How the Department of Homeland Security Created a Deceptive Tale of Russia Hacking US Voter Sites
By Gareth Porter | Consortium News | August 28, 2018
The narrative of Russian intelligence attacking state and local election boards and threatening the integrity of U.S. elections has achieved near-universal acceptance by media and political elites. And now it has been accepted by the Trump administration’s intelligence chief, Dan Coats, as well.
But the real story behind that narrative, recounted here for the first time, reveals that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) created and nurtured an account that was grossly and deliberately deceptive.
DHS compiled an intelligence report suggesting hackers linked to the Russian government could have targeted voter-related websites in many states and then leaked a sensational story of Russian attacks on those sites without the qualifications that would have revealed a different story. When state election officials began asking questions, they discovered that the DHS claims were false and, in at least one case, laughable.
The National Security Agency and special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigating team have also claimed evidence that Russian military intelligence was behind election infrastructure hacking, but on closer examination, those claims turn out to be speculative and misleading as well. Mueller’s indictment of 12 GRU military intelligence officers does not cite any violations of U.S. election laws though it claims Russia interfered with the 2016 election.
A Sensational Story
On Sept. 29, 2016, a few weeks after the hacking of election-related websites in Illinois and Arizona, ABC News carried a sensational headline: “Russian Hackers Targeted Nearly Half of States’ Voter Registration Systems, Successfully Infiltrated 4.” The story itself reported that “more than 20 state election systems” had been hacked, and four states had been “breached” by hackers suspected of working for the Russian government. The story cited only sources “knowledgeable” about the matter, indicating that those who were pushing the story were eager to hide the institutional origins of the information.
Behind that sensational story was a federal agency seeking to establish its leadership within the national security state apparatus on cybersecurity, despite its limited resources for such responsibility. In late summer and fall 2016, the Department of Homeland Security was maneuvering politically to designate state and local voter registration databases and voting systems as “critical infrastructure.” Such a designation would make voter-related networks and websites under the protection a “priority sub-sector” in the DHS “National Infrastructure Protection Plan, which already included 16 such sub-sectors.
DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson and other senior DHS officials consulted with many state election officials in the hope of getting their approval for such a designation. Meanwhile, the DHS was finishing an intelligence report that would both highlight the Russian threat to U.S. election infrastructure and the role DHS could play in protecting it, thus creating political impetus to the designation. But several secretaries of state—the officials in charge of the election infrastructure in their state—strongly opposed the designation that Johnson wanted.
On Jan. 6, 2017—the same day three intelligence agencies released a joint “assessment” on Russian interference in the election—Johnson announced the designation anyway.
Media stories continued to reflect the official assumption that cyber attacks on state election websites were Russian-sponsored. Stunningly, The Wall Street Journal reported in December 2016 that DHS was itself behind hacking attempts of Georgia’s election database.
The facts surrounding the two actual breaches of state websites in Illinois and Arizona, as well as the broader context of cyberattacks on state websites, didn’t support that premise at all.
In July, Illinois discovered an intrusion into its voter registration website and the theft of personal information on as many as 200,000 registered voters. (The 2018 Mueller indictments of GRU officers would unaccountably put the figure at 500,000.) Significantly, however, the hackers only had copied the information and had left it unchanged in the database.
That was a crucial clue to the motive behind the hack. DHS Assistant Secretary for Cyber Security and Communications Andy Ozment told a Congressional committee in late September 2016 that the fact hackers hadn’t tampered with the voter data indicated that the aim of the theft was not to influence the electoral process. Instead, it was “possibly for the purpose of selling personal information.” Ozment was contradicting the line that already was being taken on the Illinois and Arizona hacks by the National Protection and Programs Directorate and other senior DHS officials.
In an interview with me last year, Ken Menzel, the legal adviser to the Illinois secretary of state, confirmed what Ozment had testified. “Hackers have been trying constantly to get into it since 2006,” Menzel said, adding that they had been probing every other official Illinois database with such personal data for vulnerabilities as well. “Every governmental database—driver’s licenses, health care, you name it—has people trying to get into it,” said Menzel.
In the other successful cyberattack on an electoral website, hackers had acquired the username and password for the voter database Arizona used during the summer, as Arizona Secretary of State Michele Reagan learned from the FBI. But the reason that it had become known, according to Reagan in an interview with Mother Jones, was that the login and password had shown up for sale on the dark web—the network of websites used by cyber criminals to sell stolen data and other illicit wares.
Furthermore, the FBI had told her that the effort to penetrate the database was the work of a “known hacker” whom the FBI had monitored “frequently” in the past. Thus, there were reasons to believe that both Illinois and Arizona hacking incidents were linked to criminal hackers seeking information they could sell for profit.
Meanwhile, the FBI was unable to come up with any theory about what Russia might have intended to do with voter registration data such as what was taken in the Illinois hack. When FBI Counterintelligence official Bill Priestap was asked in a June 2017 hearing how Moscow might use such data, his answer revealed that he had no clue: “They took the data to understand what it consisted of,” said the struggling Priestap, “so they can affect better understanding and plan accordingly in regards to possibly impacting future elections by knowing what is there and studying it.”
The inability to think of any plausible way for the Russian government to use such data explains why DHS and the intelligence community adopted the argument, as senior DHS officials Samuel Liles and Jeanette Manfra put it, that the hacks “could be intended or used to undermine public confidence in electoral processes and potentially the outcome.” But such a strategy could not have had any effect without a decision by DHS and the U.S. intelligence community to assert publicly that the intrusions and other scanning and probing were Russian operations, despite the absence of hard evidence. So DHS and other agencies were consciously sowing public doubts about U.S. elections that they were attributing to Russia.
DHS Reveals Its Self-Serving Methodology
In June 2017, Liles and Manfra testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee that an October 2016 DHS intelligence report had listed election systems in 21 states that were “potentially targeted by Russian government cyber actors.” They revealed that the sensational story leaked to the press in late September 2016 had been based on a draft of the DHS report. And more importantly, their use of the phrase “potentially targeted” showed that they were arguing only that the cyber incidents it listed were possible indications of a Russian attack on election infrastructure.
Furthermore, Liles and Manfra said the DHS report had “catalogued suspicious activity we observed on state government networks across the country,” which had been “largely based on suspected malicious tactics and infrastructure.” They were referring to a list of eight IP addresses an August 2016 FBI “flash alert” had obtained from the Illinois and Arizona intrusions, which DHS and FBI had not been able to attribute to the Russian government.
Manfra: No doubt it was the Russians. (C-SPAN)
The DHS officials recalled that the DHS began to “receive reports of cyber-enabled scanning and probing of election-related infrastructure in some states, some of which appeared to originate from servers operated by a Russian company.” Six of the eight IP addresses in the FBI alert were indeed traced to King Servers, owned by a young Russian living in Siberia. But as DHS cyber specialists knew well, the country of ownership of the server doesn’t prove anything about who was responsible for hacking: As cybersecurity expert Jeffrey Carr pointed out, the Russian hackers who coordinated the Russian attack on Georgian government websites in 2008 used a Texas-based company as the hosting provider.
The cybersecurity firm ThreatConnect noted in 2016 that one of the other two IP addresses had hosted a Russian criminal market for five months in 2015. But that was not a serious indicator, either. Private IP addresses are reassigned frequently by server companies, so there is not a necessary connection between users of the same IP address at different times.
The DHS methodology of selecting reports of cyber incidents involving election-related websites as “potentially targeted” by Russian government-sponsored hackers was based on no objective evidence whatever. The resulting list appears to have included any one of the eight addresses as well as any attack or “scan” on a public website that could be linked in any way to elections.
This methodology conveniently ignored the fact that criminal hackers were constantly trying to get access to every database in those same state, country and municipal systems. Not only for Illinois and Arizona officials, but state electoral officials.
In fact, 14 of the 21 states on the list experienced nothing more than the routine scanning that occurs every day, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee. Only six involved what was referred to as a “malicious access attempt,” meaning an effort to penetrate the site. One of them was in Ohio, where the attempt to find a weakness lasted less than a second and was considered by DHS’s internet security contractor a “non-event” at the time.
State Officials Force DHS to Tell the Truth
For a year, DHS did not inform the 21 states on its list that their election boards or other election-related sites had been attacked in a presumed Russian-sponsored operation. The excuse DHS officials cited was that it could not reveal such sensitive intelligence to state officials without security clearances. But the reluctance to reveal the details about each case was certainly related to the reasonable expectation that states would publicly challenge their claims, creating a potential serious embarrassment.
On Sept. 22, 2017, DHS notified 21 states about the cyber incidents that had been included in the October 2016 report. The public announcement of the notifications said DHS had notified each chief election officer of “any potential targeting we were aware of in their state leading up to the 2016 election.” The phrase “potential targeting” again telegraphed the broad and vague criterion DHS had adopted, but it was ignored in media stories.
But the notifications, which took the form of phone calls lasting only a few minutes, provided a minimum of information and failed to convey the significant qualification that DHS was only suggesting targeting as a possibility. “It was a couple of guys from DHS reading from a script,” recalled one state election official who asked not to be identified. “They said [our state] was targeted by Russian government cyber actors.”
A number of state election officials recognized that this information conflicted with what they knew. And if they complained, they got a more accurate picture from DHS. After Wisconsin Secretary of State Michael Haas demanded further clarification, he got an email response from a DHS official with a different account. “[B]ased on our external analysis,” the official wrote, “the WI [Wisconsin] IP address affected belongs to the WI Department of Workforce Development, not the Elections Commission.”
California Secretary of State Alex Padilla said DHS initially had notified his office “that Russian cyber actors ‘scanned’ California’s Internet-facing systems in 2016, including Secretary of State websites.” But under further questioning, DHS admitted to Padilla that what the hackers had targeted was the California Department of Technology’s network.
Texas Secretary of State Rolando Pablos and Oklahoma Election Board spokesman Byron Dean also denied that any state website with voter- or election-related information had been targeted, and Pablos demanded that DHS “correct its erroneous notification.”
Despite these embarrassing admissions, a statement issued by DHS spokesman Scott McConnell on Sept. 28, 2017 said the DHS “stood by” its assessment that 21 states “were the target of Russian government cyber actors seeking vulnerabilities and access to U.S. election infrastructure.” The statement retreated from the previous admission that the notifications involved “potential targeting,” but it also revealed for the first time that DHS had defined “targeting” very broadly indeed.
It said the category included “some cases” involving “direct scanning of targeted systems” but also cases in which “malicious actors scanned for vulnerabilities in networks that may be connected to those systems or have similar characteristics in order to gain information about how to later penetrate their target.”
It is true that hackers may scan one website in the hope of learning something that could be useful for penetrating another website, as cybersecurity expert Prof. Herbert S. Lin of Stanford University explained to me in an interview. But including any incident in which that motive was theoretical meant that any state website could be included on the DHS list, without any evidence it was related to a political motive.
Arizona’s further exchanges with DHS revealed just how far DHS had gone in exploiting that escape clause in order to add more states to its “targeted” list. Arizona Secretary of State Michele Reagan tweeted that DHS had informed her that “the Russian government targeted our voter registration systems in 2016.” After meeting with DHS officials in early October 2017, however, Reagan wrote in a blog post that DHS “could not confirm that any attempted Russian government hack occurred whatsoever to any election-related system in Arizona, much less the statewide voter registration database.”
What the DHS said in that meeting, as Reagan’s spokesman Matt Roberts recounted to me, is even more shocking. “When we pressed DHS on what exactly was actually targeted, they said it was the Phoenix public library’s computers system,” Roberts recalled.
In April 2018, a CBS News “60 Minutes” segment reported that the October 2016 DHS intelligence report had included the Russian government hacking of a “county database in Arizona.” Responding to that CBS report, an unidentified “senior Trump administration official” who was well-briefed on the DHS report told Reuters that “media reports” on the issue had sometimes “conflated criminal hacking with Russian government activity,” and that the cyberattack on the target in Arizona “was not perpetrated by the Russian government.”
NSA Finds a GRU Election Plot
National Security Agency headquarters in Fort Meade, Md. (Wikimedia)
NSA intelligence analysts claimed in a May 2017 analysis to have documented an effort by Russian military intelligence (GRU) to hack into U.S. electoral institutions. In an intelligence analysis obtained by The Intercept and reported in June 2017, NSA analysts wrote that the GRU had sent a spear-phishing email—one with an attachment designed to look exactly like one from a trusted institution but that contains malware design to get control of the computer—to a vendor of voting machine technology in Florida. The hackers then designed a fake web page that looked like that of the vendor. They sent it to a list of 122 email addresses NSA believed to be local government organizations that probably were “involved in the management of voter registration systems.” The objective of the new spear-phishing campaign, the NSA suggested, was to get control of their computers through malware to carry out the exfiltration of voter-related data.
But the authors of The Intercept story failed to notice crucial details in the NSA report that should have tipped them off that the attribution of the spear-phishing campaign to the GRU was based merely on the analysts’ own judgment—and that their judgment was faulty.
The Intercept article included a color-coded chart from the original NSA report that provides crucial information missing from the text of the NSA analysis itself as well as The Intercept’s account. The chart clearly distinguishes between the elements of the NSA’s account of the alleged Russian scheme that were based on “Confirmed Information” (shown in green) and those that were based on “Analyst Judgment” (shown in yellow). The connection between the “operator” of the spear-phishing campaign the report describes and an unidentified entity confirmed to be under the authority of the GRU is shown as a yellow line, meaning that it is based on “Analyst Judgment” and labeled “probably.”
A major criterion for any attribution of a hacking incident is whether there are strong similarities to previous hacks identified with a specific actor. But the chart concedes that “several characteristics” of the campaign depicted in the report distinguish it from “another major GRU spear-phishing program,” the identity of which has been redacted from the report.
The NSA chart refers to evidence that the same operator also had launched spear-phishing campaigns on other web-based mail applications, including the Russian company “Mail.ru.” Those targets suggest that the actors were more likely Russian criminal hackers rather than Russian military intelligence.
Even more damaging to its case, the NSA reports that the same operator who had sent the spear-phishing emails also had sent a test email to the “American Samoa Election Office.” Criminal hackers could have been interested in personal information from the database associated with that office. But the idea that Russian military intelligence was planning to hack the voter rolls in American Samoa, an unincorporated U.S. territory with 56,000 inhabitants who can’t even vote in U.S. presidential elections, is plainly risible.
The Mueller Indictment’s Sleight of Hand
The Mueller indictment of GRU officers released on July 13 appeared at first reading to offer new evidence of Russian government responsibility for the hacking of Illinois and other state voter-related websites. A close analysis of the relevant paragraphs, however, confirms the lack of any real intelligence supporting that claim.
Mueller accused two GRU officers of working with unidentified “co-conspirators” on those hacks. But the only alleged evidence linking the GRU to the operators in the hacking incidents is the claim that a GRU official named Anatoly Kovalev and “co-conspirators” deleted search history related to the preparation for the hack after the FBI issued its alert on the hacking identifying the IP address associated with it in August 2016.
A careful reading of the relevant paragraphs shows that the claim is spurious. The first sentence in Paragraph 71 says that both Kovalev and his “co-conspirators” researched domains used by U.S. state boards of elections and other entities “for website vulnerabilities.” The second says Kovalev and “co-conspirators” had searched for “state political party email addresses, including filtered queries for email addresses listed on state Republican Party websites.”
Mueller: Don’t read the fine print. (The White House/Wikimedia)
Searching for website vulnerabilities would be evidence of intent to hack them, of course, but searching Republican Party websites for email addresses is hardly evidence of any hacking plan. And Paragraph 74 states that Kovalev “deleted his search history”—not the search histories of any “co-conspirator”—thus revealing that there were no joint searches and suggesting that the subject Kovalev had searched was Republican Party emails. So any deletion by Kovalev of his search history after the FBI alert would not be evidence of his involvement in the hacking of the Illinois election board website.
With this rhetorical misdirection unraveled, it becomes clear that the repetition in every paragraph of the section of the phrase “Kovalev and his co-conspirators” was aimed at giving the reader the impression the accusation is based on hard intelligence about possible collusion that doesn’t exist.
The Need for Critical Scrutiny of DHS Cyberattack Claims
The DHS campaign to establish its role as the protector of U.S. electoral institutions is not the only case in which that agency has used a devious means to sow fear of Russian cyberattacks. In December 2016, DHS and the FBI published a long list of IP addresses as indicators of possible Russian cyberattacks. But most of the addresses on the list had no connection with Russian intelligence, as former U.S. government cyber-warfare officer Rob Lee found on close examination.
When someone at the Burlington, Vt., Electric Company spotted one of those IP addresses on one of its computers, the company reported it to DHS. But instead of quietly investigating the address to verify that it was indeed an indicator of Russian intrusion, DHS immediately informed The Washington Post. The result was a sensational story that Russian hackers had penetrated the U.S. power grid. In fact, the IP address in question was merely Yahoo’s email server, as Rob Lee told me, and the computer had not even been connected to the power grid. The threat to the power grid was a tall tale created by a DHS official, which the Post had to embarrassingly retract.
Since May 2017, DHS, in partnership with the FBI, has begun an even more ambitious campaign to focus public attention on what it says are Russian “targeting” and “intrusions” into “major, high value assets that operate components of our Nation’s critical infrastructure”, including energy, nuclear, water, aviation and critical manufacturing sectors. Any evidence of such an intrusion must be taken seriously by the U.S. government and reported by news media. But in light of the DHS record on alleged threats to election infrastructure and the Burlington power grid, and its well-known ambition to assume leadership over cyber protection, the public interest demands that the news media examine DHS claims about Russian cyber threats far more critically than they have up to now.
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. His latest book is Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.
US Homeland Security wants to track journalists & analyze media ‘sentiment’
RT | April 7, 2018
The US Department of Homeland Security is looking to build a media monitoring database. When some reporters objected, a DHS spokesman dismissed their concerns as fodder for “black helicopter conspiracy theorists.”
Service providers who want to bid for the program have until April 13 to submit a capabilities statement, according to the notice posted on the federal contractor website by the National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD), a division of DHS charged with protecting the “physical and cyber infrastructure.”
This has led Michelle Fabio of Forbes to wonder if the DHS is trying to use the cries of “Russian meddling” to justify creating a database of journalists and social media influencers. When the Committee to Protect Journalists retweeted Fabio’s article, DHS spokesman Tyler Houlton chimed in to say the database is “nothing more than the standard practice of monitoring current events in the media.”
“Any suggestion otherwise is fit for tin foil hat wearing, black helicopter conspiracy theorists,” he added.
Houlton adopted a similar tone in responding to an inquiry from Alex Kasprak of the fact-checking site Snopes. “You are embarrassing yourself with these questions and wild conspiracy theories,” he wrote.
With Houlton being less than helpful, perhaps the Statement of Work attached to the bid request could shed some light on what the DHS is actually looking to build. According to the six-page document, the contractor shall “provide media comparison tools, design and rebranding tools, communication tools, and the ability to identify top media influencers.”
There are six tasks being required of the contractors, starting with the ability to track more than 290,000 global news sources in over 100 languages, “including Arabic, Chinese and Russian,” and the ability to instantly translate the articles to English.
The next step would be a password-protected online platform enabling the DHS to access search results on “online articles and social media conversations,” an interactive dashboard providing “real-time monitoring, analysis, and benchmark of media coverage” and the ability to analyze the coverage in terms of content, volume, sentiment, geographical spread, influencers, language and momentum, among other things.
All this should be available in an encrypted mobile app, with enabled email alerts and customer service support.
Most interestingly, listed under “Media engagement” is the ability to access “contact details and any other information that could be relevant,” for any influencer in the database, including the publications the influencer writes for, and an overview of the influencer’s previous coverage. This database would have to be searchable, including in languages such as Arabic, Chinese and Russian.
Oh, and any staff working on the contract would have to have appropriate security clearances, ranging from Secret all the way to Top Secret with SCI (Sensitive Compartmented Information).
The DHS spokesman’s snark has certainly raised some eyebrows, as official denials in Washington are never quite so forceful. One is reminded of how former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Congress the NSA does not “wittingly” spy on Americans. Unfortunately for Clapper, just a few months later whistleblower Edward Snowden showed the entire world that the NSA was doing just that.
Top Democrats demand $300mn to protect the midterms from Russia intervention
Press TV – February 21, 2018
US Democratic leaders have called for more than $300 million in new funding to protect upcoming midterm elections from Russian interference.
Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House minority leader Nancy Pelosi demanded a budget boost Wednesday, claiming that the amount is necessary to safeguard November’s elections.
The extra money should go to the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and Election Assistance Commission, they said in a letter to the Republicans.
“We’re not drawing lines in the sand,” Senator Schumer told reporters. “We hope we can get bipartisan support.”
The Democrats’ move was made in the wake of mounting pressure against the administration of US President Donald Trump over possible collusion with Moscow during the 2016 presidential campaign and election.
The president and his associates have been under increased pressure since Friday, when special counsel Robert Mueller released an indictment in the ongoing Russia probe.
The investigation seeks to find out whether the Russian government coordinated with Trump’s aides after the intelligence community’s conclusion that the Kremlin helped with the New York billionaire’s campaign effort ahead of winning the White House, an allegation dismissed both by Moscow and the president.
Democrats are, meanwhile, attempting to persuade the GOP to back the effort.
“There is some support out there, but it has never gotten to the Republican leadership level,” Minnesota Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar told reporters. “If they want to do this, they could get it done — but instead of just having introduced bills, they’re going to have to take this on and help us.”
In an emailed statement to Politico, a Senate Republican aide asserted that the offer would be “considered.”
“This request will be carefully considered along with the thousands of individual choices and decisions that will have to be weighed and made as a FY2018 omnibus bill is written,” wrote the GOP aide.
According to the spokeswoman for the Republican speaker of the US House of Representative, Paul Ryan, lawmakers will be informed “on ways to protect the 2018 election.”
“We won’t be negotiating the omnibus through the press,” AshLee Strong said.
Homeland Security’s Multibillion-Dollar Comedy Show
Image by James Bovard
By James Bovard | FFF | December 26, 2017
After the 9/11 attacks, Congress and the Bush administration pretended that unlimited federal spending was one of the best ways to thwart terrorist threats. In 2002, Congress created the Homeland Security Department (DHS), sweeping some of the most inept federal agencies, such as the Secret Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), into the new mega-department. Congress also created numerous programs — some run directly by FEMA — to shovel out more than $30 billion in anti-terrorism funding to local and state governments.
As Sen. Tom Coburn (R–Okla.) observed a few years ago, “FEMA’s lax guidelines and oversight made the agency a virtual rubberstamp for most anything that grant recipients creatively justified as related to homeland security — regardless of how loosely related.” Louisiana Homeland Security grant recipients spent $2,400 for a lapel microphone and $2,700 for a teleprompter. Fort Worth, Texas, spent $24,000 of a federal anti-terrorism grant on a latrine-on-wheels. Other Texas local governments spent Homeland Security grants on “a hog catcher for Liberty County, body bags, garbage bags, Ziploc bags and two 2011 Camaros at $31,000 apiece,” as a Senate report revealed.
DHS approved a Michigan police department’s spending $6,200 of its grant on 13 sno-cone machines. The Senate report noted that local officials “defended the sno-cone purchases saying the machines were needed to treat heat-related emergencies.” DHS also asserted that the machines were “dual purpose” because they “could be used to fill ice packs in an emergency.”
The Jacksonville Urban Area Security Initiative used a DHS grant to produce an 8-minute film entitled “Domestic Terrorism: The First Line of Defense.” The film urged viewers to report any suspicious activity and to be especially wary of people that are “alone or nervous” or people “of average or above average intelligence” (unlike the people who made the film). People were also told to be on the lookout for residents who displayed “increased frequency of prayer or religious behavior.” As a Techdirt analysis pointed out, “Broadly defined ‘suspicious behavior’ is a great way to make every citizen a suspect … and justify every violation of personal privacy. If you need warrantless wiretaps or a reason to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens, all you have to do is start listing everyday activity as ‘suspicious.’”
Anti-terrorism funding has proven to be a boon for the travel industry. Many DHS grant recipients paid to send their employees to the HALO Counter-Terrorism Summit in 2012, which took place at the Paradise Point Resort & Spa on an island near San Diego. Invitees were told that “this luxury resort features over 460 guestrooms, five pools, three fantastic restaurants overlooking the bay, a world-class spa and state-of-the-art fitness center. Paradise awaits.” The highlight of the conference was a “zombie apocalypse” show featuring “40 actors dressed as zombies getting gunned down by a military tactical unit…. Conference attendees were invited to watch the shows as part of their education in emergency response training,” as a Senate investigation reported. This type of federally subsidized mass-shooting rehearsal did not spur any protests from anti-gun groups.
DHS handouts make state and local law-enforcement agencies more intrusive and punitive. DHS has given a number of grants to purchase license-plate readers for police patrol cars. One California urban area spent $6 million on the readers, which were used to detect vehicles with “excessive traffic violations.” Two years ago, DHS solicited proposals for private companies to create a national database on license-plate data that could disclose exactly when and where citizens drive. The subsequent firestorm caused DHS to temporarily back off from its proposal but it was rolled out again in 2015.
Maryland used federal Homeland Security grants to equip hundreds of police cars with license-plate scanners that create almost 100 million records per year detailing exactly where and when each vehicle travels. The grants also paid for stationary cameras that recorded license plates passing on nearby roads. The massive databank, which mortifies the ACLU, has been almost a total failure at nailing violent criminals or car thieves or terrorists. Instead, almost all the license-plate alerts involve scofflaws who failed to take their cars in for mandatory vehicle-emissions tests.
Increased surveillance
Local governments and agencies in the Chicago area spent $45 million in Homeland Security grants to set up a network of surveillance cameras known as “Project Shield.” The system was justified as an anti-terrorist measure but was shut down after it was recognized as a boondoggle. A Chicago Tribune editorial derided the program as “Project Sieve.” Some of its equipment failed to function in hot or cold weather. Almost 20 percent of the equipment was misplaced or stolen. Idiotic decisions were made in where to place the surveillance cameras — in police-station lobbies for example. Congressman Michael Quigley (D–Ill.) denounced Project Shield as “corruption which makes us less safe.”
After the heavy-handed police response to protests in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, Barack Obama publicly fretted about the militarization of police. But many of the worst abuses have long been funded by DHS. A Senate report noted, “‘Militarized’ vehicles and bomb detection robots top the list of ‘must have’ equipment being purchased by law enforcement teams around the country.”
Many police departments use DHS grants to purchase the same type of armored personnel carriers used by the U.S. military. The most popular model is the BearCat — an acronym for Ballistic Engineered Armored Response Counter Attack Truck. The Keene, New Hampshire, police department justified using federal funds to purchase a BearCat because of rowdiness at a local pumpkin festival. An Arizona police department used a BearCat to carry out a raid on a cockfight organizer. A police department in Washington state used its BearCat to “pull over drunk drivers.” The Clovis, California, Police Department displayed its BearCat at a local Easter egg hunt. A Senate report noted, “Police departments rave about the vehicles’ ‘shock and awe’ effect saying the vehicles’ menacing presence can be enough of a deterrent for would-be criminals.” Unfortunately, there is no way to deter police departments from spending federal dollars to intimidate local taxpayers.
Police departments are also using DHS grants to buy drones to conduct surveillance over their entire domains. As the Senate report explained, “Given the proliferation of military drones used in war operations, local police now want similar equipment in their arsenal of crime-fighting tools.” Senator Coburn warned, “The deployment of these types of surveillance machines raises important questions about American citizens’ constitutional rights and the appropriate balance between improving security and freedom. Federal, state, and local policymakers must carefully consider whether new law-enforcement tools and strategies protect freedom or threaten civil liberties.” But few members of Congress have shown any interest in reining in federally funded abuses.
Federal grant money is enabling local police to buy other military-style devices. As a Senate report noted, “Long-Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) machines were originally developed for use by the military as a nonlethal way to repel adversaries, including Iraqi insurgents or pirates, by making a loud and intense sound that is capable of damaging hearing.” Pittsburgh used $88,000 of DHS grant money to buy a “long-range acoustic device” and used it on protesters at a 2009 international summit in Pittsburgh, leading to at least one lawsuit from a victim claiming permanent loss of hearing.
Federal anti-terrorism grants are also spurring pointless intrusions around the nation. The Washington, D.C., subway system has been plagued by high-profile violent attacks by riders (as well as horrendous service which occasionally kills passengers). The feds’ solution? Special grants of $10 million or more per year to bankroll police to accost travelers before they enter the subway system and search their purse, briefcase, backpack, or whatever. Metro officials insisted that the searches were no big deal because they would be very brief — unless, of course, police found a reason to arrest someone or detain him for questioning. Police rely on hand-held explosive-detection devices which are well known to be ludicrously inaccurate (and can be triggered by hand sanitizer or soap). A Washington Post reporter noted that “many of those transit commuters still have the option of traveling by car, where their property is likely to be safe from police search as long as they don’t commit a crime, a distinction no longer available to Metro riders.” The police search teams are not deployed in response to any credible threat; instead, they are simply sent out to establish police presence. This is akin to the “security theater” that TSA has made famous. But news that police conduct warrantless searches of passengers entering subway stops quickly spreads on social media. If someone wants to avoid the hassle (or the discovery of the nuclear bomb in his suitcase), he merely needs to go to a different metro station a mile or two away.
Federal anti-terrorism grants have been a great political success regardless of pervasive waste, fraud, and abuse. As author James Risen (who was targeted for years by both the Bush and Obama Justice Departments for national-security leaks he received) observed, the “homeland security–industrial complex” has been a windfall for Washington. Politicians have “learned that keeping the terrorist threat alive provides enormous political benefits…. A decade of fear-mongering has brought power and wealth to those who have been the most skillful at hyping the terrorism threat,” enhancing the “financial well-being of countless federal bureaucrats, contractors, subcontractors, consultant, analysis and pundits.”
The Trump administration has proposed curtailing some anti-terrorism grants to state and local governments but it remains to be seen whether Congress gets on board. What does the United States have to show for tens of billions of dollars of Homeland Security antiterrorism spending by local and state governments? Michael Sheehan, former New York City deputy commissioner for counterterrorism, observed, “I firmly believe that those huge budget increases have not significantly contributed to our post–9/11 security.” But the war on terrorism has been an unmitigated victory for Leviathan and politicians at every level of government.
Democratic Party oligarchs already scheming for the 2020 nomination
By Greg Felton | November 12, 2017
To this day, establishment Democrats are in denial about their party’s role in causing the election of Donald Trump. Rather than support the candidacy of the popular, progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders, who would have defeated Trump handily, the Democratic National Committee sabotaged his campaign so that it could nominate the loathesome and unelectable Hillary Clinton. Why would a U.S. political party knowingly commit electoral suicide? Essentially, the Democratic Party hierarchy is more loyal to a foreign government (Israel) than it is to the U.S. For these “Clintoncrats,” installing a warmongering Israeli satrap in the White House was more important than nominating a candidate who cared about the U.S. national interest and American lives.
For obvious reasons, the DNC’s corruption and Clinton’s moral and intellectual unfitness cannot be admitted, so to explain how a bombastic amateur won an election that was essentially rigged against him the Clintoncrats have to invent excuses. One that is still flogged by mainstream media and Internet trolls is that the Russian government “hacked” the election to help Trump. Mentioned as far back as April 2016, this fiction serves four purposes.
First, it allows the Clintoncrats to link Trump to the alleged hacking, thereby imputing impeachable misconduct and painting his victory as illegitimate. Second, it reinvents Hillary Clinton as a victim to deflect attention from her bankster/Israel-first servility and war-criminal past, both of which were largely responsible for making Democratic voters run to Trump. Third, the exclusive external focus on Russia and Trump distracts the public from rampant internal corruption within the Democratic Party and its repression of the surging progressive movement that Sanders leads. Fourth, the invention of Russian hacking, as well as anti-Trump/anti-Sanders blamecasting, gives the Clintoncrats a device to reimpose its authority on the party and the Berniecrats.
Although the election is more than three years away, any opportunity to attack Trump and score points against the progressives must be seized, and it is in that spirit that the Charlottesville riot takes on a deeper meaning than we are being led to believe.
Charlottesville—A Political Contrivance
In a world of universal deceit, crises are staged by those in power or those who hope to seize power. If these “decepticons” can inflame public opinion to serve their interests, especially when a targeted group is set up to take the blame, the public and the media are effectively co-opted since those who are enraged or terrified are too busy reacting emotionally to the crisis to question its validity much less perceive that they are being manipulated. We saw this tactic employed successfully, for example, in the World Trade Center/Pentagon attack, the Boston Marathon bombing and the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan bombings in Paris. It also worked for the Clintoncrats in Charlottesville.
A crisis that casts white southerners in a maliciously violent light while inflaming black anger and sense of racial victimhood can help bring defectors back to the Democratic Party and enlist the party’s confederates in the media to vilify Trump. This is why the dominant images of the August 12 riot are emotional and reactive: white violence against “anti-racist” counter-protesters, a car driven by a white man into a crowd of pro-black counter-protesters, a beatified victim of the driver’s impact and scathing denunciations of Trump for his equivocal ascription of blame for the violence.
The inflammatory depictions of the riot have succeeded because, like all propaganda, they generated an artificial moralized causality. From these images it was easy to infer that they were deliberate, willful acts of violence by white racist protesters, and so preclude the possibility of any intelligent, critical analysis. Such a rational approach would imply either that the white protesters were not entirely reprehensible or that the images as presented did not depict the whole truth. Because the riot was moralized from the outset, anyone who tried to appeal to objectivity could expect to be vilified as an apologist for white racism. This is what happened to Trump.
The most egregious example of this propaganda is a piece written by Helena Cobban, a writer and researcher on international affairs who unfortunately opted for ranting over research. Here is how she began:
This weekend, for the third time this year, our home-city of Charlottesville has been the target of a campaign by leaders of the hate-filled “Alt-Rights” and their associates to claim the space of this city as their own. Yesterday, one of their apparent supporters, who had driven here from Ohio, plowed his car into a group of anti-hate protesters very near to the downtown mall that is the heart of our city, killing one woman (32-year-old Heather Heyer) and injuring more than a dozen others.
Another, more indirect, result of the haters’ provocative convergence on Charlottesville was that a state police helicopter that had been circling over downtown for many hours later crashed a little east of town, killing two state troopers.…
Cobban uses “hate” or “hater” 22 times to stigmatize the protesters, but such lazy name-calling speaks to the prejudice of the writer, not to any alleged negative characteristics of the protesters. Cobban also wrapped the “anti-hate” protesters in sanctimonious, religious verbiage, not bothering to mention that many came armed with chemical irritants, baseball bats, wooden clubs and helmets. There is no possible way the Antifa/BLM crowd could be depicted as “peaceful” or “anti-hate.” In fact, these counter-protesters were the ones spoiling for a fight. Even if one were to accept that the white protesters started the riot, the Antifa/BLM crowd did much to escalate it.
Finally, Cobban manages to praise the police and politicians, and it is here that that the riot proves its political worth for the Clintoncrats. As I showed last time, Terry McAuliffe, Virginia’s Democratic governor, bears most of the responsibility because he did nothing to keep the factions apart even though he said he had put the National Guard on stand-by in the name of public safety:
“Men and women from state and local agencies will be in Charlottesville to keep the public safe, and their job will be made easier if Virginians, no matter how well-meaning, elect to stay away from the areas where this rally will take place.”
He never used them because he said that the armed militias, better equipped than the state police, were adequate to keep order. “Not a shot was fired—zero property damage,” he said. Business Insider reporter Harrison Jacobs, as I wrote earlier, deftly captures the perversity of this statement:
“McAuliffe’s response that law enforcement’s handling of the violence was successful because there were no bullets fired and “zero property damage” would appear to ignore that dozens were left injured and a 32-year-old woman, Heather Heyer, was killed…”
Cobban’s screed, although laughably prejudiced, accurately betrays the essence of the official effect-to-cause narrative that serves the Clintoncrats’ larger objective: condemn white protesters not for what they did, but for who they are and by extension condemn Trump and his southern voter base. Cobban’s title, “Charlottesville confronting white supremacy and hate,” depicts the sort of pro-black/anti-Trump, good-vs-evil hysteria. However, if the riot is viewed from cause to effect as honesty demands, an entirely different picture emerges, one that exposes the political machinations behind it.
First, those who objected to the decision to move the Robert E. Lee statue had a valid permit to stage a protest in Emancipation Park. An attempt had been made to have the permit quashed and the protest relocated to a smaller park, but the original permit was upheld in court. After 15 minutes or so the Charlottesville police, in violation of the permit, dispersed them. The dispersal brought the protesters into direct contact with Antifa/Black Lives Matter counter-protesters, and from there violence ensued. Had the police left the protesters alone and kept the two sides apart, there would have been no violence, but it was necessary to provoke white southerners into looking like the aggressors.
Second, the narrative about the death of Heather Heyer is based on a fabrication that begs allusion to the false-flag Boston Marathon bombing, in which two Chechen brothers were set up to take the blame, and crisis actors were hired to sell the story.
James Alex Fields, a 20-year-old from Ohio, is alleged to have driven the car that hit and killed Heyer, but there is no evidence that he was even behind the wheel or that the car in question hit her. Video footage of the event clearly shows “his” car striking another car, not Heyer, but that still does not answer all questions. One thing we do know: Heather Heyer, who was overweight and taking medication, died on a sidewalk from a heart attack, not a car impact.
From different angles and in different videos, different numbers of cars are involved, and people that were allegedly injured in one version turn up in other scenes unharmed, thus inviting reasoned speculation that this was yet another staged event complete with crisis actors.
CRISIS ACTOR: On the left, a man being struck by the car falsely attributed to James A. Fields as it was being backed away sharply from the site of impact. On the right, that same man sitting uninjured on a parked Toyota while the same impact car is visible next to it on the right. Note the red sneakers.
Indeed, there were conveniently placed “witnesses” to provide the rhetorical spin needed to fix the official narrative in our minds. One conspicuous person was Brennan Gilmore, a former State Department operative in Africa and manager of Virginia Democrat Tom Perriello’s failed campaign for governor. About Heyer’s death, Gilmore told MSNBC:
It was clearly perpetrated by one of these racist Nazis who came to Charlottesville to spread their vile ideology. And he targeted this crowd very clearly. There is no question of anyone who witnessed it that his intent was to cause a mass casualty incident, a domestic terrorist incident as far as what I witnessed.
Gilmore gives himself away by not so much giving evidence but by overselling the absolute certainty of it: “clearly perpetrated,” “very clearly,” there is no question… that his intent was,” “a domestic terror incident.” Gilmore was in no position to make such dogmatic assertions. Also, in the video his intonation is flat and robotic, and he looks unnaturally stiff, as one might be if asked to read lines.
MISSING VEHICLE: The Toyota van with the crisis actor in the above picture is missing in this long shot of the path the impact car took. The Toyota should be somewhere under the red arrow. These inconsistencies strongly suggest that this scene was staged and more than once.
Fields’s part in Heyer’s death had to be invented to make the incident look like an act of deliberate violence by a white racist because that’s what the Clintoncrats wanted. Fields, who was in the crowd and could not have been driving the infamous car, ends up libeled as a “terrorist.” In fact Gilmore wasn’t alone in his labelling of Fields; McAuliffe read from the same script: “You can’t stop some crazy guy who came here from Ohio and used his car as a weapon. He is a terrorist.”
It’s uncertain if the Charlottesville propaganda will still have credibility come Election Day 2020, assuming Trump survives in office that long, but no matter how often its imagery and contrived morality are flogged it won’t mean squat if the Democratic establishment can’t come up with a candidate who is credible, likeable and electable—“an un-Hillary Clinton.” That person looks like it might be McAuliffe, the man most responsible for the riot. Understanding how he fits into the Clintoncrats long-term political ambitions can give a more coherent explanation of the riot and why he did nothing to stop it.
Charlottesville and the ‘Third Clinton’
At 59, McAuliffe is youngish, energetic and comes with an impeccable Clinton loyalist pedigree.
- 2001 to 2005, chairman of the Democratic National Committee
- 1996, co-chairman of Bill Clinton’s re-election campaign,
- 2008, chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
In addition, McAuliffe guaranteed the $1.35 million mortgage on the Clintons’ Chappaqua, NY, house and went into business with Tony Rodham, Hillary Clinton’s brother. McAuliffe speaks with Bill Clinton every day and is a fundraiser extraordinaire. If there’s Democratic money to be donated, he knows how to get it. The political and financial propinquity between McAuliffe and the Clintons/Rodhams is so conspicuous that McAuliffe might as well be considered a Clinton, with all the mutual backscratching that that term connotes.
In October 2016, The Daily Mail reported that Hillary Clinton helped raise funds for Common Good VA, McAuliffe’s Political Action Committee (PAC), which then donated $500,000 to the congressional campaign of Clinton’s friend Jill McCabe, the wife of Andrew McCabe, who would later be promoted to FBI deputy director and responsible for investigating Clinton for her use of a private e-mail server. The investigation was dropped. Three years earlier, Clinton had endorsed McAuliffe for governor of Virginia.
In 2009, as chairman of the start-up GreenTech Automotive, McAuliffe needed Chinese investment capital, so he formed a business relationship with Hillary Clinton’s brother Tony Rodham, CEO of Gulf Coast Funds Management. Gulf Coast was in the business of procuring visas for foreigners under the federal EB-5 program for investing at least $500,000 in a rural or impoverished area and created at least 10 jobs. GreenTech qualified because it was set up in a rundown corner of Mississippi.
The GreenTech/Gulf Coast venture ran into serious problems because visa applications were held up over qualification criteria and other legal matters, so Rodham and McAuliffe made personal appeals to government officials to expedite matters, all of this while Clinton was Obama’s secretary of state. One of these officials was Alejandro Mayorkas, director of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, whom they personally asked to fast-track the applications. Mayorkas did so, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General would later determine that Mayorkas gave Rodham and McAuliffe unethical, preferential treatment.
Mr. Mayorkas, now Deputy Secretary of DHS, [but who resigned in October 2016 over this matter] communicated with stakeholders on substantive issues outside of the normal adjudicatory process, and intervened with the career USCIS staff in ways that benefited the stakeholders. Mr. Mayorkas’ conduct led many USCIS employees to reasonably believe that specific individuals or groups were being given special access or consideration in the EB-5 program. (p. 52)
The political favouritism afforded Rodham and McAuliffe can be seen in this timeline excerpt from the DHS report about Gulf Coast’s activities. McAuliffe ended his role in GreenTech in 2012 before running for governor in 2013.
The Establishment Man
On June 13, 2017, two months before the Charlottesville riot, McAuliffe gave an interview to the on-line news source Politico This interview is significant because in it McAuliffe pushes the Clintoncrats’s electoral game plan and in so doing telegraphs his future, passive response in Charlottesville.
Russian to judgment
Within a span of fewer than three minutes during the first quarter of the interview, McAuliffe repeatedly pushed the Russia-hacking line using the same pat phrases and the same delivery, as if he had memorized them from a script:
“trying to destabilize our government,”
“wanted to destabilize the presidency,”
“detabliizing our democracy.”
“a direct assault on the democracy of the United States.”
The segment ended with this categorical summation at 12 minutes 19 seconds: “Clearly, Russia was involved in trying to destabilize our government.”
Just like Brennan Gilmore later at Charlottesville, McAuliffe had no first-hand proof of what he was talking about. He only had a prefabricated narrative to work from. He read his part dutifully, although, like Gilmore, he did not appear to appreciate that pat repetition of boilerplate is a defining characteristic of propaganda.
Further proof that McAuliffe was lying comes from his less-than-dogmatic certainty on the subject of evidence for Russian involvement:
“Somebody had to give these people a road map”;
“I believe somebody was directing the Russians”;
“Something was going on.”
Using subjective or vague claims to back up dogmatic assertions is standard in fabricated effect-to-cause narratives, but a logical, cause-to-effect narrative proves the opposite of what McAuliffe claimed. The best evidence comes from WikiLeaks, which in March this year debunked the Russian hacking story in its Vault 7 release:
Another program described in the documents, named Umbrage, is a voluminous library of cyber-attack techniques that the CIA has collected from malware produced by other countries, including Russia. According to the WikiLeaks release, the large number of techniques allows the CIA to mask the origin of some of its attack and confuse forensic investigators.… What this means is that current efforts by Democratic Party leaders and Deep State leakers in the government intelligence sector to pin the blame on Russia for hacking the election or for trying to help elect Trump as president, now must confront the counter-argument that the Deep State itself, in the form of the CIA, may have been behind the hacks, but is making it look like the Russians did it. (emphasis added)
In December 2016, The Intercept refuted the Russian-hacking dogma, and CNBC reported that DHS tried 10 times to hack Georgia‘s election database. Given all this prior evidence of domestic hacking, McAuliffe stuck to the script. As if to make the point crystal clear, on September 28, 2017, California Secretary of State Alex Padilla accused DHS of lying about Russian hacking.
Moral high ground
Pandering to voter emotion and prejudice is a necessary distraction mechanism to preclude rational debate; thus, one of the buttons McAuliffe repeatedly pushed was “values”: moral Democrats have them; immoral “Trumpublicans” don’t:
Leadership is… moral based, value based, and that’s what the Trump administration is lacking (26m40s)
“Values” is one of those vacuous, undefined terms that can be filled with subjective bias and then be made to stand as a definitional truth. For example, “terrorism,” which specifically refers to a government’s use of coercion, violence and fear to intimidate people into obedience, is now an epithet that can be hurled at anyone who uses violence to defy Israeli or American authority. There is no coercive element to such an act, but that no longer matters, any rational analysis of “terrorism” is virtually unthinkable.
McAuliffe may not like the Trump administration, but to say it has no morals or values is inane. Trump does have morals and values, just not the same ones. One doesn’t have to like Trump or agree with him to see that McAuliffe is denying him the essential humanity that he lavishes on the much less deserving Hillary Clinton.
How does McAuliffe think Clinton and the Democratic Party have any claim to morality and “values” when they are responsible for the devastation of Libya and the murder of its leader. Why isn’t McAuliffe troubled that Clinton sold herself to Goldman Sachs banksters while she was a senator? Is being a war criminal and a bankster prostitute the sign of high moral standing? Clearly not, which is why generic terms like “values,” are only ever asserted, never explained, and why they are such good weapons for propagandists.
Liberal poster boy
McAuliffe may be embarrassingly predictable when he runs down Trump and flails at Russia, but on domestic policy he is on solid ground. He has bona fide liberal credentials, and these will be essential selling points if the Clintoncrats hope to crush the democratic wing of the party.
In the interview, McAuliffe boasted that he vetoed legislation against abortion, homosexuals, transsexuals, the environment and voting rights. He proudly told of his reforms to the juvenile detention system, which cut the number of inmates by half and ended maximum security sentences for 14 year-olds. He also made points by noting that he stared down the gun lobby and in the home state of the National Rifle Association no less.
McAuliffe achieved all this and more despite having to work with a Republican-led state legislature. He attributed this success to common values—there’s that word again—which also allowed him to pass legislation to improve jobs, education, transportation and health care. Given that the Republican Party is largely in thrall to god, guns, and greed, McAuliffe’s boasting of “common values” is perhaps not the wisest thing to do.
The Clintoncrats will need to play up McAuliffe’s liberal credentials for all their worth because as is stands the progressive Berniecrats show every sign of capturing the anti-Trump vote. As Salon reported in late May, Berniecrats won districts in state elections in New York and New Hampshire that had voted strongly for Trump in the last election: Christine Pellegrino on Long Island, and Edie DesMarais in Wolfeboro, respectively. Meanwhile, in Montana’s congressional race, Berniecrat Rob Quist openly called for a revolution against the Democratic establishment. He lost, but he forced the Republicans to spend millions of dollars for what should have been an easy victory.
Much of the Berniecrats’ overall success can be attributed to their rational understanding of the last election: not a vote for Trump over Clinton but a vote for populism over the political establishment. As Salon reporter Conor Lynch wrote:
No matter how unpopular Trump gets… Democrats would be foolish to think they can revert to business as usual and still lead a successful resistance. If there is anything more anathema to the American electorate than the boorish president, it is the corrupt and arrogant Washington establishment.
This penetrating analysis is, of course, lost on the Clintoncrats, who are planning to refight their last failure by continuing to treat voters as mindless inputs in some abstract numbers game. For the 2018 mid-term elections they intend to use Hillary Clinton’s 2016 results as a starting point in hopes of mimicking the 2010 mid-terms, when the Republicans surged to majority status.
As Politico reported on May 22, 2017, the Clintoncrats’ chief strategist is none other than Rahm Emanuel—dual Israeli/U.S. citizen, Mossad agent, and former White House Chief of Staff. This epitome of the corrupt and arrogant Washington establishment is in regular contact with the Clintoncrat hierarchy and holds frequent strategy sessions with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. If the electorate sees through the propaganda, the Clintoncrats will be in trouble in 2020, when McAuliffe will be the new face of the party.
Technically, McAuliffe has not formally committed. In the Politico interview he denied any interest in the presidency and fell back on his duty to serve the people of Virginia. This declaration of political modesty, though, was entirely predictable and can be discounted. First, it would be unseemly for McAuliffe to appear to be ambitious so early. Second, a declaration would draw unwanted media attention to his business dealings. Third, the decision might already have been made in secret.
It might be significant or it might just be coincidence, but from June 1-4, a little more than a week before the Politico interview, McAuliffe was invited to attend his first Bilderberg meeting, which happened to take place in Virginia. Bilderbergers are a group of the world’s most powerful plutocrats and power brokers who hold annual meetings behind closed doors. What they discuss is not reported, but they are thought to be the real power behind world governments. McAuliffe’s invitation could signal that his appointment as Clinton’s successor has received official establishment sanction. We might infer this because in 1991, Bill Clinton, then governor of Arkansas, attended his first Bilderberg meeting; the next year he went on to win the Democratic nomination and the presidency.
Charlottesville in perspective
McAuliffe’s contradictory behaviour during the Charlottesville riot makes sense only if it is understood as serving the Clintoncrats’ political motives. There was no political advantage to preventing a racial confrontation that would help the Democratic establishment, demonize the president and stigmatize one of his significant electoral constituencies. As Emanuel infamously told the Wall Street Journal on Nov. 19, 2008, soon after Barack Obama’s election:
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”
Emanuel was referring to the Lehman Brothers banking scandal, but his quote has taken on a life of its own. For example, it was cited by Hillary Clinton on March 6, 2009, in a speech to the European Parliament. McAuliffe never used the quote but he followed its spirit.
The Clintoncrats will need many episodes like Charlottesville if they hope to stampede Democratic voters into propping up the crumbling establishment.
A different version of this essay appears in Charlottesville: A Political Theatre in Three Acts…, edited by Dr. James Fetzer available from Moon Rock Books
‘Year late & bad info’: California says DHS falsely accused Russia of hacking its voting systems
RT | September 28, 2017
It appears that in its eagerness to accuse Russian hackers of meddling in the US presidential election, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) wrongly claimed California’s election systems had been breached.
California Secretary of State Alex Padilla released a statement in which he confirmed that DHS officials had told him that the state’s election system had been “scanned” by Russian hackers.
“Last Friday, my office was notified by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that Russian cyber actors ‘scanned’ California’s Internet-facing systems in 2016, including Secretary of State websites. Following our request for further information, it became clear that DHS’ conclusions were wrong,” he wrote in a statement published on Wednesday.
He went on to stress that last Friday’s notification from the DHS wasn’t just “a year late,” but was also “bad information.”
Now the DHS instead maintains – without any stated evidence – that “Russian scanning activity… occurred on the California Department of Technology statewide network,” rather than Secretary of State websites.
California’s Secretary of State does not use the Department of Technology to provide IT services for its website, internet-facing applications, or the statewide voter registration database, according to Padilla’s office.
Padilla’s statement added that based on this additional information, “the California Secretary of State elections infrastructure and websites were not hacked or breached by Russian cyber actors.”
As for the Department of Technology allegedly being breached, the office said its security systems were able to block “suspect activity.” However, claims that Russians were behind any such attempt remain unsubstantiated.
Padilla’s statement comes after California – along with 20 other states – was told last week that its systems were targeted last year “by Russian government cyber actors seeking vulnerabilities and access to US election infrastructure.”
The DHS’ mistake in California is the second time in a week that the department’s credibility has come into question, as it was forced to backtrack earlier this week on its claim that Russian hackers attempted to hack Wisconsin’s election infrastructure.
Just as in the case of California, the DHS quickly pointed to another government department which the elusive Russians allegedly tried to hack – the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development.
It is an interesting – and once again unproven – claim, considering the office merely oversees job training and unemployment benefits.
Despite ongoing claims and an investigation into Russian meddling in the US presidential election, no evidence has been provided to support the hysteria.
A congressional investigation into Russia’s alleged meddling in the US election has been dragging on 10 months, with any hard evidence explicitly pointing to the role of Russian authorities yet to be produced.
Moscow has repeatedly denied interfering in the election campaign.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has rebuffed the meddling claims, on one occasion noting that the US is not “a banana republic,” for others to interfere with its people’s choice.
In an interview with filmmaker Oliver Stone in June, Putin instead accused the US of meddling in Russia’s most recent presidential elections in 2012, by campaigning on the side of the Russian opposition.
Moreover, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said in August that there is “no doubt” the US will again try to meddle in the 2018 presidential election.
That same month, US President Donald Trump told a rally in West Virginia that the Russia story is a “total fabrication” and an excuse used by Democrats for the “greatest loss in the history of American politics.”
He said that prosecutors should instead be focused on Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 deleted emails rather than alleged Russian meddling.
Read more:
DHS is paying college students to create extremist propaganda games and videos
MassPrivatel | July 27, 2017
According to EdVenture Partners, college students are being paid to create DHS propaganda videos, games and much more.
Two weeks ago, the University of Maryland won this year’s DHS competition by creating a video game and social media campaign that ‘helps’ people recognize radicalization.
Helps, doesn’t begin to describe what DHS is doing.
College students make DHS propaganda educational tool-kits, apps, etc.
Students, at twenty three universities are being paid $2,000 to make DHS propaganda “mobile apps, cultural activities, videos, campus movements, social campaigns, websites, viral videos, blogs, education tool-kits.”
This is horrifying, DHS is paying colleges to create propaganda yearly.
DHS and the University of Maryland’s (UMD) want students to become participants in their ‘It Takes Just One‘ propaganda movement.
By action, they mean report them to law enforcement and ultimately Fusion Centers.
UMD’s propaganda game claims alt-right people must be dealt with
DHS’s UMD’s ‘Operation Genovese‘ game, gives players a choice between an ‘alt-right’ man and an Islamic woman who has been radicalized by ISIS. The game claims, both of their views and anti-social behavior are an issue. The game says, that both of them MUST be deradiclized or stopped.
The game also claims, they will harm themselves or others unless they’re dealt with.
UMD’s game and ‘movement’ are designed to keep fear alive and report people based on their ideology.
UMD claims, people should share their stories (report) as in ‘See Something, Say Something’ “even if it is not specific to countering violent extremism.” You know, so law enforcement can target innocent people.
‘Not enough data to show Russian link to election’ – Wordfence CEO
RT | January 1, 2017
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS)’s claims that Russia hacked the 2016 US election are based on flimsy evidence, says security expert Mark Maunder.
On December 29, the DHS and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) released a Joint Analysis Report (JAR) put together by the DHS and the FBI that blames Russia for hacking the US presidential election in an operation which they nicknamed GRIZZLY STEPPE. Among other things, the report cites the presence of PHP malware as one of the clues pointing to Russian involvement.
RT talked to Mark Maunder, CEO of internet security company Wordfence, to get his perspective.
“Our field is PHP malware and WordPress security,” Maunder explained. “We protect about two million WordPress websites.”
“The Wordfence team analyzed the PHP malware the DHS and FBI included in their report, and we analyzed the IP addresses. Looking at the PHP malware, they provided a sample, so we used the sample to find the original PHP malware which is actually in some of the attacks we’ve seen on our customer’s websites and that we’ve blocked. And that malware is encrypted, so we had to find some way to decrypt it.
“Once we decrypted it, it showed us the name of the malware and some other information, like the version of the malware. We used that to do a few searches, and we actually found what looks like the source of the malware which is a hacking group that claimed they were based in Ukraine, and they’re distributing versions of that malware which are slightly newer,” he said.
Maunder said the malware isn’t so much a tool for breaking into systems, as one used to control those already compromised.
“The malware is something the attacker would use if they’ve just hacked into a website and they want to have the ability to control that website. In other words, view files, or maybe copy files back and forth and install additional tools – they would use this malware to do that. So, it’s not malware that’s used to infect workstations. It’s sort of used as a step in the process a hacker would use to put something on a website that would then infect workstations,” the security expert explained.
However, the fact that this software was used in no way indicates that Russia interfered, officially or otherwise, in the American presidential elections.
“It’s unfortunate that the report was released on the same day that the White House took action and expelled 35 Russian diplomats from the United States. That, and some of the language in the report, seems to suggest that it is proof that Russia interfered in the 2016 US election.
“What’s actually in the report doesn’t actually include enough data, in our opinion, to show that there’s a clear link that Russia interfered in the US election. What’s actually in the report is indicators of compromise that any systems administrator could use to figure out they’ve been hacked. There’s some stuff in there that’s associated with some previous Russian activity, but it’s not evidence of a Russian link, and I think a lot of people are interpreting it as that. There are tools in the report that are sort of general tools that are used by any hacker, so if you find some of the malware that’s in the report on your network, it doesn’t mean that you were hacked by Russia, and the report doesn’t conclusively prove that Russia interfered in the election. And so, I think it’s being misinterpreted and I think that’s unfortunate,” he said.
Maunder said it is even possible that the whole attack was a false-flag operation of some kind, but he admitted there was no evidence to back this idea so far, either. He conceded, however, that the authorities could have some other information that they have not yet made public.
“A lot of indicators of compromise in this report can be used by anyone, because some of those hacking tools are publicly available. However, if the DHS and FBI have other indicators of compromise that conclusively provide a Russian link, then perhaps that’s what they used to identify the attack and link it to Russia,” he said.
Both the Obama administration and leading members of both the Democratic and Republican parties have accused the Russian government of hacking the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and releasing sensitive documents to WikiLeaks in order to compromise presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Senator John McCain, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has referred to the alleged hack as “an act of war.”
More recently, the Washington Post accused Russian hackers of breaking into the national power grid in Vermont, but the newspaper was soon forced to admit that its allegations were groundless.
Joint FBI-Homeland Security report fails to prove Russians behind Clinton leaks
By Alexander Nercouris | The Duran | December 29, 2016
In conjunction with US President Obama’s announcement of new sanctions against Russia, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have published a 13 page report into the Russian hacking allegations.
I think it is fair to say that a mountain has moved and produced a mouse. To get a sense of the absurdity, consider that the report actually begins with a Disclaimer:
DISCLAIMER: This report is provided “as is” for informational purposes only. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not provide any warranties of any kind regarding any information contained within. DHS does not endorse any commercial product or service referenced in this advisory or otherwise. This document is distributed as TLP:WHITE: Subject to standard copyright rules, TLP:WHITE information may be distributed without restriction. For more information on the Traffic Light Protocol, see https://www.us-cert.gov/tlp. Reference Number: JAR-16-20296 December 29. (bold italics added)
After this unpromising beginning, the report – which goes by the frankly weird title “Grizzly Bear” – provides a summary that reads as follows:
Previous JARs have not attributed malicious cyber activity to specific countries or threat actors. However, public attribution of these activities to RIS is supported by technical indicators from the U.S. Intelligence Community, DHS, FBI, the private sector, and other entities. This determination expands upon the Joint Statement released October 7, 2016, from the Department of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security. This activity by RIS is part of an ongoing campaign of cyber-enabled operations directed at the U.S. government and its citizens. These cyber operations have included spearphishing campaigns targeting government organizations, critical infrastructure entities, think tanks, universities, political organizations, and corporations leading to the theft of information. In foreign countries, RIS actors conducted damaging and/or disruptive cyber-attacks, including attacks on critical infrastructure networks. In some cases, RIS actors masqueraded as third parties, hiding behind false online personas designed to cause the victim to misattribute the source of the attack. This JAR provides technical indicators related to many of these operations, recommended mitigations, suggested actions to take in response to the indicators provided, and information on how to report such incidents to the U.S. Government.
Note that the report is solely concerned with hacking. It does not discuss who provided the DNC or Podesta material to Wikileaks, it does not say that Russian Intelligence carried out the hacking to influence the outcome of the US Presidential election, and nor does it say that Russian intelligence did this in order to swing the election to Donald Trump – all questions concerning which the FBI is known to have doubts. On the contrary, it is careful to say that it is the US government (ie. the Obama administration), not the US intelligence community or the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security, which assesses that the Russians passed the DNC and Podesta material on to Wikileaks for onward publication in the media
The U.S. Government assesses that information was leaked to the press and publicly disclosed. (bold italics added)
The report provides no evidence that the hacking was the work of Russian intelligence agencies. It merely states it as a fact
The U.S. Government confirms that two different RIS actors participated in the intrusion into a U.S. political party.
The two “actors” in question are the two groups of hackers known as Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear. As I have pointed out previously, the claim that these two groups of hackers act for Russian intelligence has so far been based purely on inference, with no hard facts behind it.
There is nothing in this report that changes that, or which substantiates this claim, and nothing in the report that remotely resembles a hard fact to support it. On the contrary as the paragraph I have quoted above shows, the claim is still based purely on inference . That the claim is entirely inferential, and may be based on completely false reasoning, is it turns out also the opinion of an expert in this field.
The rest of the report – which is to say nearly all of it – is taken up with technical information intended to confirm the existence of the hacking – something which no-one denies happened – and various suggestions for ways to mitigate against such hacking in the future. Whilst this is no doubt helpful, it is hardly the issue under discussion. Frankly it looks like padding, made to make the report look longer and more substantial than it actually is.
Even the Guardian has been forced to admit that this is thin stuff.
Security experts on Twitter criticised the government report as too basic. Jonathan Zdziarski, a highly regarded security researcher, compared the joint action report to a child’s activity center.
Tom Killalea, former vice-president of security at Amazon and a Capital One board member, wrote: “Russian attack on DNC similar to so many other attacks in past 15yrs. Big question: Why such poor incident response?”
If this is the sum total of the evidence upon which the Obama administration is claiming that the Russians were behind the leak of the DNC and Podesta emails, and that they did this to swing the election to Donald Trump, then this “evidence” in no way does that. Indeed if anything what the report shows is how confected this whole scandal actually is.
I would add that the complete absence of enthusiasm on the part of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security for the Obama administration’s attempts to use the claims of Russian hacking for its own political ends shines through the whole report. Anyone with experience of such reports can spot it immediately. This is very much a report produced to order, which does the absolute minimum it can get away with in order to appear to comply with the order.
Interestingly the NSA, the branch of US intelligence which has presumably the greatest expertise in the area, and which has the most information about it, is not a co-author of this report. I wonder why?
A Digital 9/11 If Trump Wins
By Finian Cunningham | SPUTNIK | November 6, 2016
There are disturbing signs that a digital 9/11 terror attack is being readied for election day in the US to ensure that Donald Trump does not win.
Such an attack – involving widespread internet and power outage – would have nothing to do with Russia or any other foreign state. It would be furnished by agencies of the US Deep State in a classic “false flag” covert manner. But the resulting chaos and “assault on American democracy” will be conveniently blamed on Russia.
That presents a double benefit. Russia would be further demonized as a foreign aggressor “justifying” even harsher counter measures by America and its European allies against Moscow.
Secondly, a digital attack on America’s presidential election day this week, would allow the Washington establishment to pronounce the result invalidated due to “Russian cyber subversion”. That option stands to be invoked if the ballot results showed Republican candidate Donald Trump as the imminent victor.
Democrat rival Hillary Clinton is the clear choice for the White House among the Washington establishment. She has the backing of Wall Street finance capital, the corporate media, the military-industrial complex and the Deep State agencies of the Pentagon and CIA. The fix has been in for months to get her elected by the powers-that-be owing to her well-groomed obedience to American imperialist interests.
The billionaire property magnate Trump is too much of a maverick to be entrusted with the White House, as far as the American ruling elite are concerned. The trouble is, however, that despite the massive campaign to discredit Trump his poll support remains stubbornly close to Clinton’s.
The latter has been tainted with too many scandals involving allegations of sleazy dealings with Wall Street, so-called pay-for-play favors while she was former Secretary of State, and her penchant for inciting overseas wars for regime change using jihadist terrorist foot-soldiers.
As one headline from McClatchy News only days ago put it: “Majority of voters think Clinton acted illegally, new poll finds”.
Trump is right. The US presidential election is “rigged”. Despite handwringing condemnations by pundits, it seems obvious that the system is heavily stacked against any candidate who does not conform with the interests of the establishment. The massive media-orchestrated campaign against Trump is testimony to that.
But such is popular disgust with Clinton, her sleaze-ball husband Bill and the Washington establishment that her victory is far from certain. Indeed in the last week before voting this Tuesday various polls are showing a neck-and-neck race with even some indicators putting the Republican narrowly ahead.
Over the weekend, the Washington Post, which has been one of the main media outlets panning Trump on a daily basis, reported this: “The electoral map is definitely moving in Trump’s direction”.
This is where a possible Deep State contingency plan is being readied to scupper a shock win by Trump.
In recent days, American media are reporting a virtual state of emergency by the US government and its security agencies to thwart what they claim are Russian efforts to incite “election day cyber mayhem”.
In one “exclusive” report by the NBC network on November 3, it was claimed that: “The US government believes hackers from Russia or elsewhere may try to undermine next week’s presidential election and is mounting an unprecedented effort to counter their cyber meddling.”
On November 4, the Washington Post reported: “Intelligence officials warn of Russian mischief in election and beyond.”
Apparently, the emergency security response is being coordinated by the White House, the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, the National Security Agency and other elements of the Defense Department, according to NBC.
These claims of Russian state hackers interfering in the US political system are not new. Last month, the Obama administration officially accused Moscow of this alleged malfeasance.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has lambasted American claims that his country is seeking to disrupt the presidential elections as “hysterical nonsense”, aimed at distracting the electorate from far more deep-rooted internal problems.
The Obama administration and its state security agencies have not provided one iota of evidence to support their allegations against Russia. Nevertheless the repeated charges have a tendency to stick.
The Clinton campaign has for months been accusing Trump of being a “pro-Russian stooge”. Her campaign has also claimed that Russian hackers have colluded with the whistleblower organization Wikileaks to release thousands of private emails damaging Clinton with the intention of swaying the election in favor of Trump.
Wikileaks’ director Julian Assange and the Russian government have both rejected any suggestion that they are somehow collaborating, or that they are working to get Trump elected.
But on the eve of the election, the US authorities are recklessly pushing hysteria that Russia is trying to subvert American democracy. Michael McFaul, the former US ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014 is quoted as saying: “The Russians are in an offensive mode and the US is working on strategies to respond to that, and at the highest levels.”
NBC cites a senior Obama administration official as saying that the Russians “want to sow as much confusion as possible and undermine our process”.
Ominously, the news outlet adds that “steps are being taken to prepare for worst-case scenarios, including a cyber-attack that shuts down part of the power grid or the internet.”
Nearly two weeks ago, on October 21-22, the US was hit with a widespread internet outage. The actors behind the “distributed denial of service” were not identified, but the disruption was nationwide and it temporarily disabled many popular consumer services. One former official at the US Department of Homeland Security described the event as having “all the signs of what would be considered a drill”. Could that cyber-attack have been the work of US Deep State agencies as a dress rehearsal for an even bigger outage planned for November 8 – election day?
The Washington establishment wants Clinton over Trump. She’s the marionette of choice for their strategic interests, including a more hostile foreign policy towards Russia in Syria, Ukraine and elsewhere.
But Trump might just snatch an election day victory from the jaws of defeat.
In which case, the shadowy forces that really rule America will trigger a “digital 9/11”. It’s not difficult to imagine the chaos and mayhem from internet blackout, power, transport, banking and communications paralysis – even for just a temporary period of a few hours.
Months of fingering Russia as a destabilizing foreign enemy intent on interfering in US democracy to get “Comrade Trump” into the White House would then serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy. In that event, the US authorities could plausibly move to declare the election of Donald J Trump null and void.
In fact the scenario could be contrived to a far more serious level than merely suspending the election result. The US authorities could easily feign that a state of emergency is necessary in order to “defend national security”.
That contingency catapults beyond “rigged politics”. It is a green light for a coup d’état by the Deep State forces who found that they could not win through the “normal” rigging methods.
US government officially accuses Russia of political hacks
RT | October 7, 2016
The US intelligence community is “confident” that Russia is behind the recent hacks of US officials’ and organizations’ emails, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of National Intelligence said.
According to the joint statement issued Friday, “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.”
“We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities,” says the statement, posted by the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
The thefts and disclosures are “intended to interfere with the US election process,” the statement said, adding that “the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia” to influence public opinion.
External attempts to access election systems in several states“in most cases originated from servers operated by a Russian company,” the US officials said. “However, we are not now in a position to attribute this activity to the Russian Government.”
It would be “extremely difficult” for anyone to alter ballot counts or election results through cyberattacks, DHS and DNI said.
DHS has established an Election Infrastructure Cybersecurity Working Group “with experts across all levels of government” to raise awareness of cybersecurity risks, and urges state and local election officials to seek cybersecurity assistance from the federal authorities.
This is the first time the US government has officially accused Russia of cyberattacks related to the US presidential campaign. The Democratic National Committee blamed Russia for the hack of their email servers in June, though a lone hacker going by the name ‘Guccifer 2.0’ claimed responsibility and denied any ties to Russia.
The statement from Homeland Security and DNI comes just hours after Secretary of State John Kerry said that Russian actions in Syria “beg for an appropriate investigation of war crimes.” Moscow has dismissed Kerry’s words as “propaganda” intended to distract from US failure to implement the Syrian ceasefire agreement.
US cybersecurity experts claim that six out of eight IP addresses used by the DNC hackers were hosted on King Servers, a Russian provider. Vladimir Fomenko, owner of the company, told RT that he was never contacted by US law enforcement, however.
“We are ready to assist in probing this crime and consulting the FBI or other services on such issues. Hackers are a common threat and we must fight it together,” Fomenko said.
“If the FBI asks, we are ready to supply the IP addresses, the logs,” he said. “Nobody is asking… It’s like nobody wants to sort this out.”
Homeland Security detains US journalist returning from Beirut, tries to confiscate phones
RT | July 22, 2016
A Wall Street Journal reporter returning from Beirut was taken into holding, grilled and asked to hand over her phones by the Department of Homeland Security at Los Angeles International Airport.
When the journalist, Maria Abi-Habib, returned from Beirut, it was another ordinary work trip. But after touching down at LAX in Los Angeles, she was treated as a dangerous suspect by the service, which now enjoys broad authority at airports.
She outlined the ordeal in a Facebook post, largely focusing on the dangers of the loss of privacy and the risk to journalistic work emerging out of the DHS practice.
As soon as she joined the line for immigration, a friendly officer walked up, giddily saying “Oh, there you are. I was trying to recognize you from your picture. I’m here to help you get through the line.” The friendly greeting by the female agent was only offset by the fact of how much she already knew. As Abi-Habib explains:
“The DHS agent went on to say she was there to help me navigate immigration because I am a journalist with The Wall Street Journal and have travelled to many dangerous places that are on the US’ radar for terrorism. She independently knew who I worked for and my Twitter account, countries I’d reported from (like Iraq) and even recent articles I’d written — I told her nothing about myself.”
But to a journalist already on the US Immigration list, this was unsurprising. Abi-Habib was put on the list precisely because of her line of work, and it had previously served to help her navigate customs more quickly.
But this time was different. After being escorted to baggage claim, she was led into a closed-off section of LAX into a room, where another DHS agent was already waiting.
“They grilled me for an hour – asking me about the years I lived in the US, when I moved to Beirut and why, who lives at my in-laws’ house in LA and numbers for the groom and bride whose wedding I was attending.”
Although she took this all in high spirits – given her previous work experience with security checks – Abi-Habib’s story quickly took a darker turn when the DHS officers asked her for her two mobile phones, saying they needed to “collect information,” though didn’t say about what.
Abi-Habib tried to explain that this not only violated her First Amendment rights, but exposed the professional sources she was protecting as a journalist. Although the words are nothing out of the ordinary for the profession, the DHS officer questioning her shot back: “Did you just admit you collect information for foreign governments?”
Shocked, Abi-Habib replied: “No, that’s exactly not what I just said,” as she proceeded to protest the confiscation of the phones.
That is when the real shock came. Abi-Habib was promptly handed a DHS document, which outlined that the service could deprive her of her rights as a US citizen at any border, and that the authority extended up to 100 miles (160km) from the border inside the actual country.
“So, all of NY city for instance,” she writes. “If they forgot to ask you at JFK airport for your phones, but you’re having a drink in Manhattan the next day, you technically fall under this authority. And because they are acting under the pretence to protect the US from terrorism, you have to give it up.”
Abi-Habib tried a different tactic – revealing that the phones were the property of the Wall Street Journal, and that the service would need to contact the paper’s attorneys to obtain permission. At that point things became potentially even more dangerous. The DHS now accused her of impeding the investigation.
That is “a dangerous accusation,” she wrote, “as at that point, they can use force.”
“She said she had to speak to her supervisor about my lack of cooperation and would return,” she wrote, as another officer remained.
The female officer returned 30 minutes later and said Abi-Habib was free to go.
“I have no idea why they wanted my phones – it could have been a way for them to download my contacts. Or maybe they expect [sic] me of terrorism or sympathizing with terrorists – although my profile wouldn’t fit, considering I am named Maria Teresa, and for a variety of other reasons including my small child.”
The DHS’ expanded powers are coming under increasing scrutiny in an age when all of one’s most private information is carried in their back pocket – not to mention sensitive work-related information. But as Abi-Habib later found out, the DHS was indeed perfectly within its right to deprive a citizen of their rights for up to 100 miles within US borders – a law that was “quietly passed” in 2013.
“This legislation also circumvents the Fourth Amendment that protects Americans’ privacy and prevents searches and seizures without a proper warrant,” she explains, adding that using encryption is now practically a must – although even then is not a guarantee, seeing as some apps will reveal the identity of the recipient, if not the chat history.
“Never download anything or even open a link from a friend or source that looks suspicious. This may be malware, meaning that they have downloaded software on your phone that will be able to circumvent the powers of encryption,” Abi-Habib warns after speaking to an encryption expert.
She also advises to “travel naked” – an expression which a tech-savvy acquaintance used. That means not taking a sensitive phone with you – only the SIM card – and using it in a ‘clean’ phone. All sensitive numbers should also be written on paper.
Abi-Habib’s story follows a wave of controversy over special powers now afforded to US agencies at the border. A new proposal to ask visitors for their “social media identifier” could help border agents search your background without having to go to the National Security Agency (NSA), it turned out late June.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which is part of the DHS, believes having this “identifier” could help it find “possible nefarious activity and connections.”
The public consultation process for that proposal will expire August 22. If successful, the social media information would be gathered in addition to the numerous database checks, fingerprinting, and face-to-interviews that already take place. How it would be processed is not revealed in the proposal and providing the information would be voluntary.
Read more:
Social profiling: US border agents want to know what you’re saying on Facebook & Twitter
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From the Archives
Examining the Foreknowledge of Building 7’s Destruction
By Dennis McMahon, J.D., L.L.M. – Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth
… If the collapse warnings were derived from vague worries and concerns, as claimed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the warnings would not have been precise. A complete collapse, such as happened to WTC 1, WTC 2, and WTC 7 on 9/11, was unknown – unless the building was being brought down by controlled demolition. That is why FDNY member James McGlynn could say on 9/11, in reference to one of the Towers, “Any time I’ve heard of a collapse, it was never an entire building like this turned out to be.” (See MacQueen’s “Waiting for Seven‚” at page 21.) Nevertheless, somehow, many people knew in advance that WTC 7 would suffer an unprecedented collapse. Which begs the question, “How did they know?” Consider the following exchange from the FDNY oral histories:
- Q. “Were you there when building 7 came down in the afternoon?”
- A: “Yes”
- Q. “You were still there?”
- A. “Yes, so basically they measured out how far the building was going to come, so we knew exactly where we could stand.”
- Q. “So they just put you in a safe area, safe enough for when that building came down?“
- A. “Five blocks. Five blocks away. We still could see. Exactly right on point, the cloud stopped right there.”(See MacQueen’s “Waiting for Seven…” at page 8.)
It is quite remarkable that a debris cloud estimate could be so precise for a collapse that was supposedly caused by unforeseen and unplanned events. Had Building 7 “tipped over,” which would have been more realistic, given the structural damage that was supposed to be the reason for its collapse, the building could actually have ended up crushing several other tall buildings, creating a destruction zone much farther away from the building. … Read full article
Aletho News Original Content
Three Mile Island, Global Warming and the CIA
By Aletho News | January 9, 2012
This article will examine some of the connections between the US and UK National Security apparatus and the appearance of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory beginning after the accident at Three Mile Island. … continue
~
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