conflagration before the next President takes office is nothing less than a slap in the face to Trump.

Obama: The US will respond to Russia hacking at a time and place of our choosing. https://t.co/xJCwozgoeb

— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) December 16, 2016

source: CNN

"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 and we will at a time and place of our own choosing," Obama told National Public Radio.

Describing potential countermeasures by the US, the President said "some of it may be explicit and publicized; some of it may not be."

 
He said he directly confronted Russian President Vladimir Putin about a potential US response, and said his counterpart acknowledged his stance.
"Mr. Putin is well aware of my feelings about this, because I spoke to him directly about it," Obama said.

Obama and Putin conferred on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in China in September.

Afterwards, Obama told reporters he raised cybersecurity with the Russian leader.

Intelligence agencies in October pinned blame on Russia for election-related hacking. At the time, the White House vowed a "proportional response" to the cyberactivity, though declined to preview what that response might entail.

Officials have said US actions against Russia may not be revealed publicly.

Speaking Thursday at the White House, Press Secretary Josh Earnest declined to say whether the US had already begun its response to Moscow's actions.

"The President determined once the intelligence community had reached this assessment that a proportional response was appropriate," Earnest said. "At this point, I don't have anything to say about whether or not that response has been carried out."

Enter Keith Olbermann, the liberal elite left personified. They have no interest in democracy.

Since Putin personally led attack on our election and coup against us, Electoral College must stop Trump and Treason pic.twitter.com/lBCaVnXy3o

— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) December 15, 2016

The Russian Embassy in the UK's response.

DNC hacking is revealed as inside job: will Russia-bashers be left unemployed? (not likely) pic.twitter.com/2n8CpOCX8e

— Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) December 15, 2016

 

Content originally generated at iBankCoin.com



via IFTTT

Aleppo Victory... US And Its Crime Partners Suffer "Meltdown Of Sanity"

ORIGINAL LINK

Submitted by Finian Cunningham via Strategic-Culture.org,

The US and its terrorist-sponsoring partners are seeing their criminal regime-change project in ruins, as the Syrian army and its allies win a spectacular victory to retake the strategically important city of Aleppo.

Western governments and their flunkies at the UN are cynically, perversely decrying a «meltdown of humanity».

Closer to the truth is their own «meltdown of sanity». This is because the official Western narrative about the Syrian war is finally being exposed on a glaring scale.

The exposure for the whole world to see is one of a systematic, fake propaganda cover that concealed a criminal enterprise – an enterprise involving terrorist proxies, or fake moderate rebels, whom the Western governments have sponsored for the past six years in a conspiracy to overthrow the government of Syria. The gravity of this systematic crime committed by Washington and its various partners is now unfolding.

Unable to cope with their own cognitive dissonance over the criminality, the Western governments and their complicit corporate news media are resorting to outright denial and to compounding lies with even more lies.

Instead of dealing with the reality that Syrian state forces have recaptured Aleppo from brutal, illegally armed groups, which the West and its regional clients have bankrolled and armed, the West distorts the dramatic victory as the «fall of Aleppo». One report on American channel CNN even referred to the victorious Syrian army and its allies as «persecutors».

With typical unhinged emotion, US ambassador to the UN Samantha Power cited unverified reports of civilians being executed in Aleppo, and slammed Syria and its allies Russia and Iran for having «no shame». It is Power and her Western partners-in-crime, including top UN officials, who should be hanging their heads in shame.

Among the hysterical soundbites about alleged atrocities and slaughter being lobbed around this week was this from UN «humanitarian» official Jens Laerke who said Aleppo was seeing a «meltdown of humanity». Catchy words, but divorced from reality.

Western news media outlets were screaming headlines alleging summary executions of women and children by the Syrian army and its Russian, Iranian and Lebanese allies as they moved in to finally retake the whole of the northern city.

Outgoing UN chief Ban Ki-Moon talked in disparaging tones about an «uncompromising military victory», while his underlings Rupert Colville and Jan Egeland decried «hellish» conditions and «war crimes» committed by Syria and Russia.

The problem is that all these sensational, reckless assertions are based on unverified claims by anonymous «activists» or persons involved with militants – militants who are integrated with terror groups like Jaysh al Fatah, Jabhat al Nusra, Ahrar al Sham and Nour al din al Zenki. All of them affiliated with the internationally proscribed Al Qaeda terrorist network – which the Western governments claim to be at war with.

It truly is a grotesque revelation when Western governments and UN officials publicly spout propaganda on behalf of terrorist groups.

Samantha Power and her British counterpart at the UN Matthew Rycroft cited UN «reports» of 82 civilians being executed, including 11 women and 13 children, by the pro-government Syrian forces during the final hours of recapturing Aleppo. But the same UN «reports» were themselves based on unverified sources supposedly embedded among the terrorists. This is not reportage. It is simply recycling rumors aimed at saving the necks of terrorist groups.

The simple fact of the information coming from unverified sources did not stop the UN, Power, Rycroft and the raft of Western media outlets, including the Washington Post, CNN, Guardian, Independent, France 24 etc, presenting the claims as if they were fact.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused Western governments and their dutiful, unquestioning news media of spreading «fake news» about the dramatic events in Syria this week. Lavrov pointed out that none of the alleged atrocities were acknowledged by independent humanitarian groups.

Syria’s ambassador to the UN Bashar al Jaafari also refuted the claims of atrocities that Western counterparts appeared to be so perplexed by.

Western governments and media outlets persisted in their gory fantasies despite abundant video footage that even they themselves were broadcasting which showed thousands of civilians calmly walking away from militant-held pockets of Aleppo towards the Syrian state forces. Is that the behavior of people who are being massacred, summarily executed, slaughtered?

One of the most absurd distortions was this from France 24. The state-owned broadcaster of one of the countries that has supplied weapons and propaganda cover to terrorists in Syria over the past six years described this week how «people in government-held areas of Aleppo were celebrating». Given that the Syrian government holds virtually all of Aleppo that means that the vast majority of Syrians were celebrating. Yet France 24 roils its words to contrive a false division between pro and anti-government populations.

The more logical and truthful depiction is that Syrian civilians are at last able to flee from terror gangs that have held them under siege. But in reporting that the whole false Western narrative about what has been going on in Aleppo and Syria for the past six years would implode like a house of cards.

Why aren’t the Western news media interviewing the tens of thousands of civilians who have now managed to flee from the defeated terrorist groups? Why don’t the Western media ask questions about the nature of their captivity? Such as, why could they not escape from militant-held eastern Aleppo until now? What do these civilians think of the Syrian army and its allies who have crushed the militants?

The curious, gaping absence of any testimonies carried by the Western media from the thousands of liberated civilians in Aleppo is mirrored by the same curious, gaping absence of testimonies from thousands of civilians liberated elsewhere in Syria by the army over the past year.

That’s because those civilians are telling media outlets which are willing to report, such as the Syrian state broadcaster SANA, as well as RT, Press TV and Al Manar, that their nightmare siege imposed by the Western-backed terrorists is over. If Western media outlets were to actually bother to conduct real journalism they would go into liberated areas of Aleppo and other towns and villages across Syria and report that life is returning to happy normalcy for these families and communities.

The truth is Aleppo was invaded by Western-backed mercenaries in July 2012, who turned the eastern side of the city into a den ruled under a reign of terror. A twisted, demented caliphate run by head-chopping Wahhabi jihadists was imposed. Like Syria as a whole, these mercenaries were sanitized in the West as «moderate, pro-democracy rebels» – albeit somehow supposedly «intermingled» with jihadi extremists.

If that were the case, then where are these supposed «moderates» now that the last den of the «rebels» in Aleppo has been routed?

The stark absence of «moderate», «pro-democracy», «Western-value-supporting rebels» emerging from the ruins of Aleppo is as stark as the absence of petrified civilians denouncing Syrian army «atrocities» or Russian «war crimes».

In one resounding moment this week, the Western narrative about Aleppo, and the Syrian war more generally, has collapsed in a pile of dust. No amount of denials and further distortions can hide the exposure of Western lies and propaganda fabrications.

So ironically, Western media outlets have recently whipped up the phenomenon of «fake news» in the context of trying to discredit Russia over alleged electoral interference in the US and Europe.

What Syria has demonstrated is that the real culprits of peddling false news, and more gravely false narratives, are the Western governments and their conceited, self-important news media.

Unable to deal with the unbearable truth of criminal complicity, the official West is displaying a meltdown of sanity.

Aleppo and Syria will one day emerge again from the present ruins. No such recovery from ruins will be made by the ignominious Western governments and their lying, criminally complicit media.



via IFTTT

What is the real purpose behind “fake news” propaganda?

ORIGINAL LINK

Here is the first problem with modern political discourse — too many people want to “win” arguments instead of getting to the greater truth of the matter. Discussions become brinkmanship. Opponents launch into immediate attacks instead of simply asking valid questions. They assert immediately that their position is the only valid position without verification. When confronted with rational responses and ample evidence, they dismiss everything instead of pondering what you have handed them...

via IFTTT

Are Debt-Laden American Consumers About To Get Crushed By Higher Interest Rates?

ORIGINAL LINK

American consumers love debt, wall street loves securitizing that debt and collecting massive fees for selling it and pension funds, with no viable alternative investments courtesy of accommodative Fed policies, love buying that debt for the extra 25bps of yield it provides.  It's a "win, win, win", right?

Well, until it's not.  While real median incomes in the U.S. have been stagnant for almost a
decade, real household personal consumption has continued its steady
rise as American's have simply replaced lost income with new debt.  But,
with household leverage near all-time highs and interest rates on the
rise, we suspect this could all end very badly for the U.S. consumer and those pension funds that were forced to "stretch for yield."

Per a Bloomberg article posted today, the average U.S. household is carrying roughly $133,000 worth of debt, spread between mortgages, credit cards, auto loans, student loans and the newly-popular, crowd-funded, personal loans. 

Debt

 

To be sure, while staggering, this is nothing new as the growth of U.S. consumer debt has basically gone exponential since the early 90's.

Consumer Credit

 

Meanwhile, real median household income has yet to recover to pre-recession 2007 levels.

FRED

 

That said, up until now, the cost of the staggering increases in notional consumer debt outstanding has been offset by lower interest rates.  As a result, historically low rates have have kept the ratio of household debt service to disposable income levels near multi-decade lows. 

FRED

 

But rising rates could change all this in the very near future.  As a quick example, lets assume the median household makes $56,000 per year and gets to take home 75% of that, or roughly $42,000.  As we mentioned above, the average household has roughly $133,000 of debt outstanding.  Assuming the average rate on that debt is 5% (which seems generous but stick with us) would imply $6,650 worth of interest payments per year, or roughly 16% of take home pay.

Unfortunately, a significant portion of consumer debt carries floating interest rates.  Therefore, in the most dire scenario, a 1% increase in rates will translate into an extra $1,330 of annual interest payments, $110 per month, and a roughly 3.2% reduction in discretionary personal income. 

So while the fed-induced treasury bubble has been fun for debt-thirsty Americans willing to take on any amount of leverage so long as they can afford the monthly payments, we suspect the unwind is going to be equally painful.



via IFTTT

The CIA Is Accusing Russia Of Doing Exactly What The CIA Does

ORIGINAL LINK

Submitted by Peter Certo via OtherWords.org,

Even in an election year as shot through with conspiracy theories as this one, it would have been hard to imagine a bigger bombshell than Russia intervening to help Donald Trump. But that’s exactly what the CIA believes happened, or so unnamed “officials brief on the matter” told the Washington Post.

While Russia had long been blamed for hacking email accounts linked to the Clinton campaign, its motives had been shrouded in mystery. According to the Post, though, CIA officials recently presented Congress with a “a growing body of intelligence from multiple sources” that “electing Trump was Russia’s goal.”

Now, the CIA hasn’t made any of its evidence public, and the CIA and FBI are reportedly divided on the subject. Though it’s too soon to draw conclusions, the charges warrant a serious public investigation.

Even some Republicans who backed Trump seem to agree. “The Russians are not our friends,” said Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, announcing his support for a congressional probe. It’s “warfare,” added Senator John McCain.

There’s a grim irony to this. The CIA is accusing Russia of interfering in our free and fair elections to install a right-wing candidate it deemed more favorable to its interests. Yet during the Cold War, that’s exactly what the CIA did to the rest of the world.

putin-trump

(Image: DonkeyHotey / Flickr)

Most Americans probably don’t know that history. But in much of the world it’s a crucial part of how Washington is viewed even today.

In the post-World War II years, as Moscow and Washington jockeyed for global influence, the two capitals tried to game every foreign election they could get their hands on.

From Europe to Vietnam and Chile to the Philippines, American agents delivered briefcases of cash to hand-picked politicians, launched smear campaigns against their left-leaning rivals, and spread hysterical “fake news” stories like the ones some now accuse Russia of spreading here.

Together, political scientist Dov Levin estimates, Russia and the U.S. interfered in 117 elections this way in the second half the 20th century. Even worse is what happened when the CIA’s chosen candidates lost.

In Iran, when elected leader Mohammad Mossadegh tried to nationalize the country’s BP-held oil reserves, CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt led an operation to oust Mossadegh in favor of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The shah’s secret police tortured dissidents by the thousands, leading directly to the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

In Guatemala, when the democratically elected Jacobo Arbez tried to loosen the U.S.-based United Fruit company’s grip on Guatemalan land, the CIA backed a coup against him. In the decades of civil war that followed, U.S.-backed security forces were accused of carrying out a genocide against indigenous Guatemalans.

In Chile, after voters elected the socialist Salvador Allende, the CIA spearheaded a bloody coup to install the right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet, who went on to torture and disappear tens of thousands of Chileans.

“I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people,” U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger purportedly said about the coup he helped orchestrate there.

And those are only the most well-known examples.

I don’t raise any of this history to excuse Russia’s alleged meddling in our election — which, if true, is outrageous. Only to suggest that now, maybe, we know how it feels. We should remember that feeling as Trump, who’s spoken fondly of authoritarian rulers from Russia to Egypt to the Philippines and beyond, comes into office.

Meanwhile, much of the world must be relieved to see the CIA take a break from subverting democracy abroad to protect it at home.



via IFTTT

Thursday, December 15, 2016

Breaking: Assange Emerges to Confirm Russia Was NOT the Source of DNC/Podesta Leaks

ORIGINAL LINK
assange-thumbJulian Assange came forward to dispute all claims Russian hackers provided documents to Wikileaks, saying definitively that was NOT the case.

via IFTTT

Rights group: Turkey is silencing media in post-coup crackdown

ORIGINAL LINK

turkey-attacks.jpeg1-980x652.jpg

Recep Tayyip Erdogan

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan attends the funeral prayers for police officer Hasim Usta, who was killed with dozens of others late Saturday outside the Besiktas football club stadium Vodafone Arena, in Istanbul, Monday, Dec. 12, 2016. Turkey's police rounded up more than 100 members of a Kurdish political party on Monday as the country mourned the dozens killed in a bombing attack near an Istanbul soccer stadium. Turkish authorities have banned distribution of images relating to the Istanbul explosions within Turkey. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel) (Credit: AP)

ISTANBUL — An international rights group says Turkey has “all but silenced independent media” in an accelerating crackdown on journalists who are being detained on “bogus charges” including terrorism.

Human Rights Watch said in a new report released Thursday that the media crackdown sharpened in the wake the failed July 15 coup.

HRW’s Europe and Central Asia director, Hugh Williamson, said that “the Turkish government and president’s systematic effort to silence media in the country is all about preventing public scrutiny.”

He said 148 journalist and media workers have been detained under the state of emergency.

Turkish officials didn’t immediately comment on the report.

The government says it is fighting a multi-prong war on “terrorists,” a term used in reference to coup backers, Kurdish militants and the Islamic State group.



via IFTTT

War On Cash Escalates: Australia Proposes Ban On $100 Bill; No Cash Within 10 Years?

ORIGINAL LINK

Submitted by Michael Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

Global financial repression has picked up steam. Australian citizens are likely the next victim.

au-100-note

AU News reports Government Floats $100 Note Removal.

SAY goodbye to the $100 note.

 

Australia looks set to follow in the footsteps of Venezuela and India by abolishing the country’s highest-denomination banknote in a bid to crack down on the “black economy”.

 

Speaking to ABC radio on Wednesday, Revenue and Financial Services Minister Kelly O’Dwyer flagged a review of the $100 note and cash payments over certain limits as the government looks to recoup billions in unpaid tax.

 

“The whole point of this crackdown on the black economy is to make sure we close down any potential loopholes,” she said. Despite the broad use of electronic forms of payment, Ms O’Dwyer warned there are three times as many $100 notes in circulation than $5 notes.

 

“It does beg the question, ‘Why?’” she said.

 

There are currently 300 million $100 notes in circulation, and 92 per cent of all currency by value is in $50 and $100 notes.

 

A report by UBS recommended Australia scrap the $100 note. According to UBS, benefits may include “reduced crime (difficult to monetise), increased tax revenue (fewer cash transactions) and reduced welfare fraud (claiming welfare while earning or hoarding cash)”.

 

“From the banks’ perspective there would likely be a spike in deposits — if all the $100 notes were deposited into banks (ignoring hoarded $50 notes), household deposits would rise around four per cent,” the report said.

Why?

Financial Services Minister Kelly O’Dwyer notes there are currently 300 million $100 notes in circulation, and 92 per cent of all currency by value is in $50 and $100 notes.

“It does beg the question, ‘Why?’” she asked.

It would behoove O’Dwyer to think. People can have 100 pennies in their pocket (each of which is nearly worthless) or they can hold a dollar.

Similarly, people can hold a stack of ten $10 notes in their wallet or they can hold a $100 note.

Mathematically it makes perfect sense that 92 per cent of all currency by value is in $50 and $100 notes.

What the hell does $1 buy these days? Is someone going to carry a wad of fifty $1 notes to go to a movie and buy popcorn?

No Cash Within 10 Years?

Rest assured this will not stop with $100 notes. There will no cash within ten years.

*  *  *

 

But as Bloomberg reports, try as everyone may, cash registers are still bursting with paper bills and metal coins. Cash is alive and well, according to a new study of the spending habits of more than 18,000 people in seven countries.

“Many have predicted and espoused the view that cash is increasingly disappearing as a payment instrument,” the authors write. “However, to paraphrase Mark Twain, we would say that the reports of the death of cash have been greatly exaggerated.”

 

The value of dollars and euros in circulation has doubled since 2005, to $1.48 trillion and €1.1 trillion, respectively. Some of that growth can be explained by demand for these currencies in foreign countries, but there’s also plenty of evidence that Europeans and Americans are still carrying around wads of cash.

 

The new research crunches and compares data on payment choices in Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the U.S. The study shows notable differences among these countries: Germans and Austrians carry around and use the most cash; the Dutch love debit cards; paper checks are still relatively common in France and the U.S.

 

The bottom line, however, is that consumers in all seven countries use cash more often than they use any other payment method. Cash is least popular in the U.S., where it’s used for 46 percent of all transactions, vs. 26 percent for debit cards and 19 percent for credit cards.
 



via IFTTT

Remember When DAPL Police Blew a Protester’s Arm Up? This Is Her Now

ORIGINAL LINK
DAPLWarning: graphic.

via IFTTT

Former UK Ambassador Says Source Of Clinton Emails Was "Disgusted" Democratic Whistleblower

ORIGINAL LINK

Just as the CIA/Democrat/Mainstream Media narrative of Russia's involvement in the election jumps the shark with fact-less accusations of Putin's personal involvement, The Daily Mail blows the entire 'hack' meme out of the water. As an evoy for Wikileaks, former UK ambassador Craig Murray claims he flew to Washington for a clandestine handoff with one source, who "had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks... Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians."

20161214_murray.jpg

Murray, who blasted The CIA's "blatant lies" in a recent op-ed, has now come forward with more details on how he knows they are lying... (as The Daily Mail reports)

Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and a close associate of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, told Dailymail.com that he flew to Washington, D.C. for a clandestine hand-off with one of the email sources in September.

 

'Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,' said Murray in an interview with Dailymail.com on Tuesday. 'The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.'

While Murray is a controversial figure who was removed from his post as a British ambassador amid allegations of misconduct. He was cleared of those but left the diplomatic service in acrimony. His links to Wikileaks are well known.

His account contradicts directly the version of how thousands of Democratic emails were published before the election being advanced by U.S. intelligence.

Murray insisted that the DNC and Podesta emails published by Wikileaks did not come from the Russians, and were given to the whistleblowing group by Americans who had authorized access to the information.

 

'Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,'  Murray said. 'The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.'

 

He said the leakers were motivated by 'disgust at the corruption of the Clinton Foundation and the tilting of the primary election playing field against Bernie Sanders.'

 

Murray said he retrieved the package from a source during a clandestine meeting in a wooded area near American University, in northwest D.C. He said the individual he met with was not the original person who obtained the information, but an intermediary.

 

20161214_murray1_0.jpg

His account cannot be independently verified but is in line with previous statements by Wikileaks - which was the organization that published the Podesta and DNC emails.

Murray declined to say where the sources worked and how they had access to the information, to shield their identities.

 

He suggested that Podesta's emails might be 'of legitimate interest to the security services' in the U.S., due to his communications with Saudi Arabia lobbyists and foreign officials.

 

Murray said he was speaking out due to claims from intelligence officials that Wikileaks was given the documents by Russian hackers as part of an effort to help Donald Trump win the U.S. presidential election.

 

'I don't understand why the CIA would say the information came from Russian hackers when they must know that isn't true,' he said. 'Regardless of whether the Russians hacked into the DNC, the documents Wikileaks published did not come from that.'

Assange has similarly disputed that charges that Wikileaks received the leaked emails from Russian sources.

'The Clinton camp has been able to project a neo-McCarthyist hysteria that Russia is responsible for everything,' Assange told John Pilger during an interview in November.

 

'Hillary Clinton has stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 US intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That's false – we can say that the Russian government is not the source.'

As Murray concluded in his recent op-ed, the continued ability of the mainstream media to claim the leaks lost Clinton the election because of “Russia”, while still never acknowledging the truths the leaks reveal, is Kafkaesque.

It is terrible that the prime conduit for this paranoid nonsense is a once great newspaper, the Washington Post, which far from investigating executive power, now is a sounding board for totally evidence free anonymous source briefing of utter bullshit from the executive.

The worst thing about all this is that it is aimed at promoting further conflict with Russia. This puts everyone in danger for the sake of more profits for the arms and security industries – including of course bigger budgets for the CIA. As thankfully the four year agony of Aleppo comes swiftly to a close today, the Saudi and US armed and trained ISIS forces counter by moving to retake Palmyra. This game kills people, on a massive scale, and goes on and on.



via IFTTT

Georgia Confirms Homeland Security Attempted To Hack Election Database 10 Separate Times

ORIGINAL LINK

Last week we noted a letter from Georgia Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, to the Department of Homeland Security questioning why someone with a DHS IP address (216.81.81.80) had attempted to hack into his state's election database on November 15, 2016 at 8:43AM.  Now, according to WSB-TV in Atlanta, we learn that Georgia's election systems were actually the target of hacking by DHS on 10 separate occasions

The Georgia Secretary of State's Office now confirms 10 separate cyberattacks on its network were all traced back to U.S. Department of Homeland Security addresses.

 

In an exclusive interview, a visibly frustrated Secretary of State Brian Kemp confirmed the attacks of different levels on his agency's network over the last 10 months. He says they all traced back to DHS internet provider addresses.

 

"We're being told something that they think they have it figured out, yet nobody's really showed us how this happened,” Kemp said. "We need to know."

 

Kemp told Channel 2’s Aaron Diamant his office's cybersecurity vendor discovered the additional so-called vulnerability scans to his network's firewall after a massive mid-November cyberattack triggered an internal investigation.

Meanwhile, Kemp pointed out that all of the attempted hackings occurred around critical registration and voting deadlines calling into question whether "somebody was trying to prove a point."

The Secretary of State's Office manages Georgia’s elections, and most concerning for Kemp about the newly discovered scans is the timing.

 

The first one happened on Feb. 2, the day after Georgia’s voter registration deadline. The next one took place just days before the SEC primary. Another occurred in May, the day before the general primary, and then two more took place in November, the day before and the day of the presidential election.

 

"It makes you wonder if somebody was trying to prove a point,” Kemp said.

Of course, the Obama administration, a pillar of "transparency" for sure, has confirmed the attacks originated at the DHS but has refused to provide a straight story on why the attempted hackings occurred.  Furious with the lack of answers, Kemp has now written a letter to the Trump administration asking for a formal review after his inauguration next month.

Last week, the DHS confirmed the large Nov. 15 attack traced back to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection internet gateway. But Kemp says the DHS’ story about its source keeps changing.

 

"First it was an employee in Corpus Christi, and now it's a contractor in Georgia,” Kemp said.

 

Unsatisfied with the response he got from DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson this week, Kemp fired off a letter Wednesday to loop in President-elect Donald Trump.

 

"We just need to ask the new administration to take a look at this and make sure that we get the truth the people of Georgia are deserving to know that and really demanding it,” Kemp said.

 

Kemp says several of those scans came around the same time he testified before Congress about his opposition to a federal plan to classify election systems as "critical infrastructure," like power plants and financial systems.

As we've said before, despite all the media attention on "Russian hackers," this cyberattack, originated from within our own Department of Homeland Security, is the only actual confirmed case of hacking related to the 2016 election. 

 

* * *

For those who missed it, here is what we wrote last week after the initial hacking was discovered.

Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp is anxiously wondering, as are we, why someone with a Department Of Homeland Security IP address would try to hack into his State's voter registration database.  Even though DHS offered cyber security help to states prior to the election, the Wall Street Journal notes that Georgia was one of the states that specifically denied assistance.

The secretary of state of Georgia is asking the Department of Homeland Security to explain what appears to be an attempted breach of the state’s voter registration database by someone in the federal government.

 

In a letter to Department of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson dated Thursday, Georgia’s Secretary of State Brian Kemp said the state had discovered an unsuccessful attempt to breach the firewall of state computer systems. That attempt was linked to an IP address associated with DHS, he said.

 

“At no time has my office agreed to or permitted DHS to conduct penetration testing or security scans of our network,” wrote Mr. Kemp, a Republican. “Moreover, your department has not contacted my office since this unsuccessful incident to alert us of any security event that would require testing or scanning of our network.”

 

The alleged attempted intrusion by the federal government on a state computer system responsible for election security was detected by a third-party security firm working for the state of Georgia. The attempt was unsuccessful, according to the state. The computers also house information about company incorporations.

According to a letter written by Kemp to DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, the attempted intrusion occurred 1 week after the election on November 15, 2016 at 8:43AM and came from an IP address associated with DHS (216.81.81.80). 

GA

 

Of course, since the hacking a state's election database it technically illegal, even for DHS, Kemp had some fairly pointed questions for Johnson on who authorized the scan and how many other states were scanned without authorization. 

GA

 

Meanwhile, the potential hacking followed threats from Jeh Johnson leading up to election day to declare election systems "critical infrastructure" which would have given the federal government more authority over state databases. 

The Department of Homeland Security made a major push in advance of November’s elections to help states secure election systems against possible hacking, as fears of foreign interference in the U.S. election process reached a fever pitch in the months leading up to Election Day.

 

The department also considered declaring election systems “critical infrastructure,” which would have given the federal government additional authority to protect the systems. DHS didn’t take that step, however, as many states expressed concern about additional federal authority over their election systems and said the constitution provided states the right to run their own elections.

 

As a result of some of the concerns, the department clarified that assistance on election-related security matters was voluntary and encouraged states to take advantage of DHS resources and expertise to help secure state election systems.

 

“DHS assistance is strictly voluntary and does not entail regulation, binding directives, and is not offered to supersede state and local control over the process,” Mr. Johnson, the DHS chief, said in September.

 

Georgia was one of the states that had declined the federal government’s assistance for election security, citing state sovereignty. “Right now, we’re just demanding answers,” said David Dove, a top aide to the Georgia secretary of state. “My boss, Secretary Kemp, has been a very vocal critic of the Department of Homeland Security declaring election systems critical infrastructure.”

After all the talk about Russian hackers, wouldn't it be just perfect if it turns out that the Obama administration was the only group to actually attempt to illegally hack into a state election database?  That said, we won't hold our breath waiting for Jill Stein and disaffected Hillary supporters to express their outrage over this incident.

 

Brian Kemp's full letter can be viewed below:



via IFTTT