The Atlantic Council should register as a foreign agent as It's heavily funded by foreign nations that seek to strengthen hawkish NATO-Daniel Herman, Consortium News

The Atlantic Council was created solely to support NATO and is heavily funded by foreign entities. (subhead, "Questioning the Investigation")

9/29/17, "Russia-gate’s Shaky Foundation," Daniel Herman, Consortium News 

"Should we demand, moreover, that the tiny Russian-owned media outlet RT register as a foreign agent--as the Atlantic Council has insisted, and as the [Trump] Justice Department is now demanding — but not require the same of the BBC and CBC, which are financed by the British and Canadian governments respectively? 

What about the Atlantic Council itself, which, receives much of its funding from foreign nations that seek to strengthen NATO? 

Should the Atlantic Council be required to register as a foreign agent? Does anyone seriously think the Atlantic Council doesn’t propagandize for NATO and for hawkish policies more generally? 

Or what about the hawkish Brookings Institution, or a host of other think tanks that welcome money from foreign powers?"...(subhead, "Silencing Dissent")

"Am I suggesting that U.S. intelligence agencies are lying in order to protect massive U.S. [taxpayer] funding for NATO and to force Russia to loosen its ties to Iran and Syria, not to mention lay off Ukraine? No, I am not suggesting any deliberate lie, though yes, wishes can father thoughts. Certainly Trump’s campaign talk of defunding NATO, friendship with Russia, and leaving Syria to Assad ruffled feathers in the intelligence community." (subhead, "What I am arguing")

The FBI absurdly claims Russians thought they could turn Illinois into a Trump state:

"Here’s an aside just for fun: why would Russian hackers imagine for a second they could turn Illinois into a Trump state? Clinton won that state by a million votes. Sure, one can understand why Russians might want to meddle with voter roles in a swing state, but Illinois? More likely the hackers were criminals seeking voter identification info, which is precisely why they downloaded 90,000 registration records. The FBI absurdly claimed that Russians needed all those records to figure out precisely how Illinois voter registration works, thus to improve their dirty work. Really? They needed 90,000 records for that?" (last parag. under subhead, "What I am Arguing")

The real threat isn't Russians, it's anti-Establishment thought:

"From the moment the Washington Post ran its infamous PropOrNot story in November 2016, the message has been clear: the real threat isn't Russians, it's any media outlet that fuels anti-establishment politics." (last parag. under subhead, "Alien and Sedition Acts")

Would the US sentence someone to death if it were only 75% certain the person committed murder? The same should apply to foreign policy:

"I’ll also add that even “high confidence” that Russia hacked the DNC, Podesta, and/or state databases is insufficient grounds for aggressive policy--e.g., harsh sanctions and diplomatic ejections, not to mention military action--let alone grounds for announcing “we are at war.”

Suppose for the sake of argument that “high confidence” is 75 percent probability. Would we convict an accused murderer on 75 percent probability?

If we did that--and if the accused were then put to death--we would be knowingly killing 25 innocents out of every 100 we adjudge. 

The same logic should apply to foreign policy. We should not be taking punitive measures unless we can assess culpability with greater certitude, else we risk harming millions of people who had no role in the original crime." (subhead, The Universality of Hacking)

"We are handing over power to unelected technocrats and shutting down dissenting speech."

"It seems to me that we are in uncharted waters....We put enormous powers into the hands of unelected technocrats with their own biases and agendas. As others have noted, moreover, the cyber-war community is at odds with the cyber-security community....

I cannot say this loudly enough. this whole episode isn't about Hillary Clinton losing the election, or Russian hacking of the DNC, or Deep State bias and boss-pleasing. The upshot is that we are entering a cyber-arms race that is going to become ever more byzantine, hidden, and dangerous to democracy, not just because elections can be stolen, but because in guarding against that, we are handing over power to unelected technocrats and shutting down dissenting speech. We are entering a new era; this won’t be the last time that hacking enters political discourse....

Presumably not even our cyber-security experts at the DHS and FBI know what the CIA and NSA’s cyber-warriors are up to. Thus Russian hacking becomes “Pearl Harbor” rather than an unsurprising reciprocal response. Both the State Department and the CIA, after all, have been in the foreign propaganda business for decades; the American public, however, has not the vaguest idea of what they do....

The intelligence community’s whispered “trust us, we’re the experts” simply isn’t good enough. If we don’t demand hard evidence, then we’re following the same path we took in 1898, 1915, 1950, 1964, and 2003. Let’s not go there." (subhead, "Where we stand")

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Added: 2017 massive leak from NSA makes clear national intel organizations shouldn't be tasked with national cyber security. They have leaks. Further, it's not in NSA's interest to make public everything it knows:

9/18/17, "Take Cybersecurity Away From Spies-For Everyone's Sake," chathamhouse.org, Emily Taylor 

"The NSA's leaks show that even the best intelligence agencies are not invulnerable to hacking....Weaving public-safety responsibility into a secret and secretive operation is always likely to cause conflicts of interest. WannaCry was an example of a state-developed cyber weapon turned against its creators.

The core exploit, Eternal Blue, is believed to have been created by the US National Security Agency (NSA), who presumably intended to keep it secret. Then, in April 2017, it was leaked, along with a suite of hacking tools targeting Windows PCs.

The same leak contains powerful exploits that could be weaponised by state adversaries, organised crime or by anyone possessing basic technical knowledge - as we saw with the Petya ransomware attack in Eastern Europe.

Had the NSA chosen to inform Microsoft of the vulnerability, there would have been no Eternal Blue, and no WannaCry. But intelligence agencies have a different motivation: they want to keep such "zero-day" vulnerabilities secret for potential development into a cyber weapon....

Loading responsibility for public cyber-safety on to the intelligence services is bad for both public safety and national security. It also risks diverting resources and energies away from national security and covert operations.

The WannaCry attack should provide an opportunity to separate two key roles: clandestine signals intelligence and the cyber security of...critical national infrastructure."...

"This article was originally published by Wired Magazine"





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