September 1, 2017
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
Russia Card Collapses, but the Deep State Pushes it Even
Harder
============================================
Friends,
I
have been saving some items about the “Russians Did It!” accusation for two
weeks now, hoping to send them out as a means of enabling readers to see and
comprehend a bit more comprehensively what the Mainstream Media, including Fox
(with the exception of Tucker Carlson), continue to obfuscate
and do their best to hide.
A
couple of weeks ago, on August 12—the very day of the Charlottesville event—I
wrote the following about the charges of Russian collusion in the November 2016
elections, that this whole “Russians Did It” investigation was little more
than:
….a political
strategy employed by a shell-shocked and furious Hillary campaign and by the
array of Deep State forces, and, that, in fact, it is one of the most immense
and grotesque frauds ever committed on the American citizenry. And that means,
of course, that the Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his practically
unlimited powers to investigate almost anything dealing with Donald Trump and
his staff, including events and dealings dating back for decades, is also based
on a fraud, a witch hunt supposedly intended to examine any Russian collusion.
In fact, it is and is becoming a wide-open assault, without boundaries or
restraints, on the president and his administration….”
Each
day this conclusion becomes more evident and more demonstrable, but each day
the Mainstream Media, abetted by its minions in the Democratic Party (as well
as many in the Republican Party) continue to ramp up their frenetic and unbridled
assault on the Trump administration and its agenda.
The
desperation and willingness of the Deep State to employ any tactic, to say
anything they consider useful whether truthful or not, to engage in any type of
character assassination, rumor-mongering, and, yes, eventually, the misuse and
abuse of the Special Counsel’s nearly unlimited powers (and financial resources),
is, or should be, patently clear for any reasonable and level-headed person to
see. Yet, their zealous campaign to weaken, possibly eject, this president, or
to at the very least, derail completely his agenda, continues unabated, with a
fury unconnected to reality, an hysteria bubbling up out of a created counter-reality.
Of
the major networks CNN and MSNBC have, by far, been the worst in these
assaults. Since the election last year, as I have pointed out—and as you have
surely noticed—all the major networks, CNN especially, have basically removed their
masks of “objectivity,” or as they say in this part of eastern Wake County,
“gone whole hog” in such efforts. “News” content has seamlessly floated over
into on-screen punditry, and frenetic ideological punditry has become
“news.” And all abetted by the ironclad
ukase laid down by the Deep State establishment, which not only controls and
sets the narrative, but decides just how far even most “opposition” Republicans
can get away with before the leash is pulled back hard.
Just
this past week, CNN came out breathlessly with two new “revelations.” The first
was that—horror of horrors!—a group of conservative American Christians [I
actually know a few of them] had had some preliminary contacts with Russian
Christians in 2016, and that the American group had attempted to interest the
Trump campaign in the contact. Although nothing actually came from it, voila!,
there it was, sure and palpable “evidence” of “collusion” with the Russians,
and no doubt with that Beast of the Apocalypse, Vladimir Putin, himself!
Then,
came the news that executives in the Trump hotel organization had continued to
negotiate with the city fathers of Moscow concerning a possible construction of
a Trump hotel in that city. Again, nothing came of it, apparently negotiations
ending by late January 2016. Yet, CNN
and the Mainstream Media went on for several days screaming loudly that Trump
had “lied” when he said in February 2016 that he had no business interests in
Russia. “See,” they blasted, “he did have interests there…and no doubt, he may
have had much more—just let Mueller’s Special Counsel investigation keep going
for another, say, seven years, and there is just bound to be something!”
The
utter desperation manifested in these crude attempts to undercut and eventually
oust the president would be laughable in a more sane and sensible period of our
history, but, tragically, we do not live in such an epoch. Rather, decades of
disinformation, ideological miseducation, and the poisoning of our political
and cultural environment, have led to a situation where millions of our fellow
citizens have literally been brainwashed…and where the managerial Deep State
calls the shots.
I
have termed, and I think rightly so, what we see before us, a kind of lunacy, a
madness, that is increasingly visible: just watch and listen, if you will, to
some of those leftist Democrat representatives of the Deep State who sometimes
show up, all the time on CNN and oftentimes on Fox. On the faces of so many of
those individuals, often in their eyes, there is a bizarre glazed-over look, a
kind of expression that strikes me as unnatural, holding back an inner fanaticism
and bile that is barely restrained, ready to explode at a moment’s notice. And
their narratives when spewed forth are constructed on that passion and fury and
an unrequited “hope” that “something” will eventually turn up. They are certain
that there is “something”
there, because, basically, they want
there to be “something” there.
Thus,
their frenzy and madness and burning hatred make up for the lack of facts, the
inability to discover any substantial support for their argument. And, thus,
rather than finally admitting that their argument is false, nugatory and based
on nothing but a political lie, they double down even harder, and as they do,
they lose contact with reality. They descend into a kind of lunacy.
And
the Special Counsel investigation continues, and every indication exists that
with Robert Mueller now partnering with zealously anti-Trump leftist Democrat
attorneys in New York, that that investigation will stretch back decades to
find anything and everything that in any way can be used to impugn, attack,
dislodge, weaken, and/or expel the president. And all the while, additional
information about the aborted Hillary Clinton “investigation” points not only
to an immense cover-up there, but actions that may well have involved
criminality and real international collusion with a foreign power (Ukraine).
This
morning, then, I send on items that would normally cast the entire Russian
collusion investigation into serious doubt, indeed, undercut it completely.
First, there is a commentary on the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity [VIPS] report which challenges—I would say destroys—the infamous January
intelligence community assessment and its use of the totally discredited, made
up “dossier” about activities of Donald Trump and his staff in Russia.
Secondly, I pass on the VIPS Summary Memo, itself, addressed to President
Trump.
Even
were there no political involvement whatsoever, the technical and scientific
analysis reported therein would be sufficient to, at the very least, call into
extreme question the entire basis for the seemingly endless investigations in
Congress and by the Special Counsel. But politics does play a role, and, in
fact, it is the reason for and
on which this entire fraudulent exercise is being enacted. And that exercise, that
effort by Congressional committees and by Robert Mueller and his
zealously-dedicated anti-Trump Democrat attorneys, abetted and pushed
unrelentingly by the media, is—as I wrote earlier—an immense and grotesque
fraud committed on the American people, with the intent to undo the November
election and overturn the verdict of the citizenry of this nation. It is
nothing less than a real and palpable coup d’etat by the Deep State.
HAS RUSSIAGATE FINALLY BEEN SOLVED?
http://www.thedailysheeple.com/has-russiagate-finally-been-solved_082017
AUGUST 8, 2017 | WILL PORTER | THE DAILY SHEEPLE
As part of what many are calling a “New
Cold War,” the mainstream media and establishment politicians have for
months insisted the 2016 presidential election was skewed by Russian
interference, some broadening the allegation to claim the president
colluded with a foreign intelligence service. Two recent developments, however,
may have finally laid the case to rest.
Late last month the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
(VIPS) organization issued a blockbuster
memo directly challenging the findings of a key January
Intelligence Community assessment that
concluded the Russians interfered in the 2016 election. The memo cited an
independent investigation which found evidence inconsistent with Russian
culpability, instead suggesting an insider leak. “Forensic studies of ‘Russian
hacking’ into Democratic National Committee computers last year reveal that on
July 5, 2016, data was leaked (not hacked) by a person with physical access to
DNC computers, and then doctored to incriminate Russia,” the memo said in its
executive summary [emphasis in original].
Most important among the investigation’s findings is the fact that
DNC files were first copied to a system with Eastern timezone settings in
effect, raising the likelihood that the transfer took place within the United
States, somewhere near the East Coast, not remotely from overseas. Moreover,
the high speed of the file transfer from the DNC system suggests the transfer
had to be done by somebody with either physical access to the system, or access
to a LAN network tied to it. “The DNC data was copied onto a storage device at a speed that far exceeds an
internet capability for a remote hack,”
the VIPS memo said, which is the only plausible avenue by which a Russian
hacker could obtain the data [emphasis in original]. The conclusions of the
independent investigation are supported by several former intelligence agents
and cyber experts, including Skip Folden, a retired IBM Program Manager for
Information Technology US and NSA Technical Director-turned-whistleblower Bill
Binney.
Finally, the independent investigation cited by the VIPS memo
concludes there were two separate file transfers from the DNC systems: the
first likely an insider making illicit access, but the second—which would
eventually find its way into the hands of “Gufficer 2.0,” the actor with
alleged ties to Russia who claimed to have hacked the DNC—was copied to an
external storage device and fabricated “telltale signs” of Russian involvement
were artificially inserted into the data.
Last week, however, a new piece of the puzzle emerged which corroborates what was
previously maligned as a conspiracy theory: according to
award-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, the murdered 27-year-old
DNC data programmer Seth Rich was indeed the man behind the DNC leak. In leaked
audio of
a phone conversation between Hersh and Ed Butowsky, a high-profile political
donor and GOP functionary who took interest in the Seth Rich story, Hersh,
citing a FBI report, states categorically that Rich leaked the DNC material to
Wikileaks. “[Rich] had submitted a series of documents—of emails—some juicy
emails from the DNC […] All I know is that he offered a sample, an extensive
sample, you know, I’m sure dozens of emails and said ‘I want money,’” Hersh
said. “Then later Wikileaks did get the password—[Rich] had a Dropbox, a
protected Dropbox, which isn’t hard to do, I mean you don’t have to be a wizard
IT, you know, he was certainly not a dumb kid.”
Hersh said he didn’t actually see the FBI report in question with
his own eyes, but had a trusted source relay its contents.
“I have somebody on the inside, you know I’ve been around a long
time, and I write a lot of stuff,” Hersh told Butowsky. “I have somebody on the
inside who will go and read a file for me. This person is unbelievably accurate
and careful, he’s a very high-level guy and he’ll do a favor. You’re just going
to have to trust me.” The veteran reporter, however, does not believe Rich was
murdered for his involvement in the leak, stating the staffer lived in a “rough
neighborhood” and on a street where several similar violent crimes had been
carried out in the past.
Murdered for what he knew or not, perhaps the strangest aspect of
the story is what happened soon after the Hersh-Butowsky audio was leaked.
Despite the existence of an audio transcript of the conversation which very
clearly captures what was said, Hersh bizarrely denies having made any of the
above claims about Rich.
When the GOP donor emailed Hersh to plead with him to publicly
come forward with what he knew, the journalist denied up and down, accusing
Butowsky of having a bad memory:
EB:
I am curious why you haven’t approached the house committee telling them what
you were read by your FBI friend related to Seth Rich that you in turn read to
me. Based on all your work, it appears that you care about the truth. Even
though, as you said you couldn’t get a second, shouldn’t you tell them so they
could use their powers to determine the truth?
SH:
Ed–you have a lousy memory…I was not read anything by my FBI friend..I have no
firsthand information and I really wish you would stop telling others information
that you think I have…please stop relaying information that you do not have
right…and that I have no reason to believe is accurate…
EB:
I know it isn’t first hand knowledge but you clearly said, my memory is
perfect, that you had a friend at the FBI who read / told you what was in the
file on Seth Rich and I wonder why you aren’t helping your country and sharing
that information on who it was?
One possible explanation behind Hersh’s denial is that he may be
working on a story pertaining to the Rich case and doesn’t want to publicize
anything before it’s finished, which could potentially spook sensitive sources
and compromise the story.
Regardless, what Hersh said cannot be taken back or simply waved
away. Not only does it confirm long-held suspicions that the staffer had
something to do with the leak (WikiLeaks even offered
a $20,000 reward for
information that would lead to the conviction of Rich’s killer), it is very
consistent with the conclusions of the VIPS memo published last month.
Further corroboration comes from retired British diplomat and
whistleblower Craig Murray, who claims to have personally made
contact with the leaker, or a go-between, on behalf of WikiLeaks in a wooded
area near American University in Washington D.C. While
he not have met the leaker himself, Murray insists the source of the leaks
was a disgruntled DNC employee, not a hacker. The retired diplomat’s claim
initially emerged in a Daily
Mail story published
in December 2016, but Murray told
radio host Scott Horton the
newspaper misquoted him, making it look like Murray played a bigger part in the
leak than he really did. “The material, I think, was already safely with
WikiLeaks before I got there in September,” Murray said. “I had a small role to
play.”
While the Russian hacking narrative has run into several roadblocks
and inconvenient facts in
recent months, the pieces of an alternative explanation appear to be falling
neatly into place.
A working theory: A DNC staffer angry over the underhanded
treatment afforded
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders took it upon himself to access
DNC servers and attempt to obtain any information that could hurt the Clinton
campaign. When the DNC discovered what had happened, unknown actors quickly
worked to preempt the insider leak with one of their own, except this leak
would be laced with fake Russian “fingerprints,” implicating our nuclear-armed
rival in election interference and stoking a months-long witch hunt. The
doctored data would be relayed through a foreign intermediary, the infamous
Guccifer 2.0, creating a gap of plausible deniability between the DNC and the
alleged Russian hacker.
Further, the DNC would hire a cyber security firm, CrowdStrike, to
“investigate” and rubber-stamp the Russia accusation—mind you, a cyber security
firm with a track record of shoddy
work (particularly
in blaming Russia for cyber attacks) and a Russian ex-pat co-founder who also
happens to be a senior
fellow at
a Russophobic establishment
think tank that’s given long-standing support to not only Democrats, but Hillary
Clinton specifically. The DNC then prevented
the FBI from accessing the DNC servers directly, forcing all subsequent
intelligence assessments to rely on CrowdStrike’s untrustworthy analysis
fingering Russia.
What began as a disparate set of data points is slowly adding up
into a coherent alternative account; one that has nothing to do with foreign
hacking, but instead an irate American fed up with the Big Corruption ubiquitous
within his country’s major political parties. The staffer’s act of
conscience would be parlayed by less benevolent forces into a scare story used
to bludgeon a president who, during his campaign, consistently spoke
of improving relations with Russia.
Indeed, what has been termed the New Cold War is
equally sensational and dishonest as the first, and is accompanied by what
Antiwar.com’s Justin Raimondo calls a “New
McCarthyism.”
“[T]he new McCarthyism underscores the cynicism, opportunism, and
downright viciousness of our political class, and especially the media, which
has done nothing to question and everything to bolster the Russophobic
propaganda put out there by self-serving lobbyists and politicians,” Raimondo
observed. “It truly is a sickening sight, made all the more so by the
self-professed ‘liberalism’ of those who are in the vanguard of this revolting
trend.”
The same trend is behind the attempt to paint Russia as an
aggressor and smear the president as an agent of the Kremlin. Powerful
interests both within and outside government—from sore
losers looking
for an excuse for their electoral loss, to regional
rivals who wish to harm Russian interests, to defense contractors looking
to gin up business—have lined up to make detente impossible.
Delivered by The
Daily Sheeple
We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses,
breaking news and videos (Click
for details).
Intel Vets Challenge ‘Russia Hack’ Evidence
http://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/24/intel-vets-challenge-russia-hack-evidence/
July
24, 2017
In a memo to President Trump, a group of former U.S. intelligence
officers, including NSA specialists, cite new forensic studies to challenge the
claim of the key Jan. 6 “assessment” that Russia “hacked” Democratic emails
last year.
Editor’s Note: This VIPS Memo included two mistaken dates. Neither affected the
Memo’s main conclusion; i.e., that the July 5, 2016 intrusion into DNC emails
that was blamed on Russia could not have been a hack – by Russia or anyone
else. The portions of the Memo affected by the mistaken dates have been
corrected.
A short explanation of the corrections:
-(1) June 14, 2016 (not the 15th, as the VIPS memo
erroneously stated) was the day Crowdstrike said malware had been found on the
DNC server and claimed there was evidence the malware was injected by
Russians. (On the following day – the 15th) – “Guccifer 2.0”
claimed responsibility for the “hack” and claimed to be a WikiLeaks source.)
-(2) Although the VIPS Memo indicated, correctly, that on June 15, 2016,
“Guccifer 2.0” … posts a document that the forensics show was synthetically
tainted with ‘Russian fingerprints,’” other language in the Memo was mistaken
in indicating that evidence of such tainting was also found
in the “Guccifer 2.0” metadata from the copying event on July 5.
MEMORANDUM FOR:
The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
(VIPS)
SUBJECT: Was the “Russian
Hack” an Inside Job?
Executive Summary
Forensic studies of “Russian hacking” into
Democratic National Committee computers last year reveal that on July 5, 2016,
data was leaked (not hacked) by a person
with physical access to DNC computer. After examining metadata from the
“Guccifer 2.0” July 5, 2016 intrusion into the DNC server, independent cyber
investigators have concluded that an insider copied DNC data onto an external
storage device.
Key among the findings of the independent forensic
investigations is the conclusion that the DNC data was copied onto a storage
device at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack. Of
equal importance, the forensics show that the copying was performed on the East
coast of the U.S. Thus far, mainstream media have ignored the findings of
these independent studies [see here
and here].
Independent analyst Skip Folden, who retired after
25 years as the IBM Program Manager for Information Technology, US, who
examined the recent forensic findings, is a co-author of this Memorandum. He
has drafted a more detailed technical report titled “Cyber-Forensic
Investigation of ‘Russian Hack’ and Missing Intelligence Community
Disclaimers,” and sent it to the offices of the Special Counsel and the
Attorney General. VIPS member William Binney, a former Technical Director
at the National Security Agency, and other senior NSA “alumni” in VIPS attest
to the professionalism of the independent forensic findings.
The recent forensic studies fill in a critical
gap. Why the FBI neglected to perform any independent forensics on the
original “Guccifer 2.0” material remains a mystery – as does the lack of any
sign that the “hand-picked analysts” from the FBI, CIA, and NSA, who wrote the
“Intelligence Community Assessment” dated January 6, 2017, gave any attention
to forensics.
NOTE: There has been so much conflation of charges
about hacking that we wish to make very clear the primary focus of this
Memorandum. We focus specifically on the July 5, 2016 alleged Guccifer 2.0
“hack” of the DNC server. In earlier VIPS memoranda we addressed the lack
of any evidence connecting the Guccifer 2.0 alleged hacks and WikiLeaks, and we
asked President Obama specifically to disclose any evidence that WikiLeaks
received DNC data from the Russians [see here
and here].
Addressing this point at his last press conference
(January 18), he described “the conclusions of the intelligence community” as
“not conclusive,” even though the Intelligence Community Assessment of January
6 expressed “high confidence” that Russian intelligence “relayed material it
acquired from the DNC … to WikiLeaks.”
Obama’s admission came as no surprise to us. It has
long been clear to us that the reason the U.S. government lacks conclusive
evidence of a transfer of a “Russian hack” to WikiLeaks is because there was no
such transfer. Based mostly on the cumulatively unique technical
experience of our ex-NSA colleagues, we have been saying for almost a year that
the DNC data reached WikiLeaks via a copy/leak by a DNC insider (but almost
certainly not the same person who copied DNC data on July 5, 2016).
From the information available, we conclude that
the same inside-DNC, copy/leak process was used at two different
times, by two different entities, for two distinctly different purposes:
-(1) an inside leak to WikiLeaks before Julian
Assange announced on June 12, 2016, that he had DNC documents and planned to
publish them (which he did on July 22) – the presumed objective being to expose
strong DNC bias toward the Clinton candidacy; and
-(2) a separate leak on July 5, 2016, to
pre-emptively taint anything WikiLeaks might later publish by “showing” it came
from a “Russian hack.”
* * *
Mr. President:
This is our first VIPS Memorandum for you, but we
have a history of letting U.S. Presidents know when we think our former
intelligence colleagues have gotten something important wrong, and why. For
example, our first such memorandum, a
same-day commentary for President George W. Bush on Colin Powell’s U.N. speech
on February 5, 2003, warned that the “unintended consequences were likely to be
catastrophic,” should the U.S. attack Iraq and “justify” the war on
intelligence that we retired intelligence officers could readily see as
fraudulent and driven by a war
The January 6 “Intelligence Community Assessment”
by “hand-picked” analysts from the FBI, CIA, and NSA seems to fit into the same
agenda-driven category. It is largely based on an “assessment,” not supported
by any apparent evidence, that a shadowy entity with the moniker “Guccifer 2.0”
hacked the DNC on behalf of Russian intelligence and gave DNC emails to
WikiLeaks.
The recent forensic findings mentioned above have
put a huge dent in that assessment and cast serious doubt on the underpinnings
of the extraordinarily successful campaign to blame the Russian government for
hacking. The pundits and politicians who have led the charge against
Russian “meddling” in the U.S. election can be expected to try to cast doubt on
the forensic findings, if they ever do bubble up into the mainstream media. But
the technical limitations of today’s Internet are widely understood. We
are prepared to answer any substantive challenges on their merits.
You may wish to ask CIA Director Mike Pompeo what
he knows about this. Our own lengthy intelligence community experience
suggests that it is possible that neither former CIA Director John Brennan, nor
the cyber-warriors who worked for him, have been completely candid with their
new director regarding how this all went down.
Copied, Not Hacked
As indicated above, the independent forensic work
just completed focused on data copied (not hacked) by a shadowy
persona named “Guccifer 2.0.” The forensics reflect what seems to have
been a desperate effort to “blame the Russians” for publishing highly
embarrassing DNC emails three days before the Democratic convention last
July. Since the content of the DNC emails reeked of pro-Clinton bias, her
campaign saw an overriding need to divert attention from content to provenance
– as in, who “hacked” those DNC emails? The campaign was enthusiastically
supported by compliant “mainstream” media; they are still on a roll.
“The Russians” were the ideal culprit. And,
after WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange announced on June 12, 2016, “We have
emails related to Hillary Clinton which are pending publication,” her campaign
had more than a month before the convention to insert its own “forensic facts”
and prime the media pump to put the blame on “Russian meddling.” Mrs.
Clinton’s PR chief Jennifer Palmieri has explained how she used golf carts to
make the rounds at the convention. She wrote
that her “mission was to get the press to focus on something even we found
difficult to process: the prospect that Russia had not only hacked and stolen
emails from the DNC, but that it had done so to help Donald Trump and hurt
Hillary Clinton.”
Independent cyber-investigators have now completed
the kind of forensic work that the intelligence assessment did not
do. Oddly, the “hand-picked” intelligence analysts contented themselves
with “assessing” this and “assessing” that. In contrast, the investigators
dug deep and came up with verifiable evidence from metadata found in the record
of the alleged Russian hack.
They found that the purported “hack” of the DNC by
Guccifer 2.0 was not a hack, by Russia or anyone else. Rather it
originated with a copy (onto an external storage device – a thumb drive, for
example) by an insider. The data was leaked to implicate Russia. We do not
know who or what the murky Guccifer 2.0 is. You may wish to ask the FBI.
The Time Sequence
June 14, 2016:
DNC contractor Crowdstrike, (with a dubious professional record and multiple
conflicts of interest) announces that malware has been found on the DNC server
and claims there is evidence it was injected by Russians.
June 15, 2016: “Guccifer
2.0” affirms the DNC statement; claims responsibility for the “hack;” claims to
be a WikiLeaks source; and posts a document that the forensics show was
synthetically tainted with “Russian fingerprints.”
We do not think that the June 12, 14, & 15
timing was pure coincidence. Rather, it suggests the start of a pre-emptive
move to associate Russia with anything WikiLeaks might have been about to
publish and to “show” that it came from a Russian hack.
The Key Event
July 5, 2016: In
the early evening, Eastern Daylight Time, someone working in the EDT time zone
with a computer directly connected to the DNC server or DNC Local Area Network,
copied 1,976 MegaBytes of data in 87 seconds onto an external storage
device. That speed is much faster than what is physically
possible with a hack.
It thus appears that the purported “hack” of the
DNC by Guccifer 2.0 (the self-proclaimed WikiLeaks source) was not a hack by
Russia or anyone else, but was rather a copy of DNC data onto an external
storage device.
“Obfuscation & De-obfuscation”
Mr. President, the disclosure described below may
be related. Even if it is not, it is something we think you should be made
aware of in this general connection. On March 7, 2017, WikiLeaks began to
publish a trove of original CIA documents that WikiLeaks labeled “Vault
7.” WikiLeaks said it got the trove from a current or former CIA
contractor and described it as comparable in scale and significance to the
information Edward Snowden gave to reporters in 2013.
No one has challenged the authenticity of the
original documents of Vault 7, which disclosed a vast array of cyber warfare
tools developed, probably with help from NSA, by CIA’s Engineering Development
Group. That Group was part of the sprawling CIA Directorate of Digital
Innovation – a growth industry established by John Brennan in 2015.
Scarcely imaginable digital tools – that can take
control of your car and make it race over 100 mph, for example, or can enable
remote spying through a TV – were described and duly reported in the New York
Times and other media throughout March. But the Vault 7, part 3 release on
March 31 that exposed the “Marble Framework” program apparently was judged too
delicate to qualify as “news fit to print” and was kept out of the Times.
The Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima, it seems,
“did not get the memo” in time. Her March 31 article bore the catching
(and accurate) headline: “WikiLeaks’ latest release of CIA cyber-tools could
blow the cover on agency hacking operations.”
The WikiLeaks release indicated that Marble was
designed for flexible and easy-to-use “obfuscation,” and that Marble source
code includes a “deobfuscator” to reverse CIA text obfuscation.
More important, the CIA reportedly used Marble
during 2016. In her Washington Post report, Nakashima left that out, but
did include another significant point made by WikiLeaks; namely, that the
obfuscation tool could be used to conduct a “forensic attribution double game”
or false-flag operation because it included test samples in Chinese, Russian,
Korean, Arabic and Farsi.
The CIA’s reaction was neuralgic. Director Mike
Pompeo lashed out two weeks later, calling Assange and his associates “demons,”
and insisting; “It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is, a
non-state hostile intelligence service, often abetted by state actors like
Russia.”
Mr. President, we do not know if CIA’s Marble
Framework, or tools like it, played some kind of role in the campaign to blame
Russia for hacking the DNC. Nor do we know how candid the denizens of
CIA’s Digital Innovation Directorate have been with you and with Director
Pompeo. These are areas that might profit from early White House review.
Putin and the Technology
We also do not know if you have discussed cyber
issues in any detail with President Putin. In his interview with NBC’s
Megyn Kelly, he seemed quite willing – perhaps even eager – to address issues
related to the kind of cyber tools revealed in the Vault 7 disclosures, if only
to indicate he has been briefed on them. Putin pointed out that today’s
technology enables hacking to be “masked and camouflaged
to an extent that no one can understand the origin” [of the
hack] … And, vice versa, it is possible to set up any entity or any
individual that everyone will think that they are the exact source
of that attack.”
“Hackers may
be anywhere,” he said. “There may be hackers, by the way,
in the United States who very craftily and professionally passed
the buck to Russia. Can’t you imagine such a scenario? …
I can.”
Full Disclosure: Over
recent decades the ethos of our intelligence profession has eroded in the
public mind to the point that agenda-free analysis is deemed well nigh
impossible. Thus, we add this disclaimer, which applies to everything we
in VIPS say and do: We have no political agenda; our sole purpose is to spread
truth around and, when necessary, hold to account our former intelligence
colleagues.
We speak and write without fear or favor.
Consequently, any resemblance between what we say and what presidents,
politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental. The fact we find it is
necessary to include that reminder speaks volumes about these highly
politicized times. This is our 50th VIPS Memorandum since the
afternoon of Powell’s speech at the UN. Live links to the 49 past memos can be
found at https://consortiumnews.com/vips-memos/.
FOR THE STEERING GROUP, VETERAN INTELLIGENCE PROFESSIONALS
FOR SANITY
William Binney, former NSA Technical Director for
World Geopolitical & Military Analysis; Co-founder of NSA’s Signals
Intelligence Automation Research Center
Skip Folden, independent analyst, retired IBM
Program Manager for Information Technology US (Associate VIPS)
Matthew Hoh, former Capt., USMC, Iraq & Foreign
Service Officer, Afghanistan (associate VIPS)
Larry C Johnson, CIA & State Department (ret.)
Michael S. Kearns, Air Force Intelligence Officer
(Ret.), Master SERE Resistance to Interrogation Instructor
John Kiriakou, Former CIA Counterterrorism Officer
and former Senior Investigator, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Linda Lewis, WMD preparedness policy analyst, USDA
(ret.)
Lisa Ling, TSgt USAF (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Edward Loomis, Jr., former NSA Technical Director
for the Office of Signals Processing
David MacMichael, National Intelligence Council
(ret.)
Ray McGovern, former U.S. Army
Infantry/Intelligence officer and CIA analyst
Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence
Officer for Middle East, CIA
Coleen Rowley, FBI Special Agent and former
Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel (ret.)
Cian Westmoreland, former USAF Radio
Frequency Transmission Systems Technician and Unmanned Aircraft
Systems whistleblower (Associate VIPS)
Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT
Automation Research Center, NSA
Sarah G. Wilton, Intelligence Officer, DIA (ret.);
Commander, US Naval Reserve (ret.)
Ann Wright, U.S. Army Reserve Colonel (ret) and
former U.S. Diplomat
No comments:
Post a Comment