National Security Officers Are Worried About Trump's Ties to Russia

The 1959 novel, The Manchurian Candidate is a political thriller about the son of a prominent U.S. political family who is brainwashed into being an unwitting assassin for a Communist conspiracy, the goal being the overthrow of the United States' constitutional government.  Now, we find ourselves face with a presidential candidate with strong financial ties to Russian oligarchs and Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin who voluntarily may be willing to sabotage our government for personal enrichment and satisfaction of his insatiable ego.   As more news outlets fortunately are picking up on the Russian hacking of the DNC and Trump's dependence on Russian financing since he has been cutoff by American banks, some in the national intelligence community are fearful of Trump gaining access to intelligence materials, especially those relating to Russia and Putin's never ending machinations and intrigue.   Both Huffington Post and The Daily Beast looks at the issue and the FBI's view that Wikileaks effort was facilitated by Russia and may have been aimed at electing Donald Trump in November.  First these highlights from The Daily Beast:

The FBI suspects that Russian government hackers breached the networks of the Democratic National Committee and stole emails that were posted to the anti-secrecy site WikiLeaks on Friday. It’s an operation that several U.S. officials now suspect was a deliberate attempt to influence the presidential election in favor of Donald Trump, according to five individuals familiar with the investigation of the breach.

The theory that Moscow orchestrated the leaks to help Trump, who has repeatedly praised Russian President Vladimir Putin and practically called for the end of NATO, is fast gaining currency within the Obama administration because of the timing of the leaks and Trump’s own connections to the Russian government, the sources said on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing and developing quickly.

Current and former U.S. officials drew analogies to so-called “active measures campaigns,” or state-sponsored operations designed for political effects.

“The release of emails just as the Democratic National Convention is getting underway this week has the hallmarks of a Russian active measures campaign,” David Shedd, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told The Daily Beast. Shedd said that additional leaks were likely, echoing an opinion expressed by U.S. officials and experts who said that the release of emails on Friday may just be an opening salvo.

Officials also noted Trump’s own connections to the Russian government. . . . One of Trump’s top national security advisers, retired Army Gen. Michael Flynn, sat with Putin at a dinner celebrating the 10th anniversary of Kremlin-backed media network RT and was paid to give a speech at the event; Flynn later re-tweeted an anti-Semitic message that called into question any Kremlin-Trump link. Another Trump adviser, Carter Page, recently denounced America’s “often-hypocritical focus on democratization” while in Moscow. And last week, Trump said that he might not come to the aid of U.S. NATO allies in the face of Russian aggression unless they paid what he thinks they owe for Europe’s common defense.

Officials also thought it was telling that the emails were given to WikiLeaks, which is perceived as being hostile to the U.S. government. “This wasn’t surprising to us,” said one U.S. official familiar with the investigation. 

"If the hack is linked to Russian actors, it would not be the first time cyber intrusions linked to the Kremlin and its supporters have sought to influence the political process in other countries,” Rep. Adam Schiff said in a statement. “Given Donald Trump’s well known admiration for Putin and his belittling of NATO, the Russians have both the means and the motive to engage in a hack of the DNC and the dump of its emails prior to the Democratic Convention. That foreign actors may be trying to influence our election—let alone a powerful adversary like Russia—should concern all Americans of any party." 

If the worse suspicions prove true, the irony will be that Trump is playing right wing nutcases' xenophobia even as he may be preparing to sell out America and European allies.  Never forget that with Trump the ONLY thing that matters is himself and his ego and self-enrichment.  

Huffington Post has these additional highlights:

Members of the intelligence community are worried that Donald Trump ― who has deep ties to Russia and is apparently the preferred presidential candidate of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin ― could have access to highly classified national security briefings as early as Friday.

Trump and presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton will begin receiving the briefings after the Democratic National Convention ends on Thursday, ABC News reported Monday. As the Republican nominee for president, Trump is now among a handful of people who do not hold a security clearance but have the potential to get these briefings. But he also has closer ties to a foreign government than perhaps any presidential candidate in recent history.

Trump has called for following Moscow’s lead on various global issues and questioned whether it’s necessary for the U.S. to always defend other members of NATO, the alliance created during the Cold War to protect American partners from an expansionist Soviet Union. His rhetoric about foreign policy neatly matches the message coming out of Moscow: that America has little need for its long-time partners in Europe ― particularly in NATO ― or elsewhere, and that the U.S. should have less influence internationally. Trump has extensive business and financial ties to Russia.

“Never have we had a candidate so tied to a foreign power, especially one that is so hostile to the U.S. in many ways, and one that is actively messing with our election,” said one former senior intelligence official. “Many [in the intelligence community] don’t care about U.S. politics and pride themselves on being nonpartisan, but the ties to Russia are deeply disturbing.”

“The notion that the Trump team could request intel briefings on Russia when they clearly have close ties is horrifying, especially after the DNC leak,” said the former intelligence official.

Be very, very afraid.

Check Your Christmas Gifts: NSA Swiped, Bugged Packages

If Americans still believe that they have any shred of privacy from government surveillance, they are deluding themselves.  A new story in Der Spiegel reveals that the NSA has a hacking unit that utilizes "back door" tools to invaded commercial, governmental and private computers.  Indeed, the NSA has even intercepted computers ordered online and placed surveillance bugs into them.  This blog has noted in the past that America ranks with China and Russia as one of the nations where citizens have the least personal privacy.  It now seems we may be the worse of them all.  Here are article excerpts:

The NSA's TAO hacking unit is considered to be the intelligence agency's top secret weapon. It maintains its own covert network, infiltrates computers around the world and even intercepts shipping deliveries to plant back doors in electronics ordered by those it is targeting.

One of the two main buildings at the former plant has since housed a sophisticated NSA unit, one that has benefited the most from this expansion and has grown the fastest in recent years -- the Office of Tailored Access Operations, or TAO. This is the NSA's top operative unit -- something like a squad of plumbers that can be called in when normal access to a target is blocked.

According to internal NSA documents viewed by SPIEGEL, these on-call digital plumbers are involved in many sensitive operations conducted by American intelligence agencies. TAO's area of operations ranges from counterterrorism to cyber attacks to traditional espionage. The documents reveal just how diversified the tools at TAO's disposal have become -- and also how it exploits the technical weaknesses of the IT industry, from Microsoft to Cisco and Huawei, to carry out its discreet and efficient attacks.

An internal description of TAO's responsibilities makes clear that aggressive attacks are an explicit part of the unit's tasks. In other words, the NSA's hackers have been given a government mandate for their work. During the middle part of the last decade, the special unit succeeded in gaining access to 258 targets in 89 countries -- nearly everywhere in the world. In 2010, it conducted 279 operations worldwide.

Indeed, TAO specialists have directly accessed the protected networks of democratically elected leaders of countries. They infiltrated networks of European telecommunications companies and gained access to and read mails sent over Blackberry's BES email servers, which until then were believed to be securely encrypted. Achieving this last goal required a "sustained TAO operation," one document states.

Workers at NSA's target selection office, which also had Angela Merkel in its sights in 2002 before she became chancellor, sent TAO a list of officials within the Mexican Secretariat they thought might make interesting targets. As a first step, TAO penetrated the target officials' email accounts, a relatively simple job. Next, they infiltrated the entire network and began capturing data. 


One example of the sheer creativity with which the TAO spies approach their work can be seen in a hacking method they use that exploits the error-proneness of Microsoft's Windows. Every user of the operating system is familiar with the annoying window that occasionally pops up on screen when an internal problem is detected, an automatic message that prompts the user to report the bug to the manufacturer and to restart the program. These crash reports offer TAO specialists a welcome opportunity to spy on computers. 

A comprehensive internal presentation titled "QUANTUM CAPABILITIES," which SPIEGEL has viewed, lists virtually every popular Internet service provider as a target, including Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter and YouTube. "NSA QUANTUM has the greatest success against Yahoo, Facebook and static IP addresses," it states. The presentation also notes that the NSA has been unable to employ this method to target users of Google services. Apparently, that can only be done by Britain's GCHQ intelligence service, which has acquired QUANTUM tools from the NSA.

Sometimes it appears that the world's most modern spies are just as reliant on conventional methods of reconnaissance as their predecessors.

Take, for example, when they intercept shipping deliveries. If a target person, agency or company orders a new computer or related accessories, for example, TAO can divert the shipping delivery to its own secret workshops. The NSA calls this method interdiction. At these so-called "load stations," agents carefully open the package in order to load malware onto the electronics, or even install hardware components that can provide backdoor access for the intelligence agencies. All subsequent steps can then be conducted from the comfort of a remote computer.

Did the NSA Hack into Google and Yahoo?

The revelations about the National Security Administration's ("NSA") lawless disregard for legal limits that keep flowing from the documents released by Edward Snowden seem to know no end.  Now, it is reported that the NSA hacked into Google and Yahoo's systems and spied on millions and millions of indviduals, many of them American citizens.  As noted before, Hitler's Nazi regime would be envious of what the NSA has done in terms of domestic spying.  Not surprisingly, the NSA is denying the reports, but based on what we've seen to date, I believe the NSA folks about as much as I could throw an aircraft carrier across Hampton Roads harbor.  CNN has some details.  Here are excerpts:

The National Security Agency's director flatly denied a Washington Post report Wednesday that the NSA secretly broke into communications links that connect Google and Yahoo data centers, calling the newspaper's allegation false.

Army Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA director, pushed back against the report that cites leaked classified documents, saying the agency does not illegally access the servers of Internet companies.

"The servers and everything we do with those, those companies work with us. They are compelled to work with us. This isn't something the court just said, 'Would you please work with them and throw data over it.' This is compelled. And this is specific requirements that come from a court order," Alexander said at a cybersecurity conference in Washington.

"This is not NSA breaking into any databases. It would be illegal for us to do that. So, I don't know what the report is. But I can tell you factually we do not have access to Google servers, Yahoo servers. We go through a court order."

The Washington Post report is the latest in a series of allegations that stem from disclosures given to news organizations by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who describes himself as a whistle-blower.

The operation is code named MUSCULAR, and it is operated jointly by the NSA and its UK counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters, The Washington Post reported, citing the documents.

According to The Washington Post, the NSA and the Government Communications Headquarters are copying data flowing through fiber-optic network cables overseas, and the NSA sends millions of the records from Yahoo and Google to data warehouses at its headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland.

There is no oversight of the NSA operation because it is occurring overseas out of the reach of the court, according to the report.

The report raised the concern of Google and Yahoo, with the Internet behemoths saying they never gave the NSA permission to access communication links to their respective servers.

"We have strict controls in place to protect the security of our data centers, and we have not given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency," said Yahoo spokeswoman Sarah Meron.

Google has "long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping, which is why we have continued to extend encryption across more and more Google services and links," said David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer.

"We do not provide any government, including the U.S. government, with access to our systems. We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks, and it underscores the need for urgent reform."

The newspaper report emerged a day after Alexander and James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, testified before a House committee reviewing the agency's surveillance activities.

I for one increasingly view Snowden as a super patriot who wanted Americans to know about the lawlessness of branches of the United States government, the NSA in particular.  Domestic spying is illegal except in certain narrow instances.  It's arguably a violation of the U.S. Constitution, in fact.  

Bilerico is Going Dark Temporarily

UPDATED: Here is some additional information from Bilerico Editor in Chief, Bill Browning, concerning the hacker attack on Bilerico Project and its affilaited blogs:
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I wanted to give folks a quick heads up on what's happened to the Bilerico Project and our affiliated sites. All of our sites are currently dark - they've been taken offline by a massive hacker attack.

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We've been fighting off these Eastern European hackers for over a year now; they're the same crowd that took down popular feminist political blog Shakespeare's Sister a year and a half ago. They're professionals and they're nasty.

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Earlier this week, they managed to take us down for about 9 hours overnight but we were able to regain control. They severely compromised the server though, so we had to get a new server up and running quickly. Yesterday, we got the new server racked up and were planning on making all of the switch overs (we also host quite a few Indiana LGBT organizations' websites), but the hackers managed to crack through our defenses again yesterday afternoon.

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This time they firebombed the place; our old server is toast. Unfortunately, none of the data was transferred before they regained control. We have backups and are trying to get the site back up ASAP, but we're still suffering from the lag required to set up a new server from scratch, retrieve as much data as possible from the old server, install all of our attendant software like Movable Type, and then port over the Bilerico database and double check to make sure it all works again since our site was so customized.

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I have no idea when the site will be back up and running. We're hopeful that we can have it all finished by Friday night, but there's no guarantee. The hackers caused massive damage, but co-owner and tech guru Jerame Davis is working feverishly to fix everything.

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Not too long ago Pam's House Blend and other liberal blogs using the same platform went dark as a result of hackers. Now, The Bilerico Project and its affiliated blogs have been attacked and the result is that a new server is being set up as quickly as possible. Bill Browning sent all contributors this note today:

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We will be moving to a new server tomorrow afternoon. As you saw on TBP's front page this week, we were hit by hackers again. We regularly fight off these Denial of Service attacks (we're an LGBT liberal blog; it comes with the territory), but this time our server is toast. They killed it.

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Thanks for your patience as we migrate to the new server. The good news out of all of this is that we'll plenty of room now for even more visitors; we'd almost outgrown our old server capacity! Let's keep up the hard work and continue to grow the Bilerico sites. We may have bumps in the road like this one, but we just keep improving thanks to all of you!

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It's a sad commentary that the wingnuts feel they have to knock down sites since they cannot counter sound arguments with anything but religious fanaticism and untruths. Bilerico should be back up unscathed within a day or so at most.