3/8/17, "Fresh Doubts about Russian ‘Hacking’," Robert Parry, Consortium News
"Exclusive: The gauzy allegations of Russia “hacking” the Democrats to elect Donald Trump just got hazier with WikiLeaks’ new revelations about CIA cyber-spying and the capability to pin the blame on others, reports Robert Parry....
WikiLeaks’ disclosure of documents revealing CIA cyber-spying capabilities underscores why much more skepticism should have been applied to the U.S. intelligence community’s allegations about Russia “hacking” last year’s American presidential election. It turns out that the CIA maintains a library of foreign malware that could be used to pin the blame for a “hack” on another intelligence service.
That revelation emerged from documents that WikiLeaks published on Tuesday from a CIA archive that WikiLeaks said had apparently been passed around within a community of former U.S. government hackers and contractors before one of them gave WikiLeaks some of the material.
The documents revealed that the CIA can capture the content of encrypted Internet and cell-phone messages by grabbing the material in the fraction of a second before the words are put through encryption.
Another program called “Weeping Angel” can hack Samsung “smart” TVs with built-in Internet connections, allowing the CIA and British intelligence to covertly use the TVs as listening devices even when they appear to be turned off.
Besides the 1984-ish aspects of these reported capabilities – Orwell’s dystopia also envisioned TVs being used to spy on people in their homes – the WikiLeaks’ disclosures add a new layer of mystery to whether the Russians were behind the “hacks” of the Democratic Party or whether Moscow was framed.
For instance, the widely cited Russian fingerprints on the “hacking” attacks – such as malware associated with the suspected Russian cyber-attackers APT 28 (also known as “Fancy Bear”); some Cyrillic letters: and the phrase “Felix Edmundovich,” a reference to Dzerzhinsky, the founder of a Bolsheviks’ secret police – look less like proof of Russian guilt than they did earlier.
Or put differently — based on the newly available CIA material — the possibility that these telltale signs were planted to incriminate Moscow doesn’t sound as farfetched as it might have earlier.
A former U.S. intelligence officer, cited by The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, acknowledged that the CIA’s “Umbrage” library of foreign hacking tools could “be used to mask a U.S. operation and make it appear that it was carried out by another country….That could be accomplished by inserting malware components from, say, a known Chinese, Russian or Iranian hacking operation into a U.S. one.”
While that possibility in no way clears Moscow in the case of the Democratic “hack,” it does inject new uncertainty into the “high confidence” that President Obama’s intelligence community expressed in its assessment of Russian culpability. If the CIA had this capability to plant false leads in the data, so too would other actors, both government and private, to cover their own tracks.
Dubious Forensics
Another problem with the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment is that the forensics were left to private contractors working for the Democrats, not conducted independently by U.S. government experts.
That gap in the evidentiary trail widens when one notes that CrowdStrike, the Democratic Party’s consultant, offered contradictory commentary about the skills of the hackers.
CrowdStrike praised the hackers’ tradecraft as “superb, operational security second to none” and added: “we identified advanced methods consistent with nation-state level capabilities including deliberate targeting and ‘access management’ tradecraft — both groups were constantly going back into the environment to change out their implants, modify persistent methods, move to new Command and Control channels and perform other tasks to try to stay ahead of being detected.”
In other words, CrowdStrike cited the sophistication of the tradecraft as proof of a state-sponsored cyber-attack, yet it was the sloppiness of the tradecraft that supposedly revealed the Russian links, i.e. the old malware connections, the Cyrillic letters and the Dzerzhinsky reference.
As Sam Biddle wrote for The Intercept, “Would a group whose ‘tradecraft is superb’ with ‘operational security second to none’ really leave behind the name of a Soviet spy chief imprinted on a document it sent to American journalists? Would these groups really be dumb enough to leave cyrillic comments on these documents? Would these groups that ‘constantly [go] back into the environment to change out their implants, modify persistent methods, move to new Command and Control channels’ get caught because they precisely didn’t make sure not to use IP addresses they’d been associated [with] before?
“It’s very hard to buy the argument that the Democrats were hacked by one of the most sophisticated, diabolical foreign intelligence services in history, and that we know this because they screwed up over and over again.”
Sources and Methods
The WikiLeaks’ disclosures on Tuesday also demonstrate that the pro-transparency Web site has a well-placed source with access to sensitive U.S. intelligence data.
That reinforces the suggestion from WikiLeaks’ associate, former British Ambassador Craig Murray, that the emails purloined from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta originated from U.S. intelligence intercepts and were then leaked by an American insider to WikiLeaks, not obtained via a “hack” directed by the Russian government.
Podesta’s association with the international lobbying firm, the Podesta Group, could justify U.S. intelligence monitoring his communications as a way to glean information about the strategies of Saudi Arabia and other foreign clients.
Murray suggested that the earlier WikiLeaks’ release of Democratic National Committee emails came from a Democratic insider, not from Russia. In addition, WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange has denied that Russia was the source of either batch of Democratic emails, although he refused to say who was.
Of course, it would be possible that Russia used American cutouts to launder the emails without WikiLeaks knowing where the material originated. And some cyber-experts, who were cited in press reports about the new WikiLeaks’ disclosures on Tuesday, speculated, without evidence, that perhaps Russia was the source of them, too.
Still, there are now fresh reasons to doubt the Official Narrative that Russia “hacked” into Democratic emails in a covert operation intended to throw the U.S. election to Donald Trump.
Those doubts already existed – or should have – because the U.S. intelligence community refused to release any hard proof that the Russians were responsible for the purloined Democratic emails.
On Jan. 6, just one day after Director of National Intelligence James Clapper vowed to go to the greatest possible lengths to supply the public with the evidence behind the accusations, his office released a 25-page report that contained no direct evidence that Russia delivered hacked emails from the DNC and Podesta to WikiLeaks.
The DNI report amounted to a compendium of reasons to suspect that Russia was the source of the information – built largely on the argument that Russia had a motive for doing so because of its disdain for Democratic nominee Clinton and the potential for friendlier relations with Republican nominee Trump.
A Big Risk
But the DNI’s case, as presented, was one-sided, ignoring other reasons why the Russians would not have taken the risk.
For instance, while it is true that many Russian officials, including President Putin, considered Clinton to be a threat to worsen the already frayed relationship between the two nuclear superpowers, the report ignores the downside for Russia trying to interfere with the U.S. election campaign and then failing to stop Clinton, which looked like the most likely outcome until Election Night.
If Russia had accessed the DNC and Podesta emails and slipped them to WikiLeaks for publication, Putin would have to think that the National Security Agency, with its exceptional ability to track electronic communications around the world, might well have detected the maneuver and would have informed Clinton.
So, on top of Clinton’s well-known hawkishness, Putin would have risked handing the expected incoming president a personal reason to take revenge on him and his country. Historically, Russia has been very careful in such situations, holding its intelligence collections for internal purposes only and not sharing them with the public.
While it is conceivable that Putin decided to take this extraordinary risk in this case – despite the widely held view that Clinton was a shoo-in to defeat Trump – an objective report would have examined this counter argument for him not doing so.
But the DNI report was not driven by a desire to be evenhanded; it was, in effect, a prosecutor’s brief, albeit one that lacked any real evidence that the accused is guilty.
Though it’s impossible for an average U.S. citizen to know precisely what the U.S. intelligence community may have in its secret files, some former NSA officials who are familiar with the agency’s eavesdropping capabilities say Washington’s lack of certainty suggests that the NSA does not possess such evidence.
That’s the view of William Binney, who retired as NSA’s technical director of world military and geopolitical analysis and who created many of the collection systems still used by NSA.
Binney, in an article co-written with former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, said, “With respect to the alleged interference by Russia and WikiLeaks in the U.S. election, it is a major mystery why U.S. intelligence feels it must rely on ‘circumstantial evidence,’ when it has NSA’s vacuum cleaner sucking up hard evidence galore. What we know of NSA’s capabilities shows that the email disclosures were from leaking, not hacking.”
Released last summer — around the time of the Democratic National Convention — the DNC emails revealed senior party officials showing a preference for former Secretary of State Clinton over Sen. Bernie Sanders although the DNC was supposed to remain neutral.
Later in the campaign, the Podesta leak exposed the contents of speeches that Clinton gave to Wall Street banks, which she wanted to keep secret from the American voters, and the existence of pay-to-play features of the Clinton Foundation.
News articles based on the WikiLeaks’ material embarrassed the DNC and the Clinton campaign, but the rupture of secrets was not considered a very important factor in Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump. Clinton herself blamed that surprising outcome on FBI Director James Comey’s last-minute decision to briefly reopen the investigation into her improper use of a private server for her emails as Secretary of State.
After Comey’s move, Clinton’s poll numbers cratered and she seemed incapable of reversing the trend. More generally, Clinton faced criticism for running an inept campaign that included her insulting many Trump supporters by calling them “deplorables” and failing to articulate a clear, hopeful vision for the future.
However, after the shock of Trump’s stunning victory began to wear off, the outgoing Obama administration and angry Democrats began singling out Putin as a chief culprit in Clinton’s defeat.
Despite the appearance that they were scapegoating America’s old adversary – the Russkies – liberals and Democrats have used the allegations to energize their base and put the young Trump administration on the defensive, even though hard evidence to support the accusations is still lacking.
The liberals and Democrats also don’t seem to care that they are using these dubious allegations to ratchet up tensions between the world’s two nuclear superpowers,
thus putting the future of the world at risk."
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Among comments
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"The Democrats and Republicans ran between them close to 2 dozen establishment candidates, most of whom acquiesced to policies that saddled the country with endless regime change wars and a near catastrophic financial meltdown that had devastating effects on millions of people."...
3/8/17, "evelync, 5:48pm
The Democrats and Republicans ran between them close to 2 dozen
establishment candidates, most of whom acquiesced to policies that
saddled the country with endless regime change wars and a near
catastrophic financial meltdown that had devastating effects on millions
of people. That same government without a peep from most of these
candidates bailed out the banks but hung middle America out to dry with
lost jobs from unfair trade practices and lost homes from ruthless
foreclosures. Both Party’s establishment candidates were therefore not
trusted.
In the end, the Democratic Party had succeeded in knee capping Independent Bernie Sanders, (at heart really a “New Deal democrat”) who had earned the trust of most people across party lines whether they agreed with his policies or not. Hillary Clinton as shown by the polls was not well liked or trusted and seen as a supporter of unfair trade deals and unscrupulous bankers who played fast and loose with a deregulated – on her and Bill’s watch – financial market....
The polls told us that Bernie could have beaten Trump in November. We don’t know, we will never know for sure, how the election would have gone if the leaks never took place. But Keith Ellison, over a year before the election, was warning that Trump could win the Republican nomination and that the Democrats should watch out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHkPadFK34o
The Democrats were in denial over Trump and payed no attention to the polls that said Hillary could not beat Trump but Bernie could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahkMA6JPOHU
So, it’s disconcerting that they are now pushing so hard to avoid admitting their mistakes and are instead pushing the Russian narrative instead of acknowledging where they went wrong.
The election could well have been decided long before the leaks came out, although the leaks did help confirm peoples’ existing opinions about Secretary Clinton.
It was discouraging, at the White House Correspondents Dinner, how President Obama acknowledged that his preferred candidate Secretary Clinton’s candidacy was “trudging up HILL”. He should have payed attention to his own prescient joke."
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My comment to the above comment: Bernie was never a serious candidate. That was obvious if you saw him completely melt in front of Hillary at one of their early televised meetings. Standing next to each other, he gushed to her that he was tired of people talking about her emails. She lit up, smiled lovingly at him and said, thank-you. The Democrats needed somebody--anybody--to appear to be "running against" Hillary for the nomination. That's all Bernie was. People may have found him likeable, but he wasn't universally "trusted" as you suggest. When it came time to battle the globalist labor unions (that pretend to be for US workers) on anti-TPP trade deal language in Democrat platform meetings--after Bernie had lost the nomination but could've shown some fight for his supporters, he was completely ineffective:
7/9/16, "Bernie Sanders Defeated on Trade in Democratic Platform Fight," NBC News, Alex Seitz-Wald, Orlando, Fla.
"In a major defeat during an otherwise fruitful process for him, Bernie Sanders failed to get strong language opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership inserted in the draft Democratic platform at a party meeting here Saturday.
Instead, the committee approved an amendment backed by a large swath of labor unions that called for tough restrictions on trade deals, but did not explicitly oppose the trade pact with a dozen Pacific Rim nations (TPP)....
"We've had no speech here in favor of TPP, but we can't bring ourselves to say we oppose TPP," said Sanders delegate Robert Kraig.
But it was clear as a string of trade union presidents lined up at the microphone to oppose the Sanders amendments that his forces were outmatched....
Both the Clinton campaign and the DNC were whipping members to oppose stronger anti-TPP language, as a courtesy to Obama."...
Continuing: Anti TPP was the one major issue in which Bernie's position actually did cross party lines or at least was also favored by Trump voters, but he showed no fight in the end.
Further on Bernie, no one in their right mind at this late date "respects" anyone who promotes the now $2 billion a day climate scare industry. US taxpayers have been forced to massively fund the global climate science industry since 1990 when George HW Bush set up the USGCRP in the executive branch on top of assigning 13 federal agencies with climate endeavors:
"The Government’s Role in Climate Science Funding...[is] embedded in scores of agencies and programs scattered throughout the Executive Branch of the US government. While such agency activities related to climate science have received funding for many years as components of their mission statements, the pursuit of an integrated national agenda... took a critical step with passage of the Global Change Research Act of 1990. This Act established institutional structures operating out of the White House."...
(continuing): This theft has been supported by the entire political class every day since then. US taxpayers have been beaten and brutalized daily to create a $2 billion a day industry about something that doesn't exist (the urgent need to reduce global CO2 to zero)--dreamed up out of thin air--although it's a perfect weapon to demonize Americans and call them murderers. This behavior of the US political class toward its citizens fits Lemkin's definition of genocide (scroll down). We must in perpetuity admit we're bad and must turn over our wages to global thugs as "reparations" for our alleged climate harm--though no amount we pay can ever be enough. Even if US CO2 went to zero, it wouldn't make a dent in global CO2 because of China's large contribution. So, the word "respect" can't be used about Bernie Sanders since he hops on the global warming gravy train that robs from the poor and gives to the rich. As to Obama, what in the world makes you think he'd ever help you or the country out? After his 8 years of hob nobbing with coastal elites what does the Democrat Party stand for? Globalist profiteers, open borders, unmarried women, transgender bathrooms, non-whites, violent riots, and anarchy. Not enough to carry a major national political party. As to the GOP E, by the 2014 midterms it had perfected the practice of being a "political party" that had no agenda:
"The Republican Party purposely stood mute nationally...It is rare that a political party running for office in a midterm election not standing for anything ends up with a mandate , and they have one, and it is the biggest and perhaps the most important mandate a political party has had in the recent era."...11/5/2014, Rush Limbaugh
and
"Because Republicans didn't run on an agenda other than antipathy toward all things Obama, they created a policy vacuum — and it’s about to be filled by a swirl of competing, and contradictory, proposals....That’s the consequence of an agenda-free campaign: a majority without a mission."...11/4/2014, Washington Post, Dana Milbank
(continuing): Actually, they had an agenda but couldn't admit it, being that it was exactly the same agenda as democrats: extreme globalism, open borders, massive free trade deals, and endless foreign wars.
Half of America--Republican voters, many independents, and disaffected democrats--had no political party that reflected their views. The result was the desperately needed hostile takeover of the Republican party by Donald Trump:
"Donald Trump became the presumptive GOP nominee...in a system where the elites of both parties are, as if by rote, extreme globalists....On the triad of trade, immigration, and foreign policy, these voters are nationalist, not globalist—they would limit America’s intervention in foreign conflicts and subject the importation of products and people from the rest of the world to a more rigorous is-it-good-for-us test. (And by “us” they mean themselves, not the Fortune 500.)...
For Trump and his voters, the “Reaganite” basket of so-called "conservative" issues—free trade, high immigration, tax cuts for those with high incomes and entitlement cuts for the middle class—was irrelevant or actually undesirable."...6/27/2016, "Why Trump Wins," "He knows border wars have replaced culture wars." The American Conservative, by
(continuing): What are you going to do about the Democrat Party's super delegates? How are you going to get the Democrat Party to give up even half of them? The GOP E has all kinds of delegates, back room deals, and dirty tricksters popping up out of the woodwork to prevent voters from getting the candidate they want. At least in one national election, their behavior resulted in Donald Trump. Hillary vs Bernie in 2016 brought the super delegate scam to light. Since the party won't give them up, what are Democrat voters going to do about it?
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Citation: Massive US taxpayer funding of the global climate science industry began in 1990 when George HW Bush institutionalized it in the White House and throughout 13 federal agencies:
3/6/2015, "Causes and consequences of the climate science boom," William Butos and Thomas McQuade
"Funding appears to be driving the science rather than the other way around."
"2. By any standards, what we have documented here is a massive funding drive, highlighting the patterns of climate science Rand D as funded and directed only by the Executive Branch and the various agencies that fall within its purview."...
More from the paper:
"1. The Government’s Role in Climate Science Funding...[is] embedded in scores of agencies and programs scattered throughout the Executive Branch of the US government. While such agency activities related to climate science have received funding for many years as components of their mission statements, the pursuit of an integrated national agenda to study climate change and implement policy initiatives took a critical step with passage of the Global Change Research Act of 1990. This Act established institutional structures operating out of the White House to develop and oversee the implementation of a National Global Change Research Plan and created the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) to coordinate the climate change research activities of Executive Departments and agencies.[33] As of 2014, the coordination of climate change-related activities resides largely in the President’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, which houses several separate offices, including the offices of Environment and Energy, Polar Sciences, Ocean Sciences, Clean Energy and Materials R&D, Climate Adaptation and Ecosystems, National Climate Assessment, and others. The Office of the President also maintains the National Science and Technology Council, which oversees the Committee on Environment, Natural Resources, and Sustainability and its Subcommittee on Climate Change Research. The Subcommittee is charged with the responsibility of planning and coordinating with the interagency USGCRP. Also, the Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy is housed within the President’s Domestic Policy Council. While Congress authorizes Executive branch budgets, the priorities these departments and agencies follow are set by the White House. As expressed in various agency and Executive Branch strategic plans, these efforts have been recently organized around four components comprising (1) climate change research and education, (2) emissions reduction through “clean” energy technologies and investments, (3) adaptation to climate change, and (4) international climate change leadership.[36]....By any of these measures, the scale of climate science R&D has increased substantially since 2001. Perhaps, though, the largest funding increases have occurred in developing new technologies and tax subsidies. As can be seen from Table 1, federal dollars to develop and implement “clean energy technologies” have increased from $1.7 billion in 2001 to $5.8 billion in 2013, while energy tax subsidies have increased from zero in 2001 and 2002 to $13 billion in 2013, with the largest increases happening since 2010. The impact on scientific research of government funding is not just a matter of the amounts but also of the concentration of research monies that arises from the focus a single source can bring to bear on particular kinds of scientific research. Government is that single source and has Big Player effects because it has access to a deep pool of taxpayer (and, indeed, borrowed and created) funds combined with regulatory and enforcement powers which necessarily place it on a different footing from other players and institutions. Notwithstanding the interplay of rival interests within the government and the separation of powers among the different branches, there is an important sense in which government’s inherent need to act produces a particular set of decisions that fall within a relatively narrow corridor of ends to which it can concentrate substantial resources.
2. By any standards, what we have documented here is a massive funding drive, highlighting the patterns of climate science RandD as funded and directed only by the Executive Branch and the various agencies that fall within its purview.[40] To put its magnitude into some context, the $9.3 billion funding requested for climate science RandD in 2013 is about one-third of the total amount appropriated for all 27 National Institutes of Health in the same year,[41] yet it is more than enough to sustain a science boom. Its directional characteristic, concentrated as it has been on R&D premised on the controversial issue of the actual sensitivity of climate to human-caused emissions, has gone hand in hand with the IPCC’s expressions of increasing confidence in the AGW hypothesis and increasingly shrill claims of impending disaster.
3. The recent pattern of federal climate science funding, moving toward emphasis on the development of technologies and their subsidization through the tax system, suggests that climate change funding has become more tightly connected to agencies like the Department of Energy, NASA, the Department of Commerce (NOAA), EPA, and cross-cutting projects and programs involving multiple agencies under integrating and coordinating agencies, like the USGCRP, lodged within the Executive branch. The allocations of budgets within these agencies are more directly determined and implemented by Administration priorities and policies. We note that the traditional role of NSF in supporting basic science based on a system of merit awards provided (despite some clear imperfections) certain advantages with regard to generating impartial science. In contrast, even a casual perusal of current agency documents, such as The National Science and Technology Council’s The National Global Change Research Plan 2012-2021, shows that those driving this movement make no pretense as to their premises and starting points.[39]
4. To be sure, the very opaqueness of these allocations and their actual use only provides for “ball park” estimates. However, we believe that the results presented in Table 3 come closer to a useful accounting than what previously has been provided. We have combined data from Leggett et al. (2013) and the AAAS Reports for Fiscal Years 2012 and 2013 (the only years for which the AAAS provides detailed budgetary data for climate science R&D and climate-related funding). This constrains Table 3 to including data only from 2010 through 2013. We have adjusted budgetary data and categorized it in light of discussion points 1-5 above. Note that the estimated aggregate expenditures for climate science and climate-related funding (excluding tax subsidies) from 2010-2013 in Table 3 are about twice that of the Leggett findings.
5.5 Funds administered by the Treasury Department in Table 2 are credit lines and loans channeled through the World Bank earmarked for international organizations to finance clean technologies and sustainable practices; consequently such funds would also more accurately be considered as climate-related sustainability and adaptation....
8. This summary and the detail in Table 1, however, do not capture the full scale of federal funding for climate science R&D. Two complications must be considered to capture a more accurate estimate. First, the entries in the first row of Table 1 for climate science only refer to monies administered by the Executive branch via the office of the USGCRP and does not include all climate-related R&D in the federal budget. For example, the entry in Table 1 for the USGCRP in 2011 is just under $2.5 billion; yet the actual budget expenditures for climate science-related R&D as calculated by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) total about $16.1 billion.[38] In addition, since USGCRP funding is comprised of monies contributed from the authorized budgets of the 13 participating departments and agencies, a more accurate estimate of climate-related R&D requires deducting USGCRP funding from the aggregated budgets of those 13, most of which are included in Table 2.
9. Leggett et al. (2013) of the Congressional Research Service provides a recent account of climate change funding based on data provided by the White House Office of Management and Budget (see Table 1, below). Total expenditures for federal funded climate change programs from 2001-2013 were $110.9 billion in current dollars and $120.2 billion in 2012 dollars. “Total budgetary impact” includes various tax provisions and subsidies related to reducing greenhouse gas emissions (which are treated as “tax expenditures”) and shows total climate change expenditures from 2001-2013 to be $145.3 billion in current dollars and $155.4 billion in 2012 dollars.[37]
10. The USGCRP operates as a confederacy of the research components of thirteen participating government agencies, each of which independently designates funds in accordance with the objectives of the USGCRP; these monies comprise the program budget of the USGCRP to fund agency cross-cutting climate science R&D.[34] The departments and agencies whose activities comprise the bulk of such funding include independent agencies such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Science Foundation, Environmental Protection Agency, US Agency for International Development, the quasi-official Smithsonian Institute, and Executive Departments that include Agriculture, Commerce (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Institute of Standards and Technology), Energy, Interior (the US Geological Survey and conservation initiatives), State, and Treasury.[35]
11. The past 15 years have seen a sustained program of funding, largely from government or quasi-government entities.[31] The funding efforts are spread across a bewildering array of sources and buried in a labyrinth of programs, agency initiatives, interagency activities, and Presidential Offices, but what they seem to have in common is an adherence to the assumption that human activity is primarily responsible for the warming observed in the latter part of the 20th century. Funding appears to be driving the science rather than the other way around. And the extent of this funding appears not to have been heretofore fully documented.[32]"...
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