(Note Obama’s campaign logo on their ‘protest’ signs)
Sorry, but this is too great not to feature, and too long to put into my own words. Schadenfreude Rules! Sorry in advance for typos, but I need to rustle up some dinner.
Gack, ever since I’d been introduced to Saint Bill McKibben, lord of the eco-warrior empty spectacle, by Michael Donnely in 2013, and had penned ‘Tweeting While the World Burns or: Elites Against the XL Pipeline’ at My.Firedoglake, let’s say I’ve been (ahem) a major detractor, to put it mildly. Hard to imagine that 350.org is funded by the Rockefeller and Tides Foundations, isn’t it?
“Call me a crank. Call me an egalitarian ideologue. Hell, call me Ishmael if you’d like, but is this what democracy looks like to you? Do hand-picked celebrity protests help or hurt the eco-movement, especially if they’re staged a few days in advance of ones for everyday people? You be the judge.” [big snip concerning epic alternative media Praise for the Spectacle, as well as for Saint Obama and his ‘moral core’]
“When I read Michael Donnelly’s (another crank) piece at Counterpunch: ‘Tweeting as the World Burns’. Suffice it to say that I don’t agree with some of what he wrote, but some of it sure set off my bullshit meter again, and some…sent smoke comin’ out of my eyes and ears, starting with some of the tweets from the heroes of the story:
“Bucket list item checked off: share a paddy wagon with Julian Bond. This is a broad movement,” Bill McKibben tweeted after his misdemeanor arrest for protesting the Keystone Pipeline outside the White House, February 13, 2013
“It’s always good to get arrested with a Kennedy” posted Pete Nichols, who flew in from California for the rally. When informed about the Tar Sands-derived fuel in his and many of the other protesters’ mode of transportation, he frivolously responded, “I actually teleported. New Waterkeeper project. ssshhhh…btw…..tar sand oil makes terrible jet fuel and even worse martinis.”
And the whole time they were doing their little bucket-list catch-and-releases,Obama was out of town. And they knew it!
Anyhoo, when I came upon ‘Beyond Democrat Dead-ends: What Real Climate Action Looks Like’ by Carol Dansereau, Counterpunch, June 2 this mornin’, I fairly crowed with gleeful shadenfreude. And yeah, I’m gonna (ahem) borrow more of her essay than is strictly within ‘fair use rules’, and hope she’ll be glad of it, not mad of it.
“The global warming situation is absolutely crazy. Millions of people are already experiencing drought, famine, floods, wildfires, superstorms and other climate disasters. As a species, we are teetering on the edge of full-blown catastrophe, with extinction a distinct possibility. Yet, we can’t seem to put in place obvious solutions that are sitting right there in front of us.
Even crazier, environmentalists repeatedly praise Democrats for phony climate action plans that don’t come close to what’s needed.
Take the “100 by ‘50” legislation recently introduced by Oregon Senator Merkley and other Democrats. Environmental leaders lined up to celebrate this as the blueprint that will get us beyond global warming, even though it’s nothing of the sort. Some environmentalists used their endorsements to denounce Republicans for being funded by the fossil fuel industry, deftly ignoring the funding received by Democrats from that same industry. The message was clear: when we put Democrats back in power and pass a bill like “100 by ‘50”, we’ll be on our way to solving the climate crisis.
This is pure hogwash. The Democrats have kept us running in circles as the climate crisis has deepened. And although this new bill purports to get us to 100% clean and renewable energy by 2050—hence the catchy title—it almost certainly won’t do that. Yes, it is “the most ambitious piece of climate legislation Congress has ever seen”. But that’s only because prior offerings were so pathetic that “100 by ’50” seems ambitious in comparison.
“100 by ‘50”: Beyond the Sound Bites
According to 350.org founder Bill McKibben, “(i)nstead of making changes around the margins”, the “100 by ’50” legislation would finally commit America to “wholesale energy transformation.” If only this were true.”
Now what he’d actually said was this:
““100 is an important number. Instead of making changes around the margins, this bill would finally commit America to the wholesale energy transformation that technology has made possible and affordable, and that an eroding climate makes utterly essential,” said Bill McKibben, 350.org co-founder. “This bill won’t pass Congress immediately–the fossil fuel industry will see to that–but it will change the debate in fundamental ways.”
But back to Dansereau; she critiques the claims of the bill with hooeys and phooeys under these headings:
Continuing Fossil Fuel Production. Let’s start with the fossil fuel side of things. To address global warming, we must keep most of the remaining oil, gas and coal in the ground. The “100 by ’50” legislation doesn’t do that.” with a long etc. full of hyperlinked evidence.
Inadequate Promotion of Alternatives. (which section she rightfully adds a ‘big whoop!’
The Same Old Same Old
and then:
What Will a Real Climate Action Plan Look Like? (this is the recap of the longer plan):
* It will be a concrete plan that accurately identifies what we need to accomplish and details what we’ll do when.
* It will be composed of mandates instead of incentives.
* It will take the energy industry and other relevant industries into public ownership under democratic management.
* And it will establish an Economic Bill of Rights.
Is It Possible?
Can we develop such a plan and make the radical system changes that are needed? Absolutely! To begin, we need to stop being diverted by weak proposals put forth by Democrats. And we need to unite, like never before, with other social justice movements.
The 1% forces we’re up against are powerful. But ultimately working people are more powerful, because without our cooperation goods aren’t produced, people and products aren’t transported, and services aren’t rendered. Society doesn’t work unless we do.
Should we rally around another dead-end Democratic Party climate plan? Hell no! It’s time to start acting like we live in a democracy, developing and implementing a real plan that averts climate catastrophe and creates the world we want.
It’s hard not to love her optimism and enthusiasm, as well as her understaning that only public ownership of the energy sector will make any difference. In a similar vein, here is ‘Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement: The socialist solution to climate change’ 3 June 2017, wsws.org
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
wouldn’t you have imagined that senators sanders, booker, merkely, and markey might gave actually gone Bold and offered a senate version of john conyers’ ‘expanded medicare for all’ (HR 676 instead?
“Medicare for all” is not a panacea. Medicare includes some really harsh deductibles, co-pays, and cost recovery provisions (that allow providers to go to collection companies). That is far from “health care as a right” or the idea that health care for everyone is part of the social infrastructure. For example, 20% of an emergency room visit is still $200-$400 in cash outlay, which is out of reach for folks whose sole income is Social Security. And worse in high cost-of-living states (California is the poster child). And it does not cover vision adequately or dental at all. That’s what sells those damn private Medicare Advantage policies.
i can’t speak intelligently on it at all, but marym had linked to this site and noted this section during a conversation on the boards:
“This program will cover all medically necessary services, including primary care, medically approved diet and nutrition services, inpatient care, outpatient care, emergency care, prescription drugs, durable medical equipment, hearing services, long term care, palliative care, podiatric care, mental health services, dentistry, oral surgery, eye care, chiropractic, and substance abuse treatment.”
but the devil would be in the details, and you seem to know the details, esp. as to its being out of reach for those living on SS only. but as to the bern, while he keeps announcing he’s about to offer a companion bill, he says that ‘we’ should use our energy to keep obamaDontcare alive.
is it better than obamaDontCare? dr. margaret flowers seem to believe it’s far better, but maybe that depends on which demographic one inhabits.
be back soonish; i need to get in the garden to transplant more starts from the greenhouse.
Suits, ties, fedoras. Guess we know which Democrats those are. The ones who can afford suits, have not given up ties, and are nostalgic for the 1950s (the era of fedoras).
The political realignment means that we are waiting to see an opposition party with power form. That ain’t the Democrats; they are checking policy boxes not building a movement.
But all of a sudden the local politicians are alive, not going to drop their city and county sustainability coordinators or programs that are saving government funds by dealing with climate change. Transition to electric city fleet (except for the po-po’s) goes on. Stormwater treatment is using less concrete and more citizen involvement. We are at the level of actions and not as much regulations. Not that regulations and enforcement are not going to be necessary for the big polluters (Duke Energy, for example).
But that picture with the Obama logo (OFA?) looks so sadly out of place for the times. Downright hilarious.
nope, it won’t be the democRats. but when i read at a librul site or two that ‘we just need to get our message out next time’, i dang near fall off my chair laughing. some guess states can take on climate solutions ‘locally’, but haven’t any number of sorta home-rule counties that banned fracking, for instance, been over-ruled by the courts?
but yes, there are likely any number of citizen actions that can make some difference, but only ‘some’, esp. given that the military and factory ag are the largest carbon footprints in the u.s., and as dansereau had noted, the US is also exporting soooo much coal (and now oil, bitumen, esp.after O’s having lifted that little ‘no export’ past legislation) .
but oy, that obama logo: ‘please mr. obama, you have such a strong moral core…’ yeah, my memory is that i got taken for quite a ride by many commenters on that diary. my favorite sort of comment was ‘every little bit helps’. no, it doesn’t; this shit just makes a pretense out of ‘helping’, including that the spectacle kept our eyes on that pipeline and ‘divestment tours’ while the environmental raping and pillaging of amerika and the planet went ahead out of sight, out of mind.
well, stay tuned, i guess.
I turn off the internet for a day & all hell breaks loose. shootings, GCC break up, etc. I promise, internet, never to turn you off again.
I saw a perp walk on capitol hill during a rally for (sic) “the dream act.” my only comment/question to anyone there was, why are you supporting this turd (the dream act)? (oh right, obama.) anyway, about 50 people got arrested, incl., iirc, john conyers. hard to take seriously something they so obviously tho’t was a funny joke. conyers had a perky little spark in his step as he strutted up to get arrested.
i’m wondering about the utility of local agencies taking enviro matters in their own hands if they don’t at the very least speak out about the need for radical national & international action. what the local county board can *do* about USG policy is debatable, maybe nothing, but you can’t leave out the “thinking globally” part of acting locally. e.g.: san diego is investing billions in a massive salt water reclamation project. what is the effectiveness of doing this while people like demrat jerry brown run the state? the project creates no confrontation or conflict w/the way the state uses its water, and so the state is perfectly happy to see it move ahead. changes nothing about the dynamics of statewide water waste. i’m not saying s.d. should or shouldn’t do this project, but I do know from personal experience liberal do goody types wash their hands of other concerns b/c hey, we san diego-ans are doing our part. and we’ve just got to *do* *something*.
anyway, if that makes sense…
so it was you who’d created all the mayhem yesterday? you weren’t paying enough attention to herr eric schmidttttt then, it seems. “It’s not nice to try and fool Mother Google! We’ll show you Why!”
seem i was typing something similar to your “…the utility of local agencies taking enviro matters in their own hands…”, and especially filthy hydrocarbons exported globally by amerika for fun and profit.
dunno about the SD desalinization project per se, as in ‘who would use the water?, etc.(as the central valley has sunk how many insane numbers of meters?), but i do see what you mean in general. and by the by, hadn’t governor moonbeam vetoed a legislatively passed effort to give public banking a trial run or close to that?
oopse, on edit: i just happened upon:
https://twitter.com/JournalNEO/status/871712276411240449
precisely. yes, I tho’t you were replying to me/us in your comment to thd above. i’d sorta heard about FB’s & google’s planned war on “fake news”, so thanks for the link.
that san diego water project may not be the best example b/c of its size. grassroots people don’t just up & decide to build a multi-billion dollar plant w/o a lot of influence from developers, financiers, politicians, etc.
i know it’s a bit hard to believe (okay, not really), that i read slowly, think slowly, and type even more slowly than a first-grader. but that’s why our comments crossed even w/ that time lag. course sometimes i walk away from an open comment box to do something *more important*, lol.
i our neck o’ the woods, and given the salt produced by esp. flood irrigation, folks in texas were flippin’ out enough to offer a huge financial incentive to local water companies, ditch systems, to set up sprinkler systems. a lot of big ranches and farms have, but for us, it’s just financially prohibitive, and the way some of the old ranches were divied up, as with the land we’d homesteaded, would make it so awkward, and would require multiple systems. so…we still flood irrigate, and are part of the problem.
but oy, on the GCC states ‘war on qatar’, i read b’s coverage and opinions, but when i clicked into his ‘T fell for the ksa/israel trap’ (iirc) link to alistair crookie monster at consortium news, i got lost and queasy purdy darned fast.
but it’s a version of the holy wars between sunni v. shi’a, w/ a few twists, w/ bibi playing his usual #fake role.
standing rock is a better example of local=inter/national. and many others.
how do we call BS on the NYT coverage of GCC nations break w/Qatar?
Yemen. just what do you mean, NYT, that Yemen has broken ties w/Qatar? you mean the Saudis say Yemen has broken w/Q., the puppet gov’t installed at gunpoint, right? now why would the NYT lie & obfuscate what’s going on in those oil patches?
here’s our enviro donkey saviors, quote from recent interview w/HRC in NY mag found at
http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/
History, says Clinton, “will judge whoever’s in Congress now as to how they respond to what was [a Russian] attack on our country. It wasn’t the kind of horrible, physical attack we saw on 9/11 or Pearl Harbor, but it was an attack by an aggressive adversary who had been probing for many years to figure out how to undermine our democracy, influence our politics, even our elections.”
I guess there’s some grim humor in her desperate whiny narcissism. she coulda been a contender…the woman who could really put the wonder in IDF badassery. at least w/trump we’ll be spared this kind of BS: “‘wonder woman’ is both a testament to the wonderful women serving in our, I mean Israel’s, armed forces and a positive role model for girls everywhere.” feminism=Zionism=infantile Justice League cartoon fantasies. see nikki haley.
thanks for the parody of the Times coverage, and the ‘fish rots from the head’ essay. good on you and davidly, by the by. but just shoot me now, and i have zero idea how i was led to this, but consider it FWIW (literally):
‘Top-Secret NSA Report Details Russian Hacking Effort Days Before 2016 Election’, the (gag) intercept. note: ‘Effort’, and i haven’t had the stomach to read it.
your final several sentences = comment of the day, you wag. ;-)
easier coverage than pierre’s place, but six hrs. later: ‘Feds Arrest NSA Contractor in Leak of Top Secret Russia Document’, nbc news. not too many weasel words, but there are videos. is it all for real? ha, one of the 4 ‘journalists’ of the intercept piece is ryan grim long at huffpo. how many fearless journalists does Pierre need, anyway?
on edit: B’s havin’ a bit of fun burnin’ Pierre’s Palace: ‘Do Not Trust The Intercept or How To Burn A Source’
I couldn’t make head or tails of that, wendye, but then I already had the main points furnished by you of Omidar’s oligargical (woops, didn’t intend that but I rather like it) influence way, way back when. What goes around comes around.
Speaking of which I’d experienced deja vu as well up above with suits and Obama logo (he is gone to the rich man’s heaven, isn’t he?) and was muttering Frost’s “Ice is nice and would suffice” so went looking for that poem – I know it’s at the end of the book but I got distracted by this lovely little thing:
“He would declare and could himself believe
That the birds there in all the garden round
From having heard the daylong voice of Eve
Had added to their own an oversound.
Her tone of meaning but without the words.
Admittedly an eloquence so soft
Could only have had an influence on birds
When call or laughter carried it aloft.
Be that as may be, she was in their song.
Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed
Had now persisted in the woods so long
That probably it never would be lost.
Never again would birdsong be the same.
And to do that to birds was why she came.”
I can imagine in your flooded fields (it’s a time honored practice in NM as well) Mr. wendye pausing on his shovel to ruminate thusly. Up among the stars, Mr. Frost – up among the stars!
and remember: those photos were copyrighted, yanno, ya could use them for yer xmas cards! (i er…jacked that one.) pfffft.
yeah, i wasted about ten minutes trying to find that first story on ‘Pierre’ and fearless journalism’, never mind. b got me confused as to the fbi parts, but this from the comment section was fascinating:
i admit my love of schadenfreude kicked in mighity reading both b and the comments, save for a couple russophobes, and a couple folks who ‘just can’t figure out why wikileaks is supporting Reality Winner’ (quite a name, eh?). gawd’s blood: “we will never, ever, reveal a source” is why. ack!
b did get one thing wrong, though: “The Intercept was funded with some $50 million from Omidyar.” pierre gave the organization a cool quarter of a billion bucks, or, yanno, $250,000.
love the poem that fits hollow man O, lol. oh, yes, lots of farmland in NM must still be irrigated by acequias, most esp. the spanish land grand acreages? ah, the milagro beanfield (water) wars! whooosh. what a trilogy, and oh, dear, did nichols go to hell after those. iirc, i sent one of his books back to him.
yes, mr. is *trying* to slow down when he irrigates, stop and smell the grass, watch it wave, hear the birdies on high, then follow them skyward… when folks call for him and he’s out w/ the water, i tell them ‘mr. wd is outstanding in his field’. dunno that they get the jest, but…i like saying it, anyway. ;-)
the bullshit rises so fast in ‘Nam you needs wings just to stay above it-Willard, Apocalypse Soon
i’m curious about this Qatar thing as a test of the actual reach of US global spying. newz reports all treat this break in the gcc countries as a surprise.
either it is a surprise, and our spook services need lots & lots more money cuz uncle sam is not supposed to be caught w/his pants down and they aren’t totalitarian & panoptical enough;
or it’s not a surprise and the breathless coverage of the NYT and others serves another purpose (maybe partly just to show trump once again in a crisis way over his head, maybe another rationalization for the on-going US military dominance in the region? how much more rationale is needed????)
i’m inclined to the former. maybe not on my phone & laptop here in Beulah land, but the totalizing, all-encompassing sweep of the surveillance state is overstated. and certainly the competence. maybe it suits my biases to be able to say these assholes aren’t in control of anything & they don’t really even know what’s going on. but the alternative is that these guys show no omni-competenece in any other area of life yet somehow they are playing 11th dimensional chess w/alliances that, to quote the morons on NPR channeling Hilary’s fav, Henry K, “have been the backbone of global security for 70 years.” (that dude got tenure at Harvard for spouting inanities like that.)
a’ite, back to work..
stuff going on w/NATO is the same. either the US is run by morons, or there is some risky but grand strategy to get everyone even further under US domination. or both. think merkel & co are now considering even stronger measures to keep the US out of their phones & servers? is that part of the grand strategy or a screw up?
holy crow, ditto on willard’s quote for the global zeitgeist now, eh? fast and furious the bullshit rises. are we comin’, are we goin’, are we fake friends or just Friends for the Day? pipelinistan or arab nato for bibi?
anyhoo, i agree w/ chris floyd‘s take, as in, ‘this is it in a nutshell’:
Viewing all this history, and viewing the actual, visible record of officials like Theresa May (and her bipartisan UK predecessors and US counterparts) on counterterrorism, we are left with only two possible conclusions. One, that all of these highly educated, accomplished and successful individuals — across the range of party affiliations — are dithering, blithering idiots, incapable of recognizing the clear, manifest, repeated failure of their counterterrorism policies, year after year after year. Or two, that quelling and countering terrorism is NOT actually an overarching priority for our leaders; that they know full well these policies lead to more extremism, more terrorism — as their own intelligence services have repeatedly told them — but carry on with them just the same.
Therefore we are left with a further conclusion, which I’ve noted before, but which becomes clearer and clearer with each new terrorist attack and each new doubling-down on the same failed policies by the West: for our leaders, for those on the commanding heights of our bipartisan power structures, the game is worth the candle.’
yes, absolutely on c Floyd’s piece. but that doesn’t really answer my question does it? I did think of another answer: that the “US” is a platform for personal aggrandizement, and so NATO & the GCC are valuable only viewed thru that prism. so these alliances can be sacrificed if need be.
still, risky behavior and no wonder many might view it as class betrayal and thus an affront & threat to their own wealth/position. (“it”=allowing cracks in alliances, and even encouraging them to the point where these alliances may collapse.)
do fake isis terror attacks count as breaches of NATO article 5?
i guess ‘sacrificed as needs be’ was what i’d meant to convey with my ‘ are we comin’, are we goin’, are we fake friends or just Friends for the Day? pipelinistan or arab nato for bibi?’ but as to your larger musings as to ‘the “US” is a platform for personal aggrandizement, and so NATO & the GCC are valuable only viewed thru that prism’, i’d have to say that of course, amerikan FP exceptionalism is inarguably sacrosanct, and ordered by god’s ‘manifest destiny’ belief.
but i’d checked back, and floyd hadn’t even included that ‘war is a racket’, and that the wall street purveyors of instruments of was/is a key ingredient.
your last question is a doozy, and here’s nato article five, which i’d had to look up. but again: if the US, nato, wish to claim fake isis attacks are the real deal, that’s the end of the matter. and most especially as the Imperium’s msm scribes keep on script. ‘we get to name who’s a terr’ist, and who ain’t!’ al qaeda = good partners this week, for instance.
if i had thought it through more fully, i might have added that this is the second, (third?) repurposing of nato and the deep state how many iterations now?
juliania, i’d begun to wonder if i might have parked my initial pierre, billionaires, the intercept piece at my.fdl here, but as i hadn’t known much about categories, tags, and all that rot, the only one my search of the cache pulled up was ‘Glenn Greenwald: ‘…it’s just kind of time for me to do other things’ July 15, 2014 cafe babylon. with RL obligations and all, i’ve only had time to scan it, so i dunno deeply (or not) i may have delved.
a commenter at MoA read all the intercept ‘journalism’ on the issue, and said that the authors were actually asking for more money for the NSA, wth? sibel edmonds even stopped by to thank him. one of the tankies on twitter suggested this:
‘The CIA in Ukraine: Excerpt from The CIA as Organized Crime’ (written by doug valentine), jan 8, 2017 from a podcast interview w/ valentine in 2014, dissident voice
it really is a fun read, and i can’t think why i’d missed it earlier. the utterly incestuous relationships of CIA fronts at play along w/ their oligarchical funding is mind-boggling. best single paragraph might be:
“Maybe Pierre Omidyar is accessible to US foreign policy agencies due to some prior family connections. Maybe that accounts for why he spent a few hundred thousand dollars (a paltry sum for a billionaire) to help put the Centre UA in place in the Ukraine: so the CIA could run operations against the Russians, like it did out of Iran. I’ve never heard any explanation from inquisitive Glenn Greenwald. When it comes to his sugar daddy’s monkey business, Greenwald’s policy is “see no, hear no, speak no evil.” Why? Is that the quid pro quo for the handout?”
yeah, remember GG had said he’d never had any reason to ask Pierre…anything?
how soon will amy goodman have them on?
Points out the difficulty in finding a source of original record in journalism. When money talks, bullshit doesn’t walk, it dances.
What the Intercept article gave us was yet another glimpse into the NSA (unless the proffered report is bogus). The gist. Someone in or after August requested NSA start tracking attempts to subvert the US election. Was this a precautionary request? No doubt as the Congressional inquiry unfolds, the Trumpistas will ask who asked for NSA tracking and of what. What we know from Snowden and Marcy Wheeler’s extensive analysis is that NSA does not get informed of many things proactively in real time. Most searches (example, the San Bernardino terrorist attack) are done after the fact. This report apparently summarizes some findings responding to that request. It is a “what the NSA knows at this point” set of facts. It is likely, but time will tell, the triggering information for all of the allegations during and after the Clinton campaign. Who shared intelligence information (even in summary) with the campaigns will likely be another item in the Congressional hearings.
The Intercept article does not deal with what caused NSA to make the attribution of the spearphishing to the Russian GRU. But spearphishing is a tactic that could have made voter registration applications in up to eight states vulnerable to all sorts of michief if the people conducting the spearphishing actually got access either to the software company’s systems or to the registration systems of local boards of elections in the eight states supposedly vulnerable. And affecting registration systems is an important vulnerability because it is easier to suppress votes based on registrations in 3080 counties than to flip votes on on selected machines among hundreds of thousands in selected precincts among hundreds of thousands. The easiest way to do that would be to flip information so that registered voters who might show up at the polls are indicated in the registration books as ineligible to vote or are not in the books at all. In most states, this is now dealt with by a provisional ballot, but this slows down the voting process on election day (as it did in Durham NC, cited in the article). Slower voting means some people in line drop out and don’t vote. It is a way that GOP boards of elections have suppressed minority voting even without their systems being compromised. Voter caging is sufficient to do it. There is that reality lurking behind the Intercept article. And an NSA sensitive to that reality in the Obama administration examining data that they have stored (legally or illegally, constitutionally or unconstitutionally) in their very expensive databases.
Where it gets interesting is the report that Obama was briefed about this report of spearphishing of voting systems, confronted Putin about it at the Beijing summit at the end of October 2016. And the report is that the spearphishing attacks stopped, either because of Obama’s confronting Putin or because of the end of the election season days before the election. The implication of the report is that the spearphishing was unsuccessful. Neither the software vendor nor the boards of elections (even Durham’s) were compromised. The story is that someone attempted it, that the NSA attributed it to Russian GRU, and that the copy of the Top Secret (why?) NSA report was passed to the Intercept by Reality Leigh Winner, named in a warrant issued an hour after publication by the Intercept (someone was waiting for publication to occur to be the crime).
Winner is a contract intelligence analyst (?) for Pluribus International Corporation, an Alexandria VA headquartered private contractor to the NSA. Winner has experience in Pashtun, Dari, and Farsi (Afghanistan and Iran). Nominally formerly in the US Air Force when in the military, she came out and got an intelligence contracting job.
b wonders why she had access to Top Secret information and what was her need to know. I wonder why the information was Top Secret to begin with. Why was legitimate information about attempts to compromise the US election system hidden from the US public during the campaign for election? I’m sure that Mr. “least untruthful statement” Clapper will soon have the opportunity to tell the American people, eh?
Secrecy corrodes democratic processes. After 70 years of a regime of secrecy, the old framework of constitutional government is pretty corroded and rotten. The 1989 collapse of the DDR allowed East Germans the chance to find out some uncomfortable hidden truths about the Stasi. Reckon USians will ever get that chance with their own history of the American Century?
Far from climate change but sorta in the disinformation war hall-of-mirrors category.
everybody in bed w/everybody, hard to keep tabs. somebody at b’s (or b himself, can’t remember) pointed out that it’s not that difficult to do the kind of election tampering under discussion, assuming that it even happened. and that it’s just as likely the NSA or whoever did something in order to falsely attribute it to R or N Korea or that dread threat to all that’s holy & good, Venezuela. that Obama confronting Putin story sounds like a joke. made me laugh.
as you said, this is all so anti- and un- democratic. clapper could come out w/all kinds of unsourced, unverified, unverifiable “top secret for the good of the nation” nonsense, and as long as it means wonder woman really won, will any dembots demur? nah. as long as the spooks put in office someone who looks & sounds like them…is that you, Mike Pence?
I think the fear may be that trump’s bull in a china shop mentality threatens to kick over their feed trough. too much of a loose canon moron to express the proper class solidarity, even in just the idiotic category of “making murka look bad.” trump is not, at this time, a climber, a crawling, ambitious grabber, not in the way a barak or Hilary is/was. b/c trump bro’t his billions w/him, he didn’t spend decades learning the proper class deference to qualify to be a shoeshine boy/girl (aka politician) in the top country clubs of the nation.
part of it is just a big “the apprentice: trump gets what he dished out” reality tv spectacle. big finance seems happy that the privatization of everything & austerity measures and dereg are moving full spectrum dominance ahead. what’s Lockheed not to like about the Saudi arms deal? trump may screw up US co’s ability to rape others willy nilly (aka, “America’s standing in the world.) those same co’s will just turn their unregulated sights & claws more penetratingly into the bowels of this country. falling profits can be offset by cutting labor costs, e.g., slavery. hello for profit prisons w/ cost-plus guaranteed contracts.
well done, A+, save for perhaps ‘trump may screw up US co’s ability to rape others willy nilly’ but US global bidness, aka, wall st. finance capital…is fine. we’ll see how his budget goes down w/ congress, though. i ain’t bettin’ on many nays, though, once a whip count gets some to vote nuh-uuh.
well done, but i have a couple questions. one concerns this: “Where it gets interesting is the report that Obama was briefed about this report of spearphishing of voting systems, confronted Putin about it at the Beijing summit at the end of October 2016. And the report is that the spearphishing attacks stopped, either because of Obama’s confronting Putin or because of the end of the election season days before the election.” dis that report come from ‘a high-level insider’ or something? but yeah, the intel folks will just lie to advance their own desires as to what should be promoted as ‘the perceived truth’ (aka manufacture some more media / citizen consent).
from b: “The document notes explicitly (p.5) that the operation used some techniques that distinguish it from other known Russian military intelligence operations. It might have been done by someone else.” so…they didn’t say it was done by the gru?
as far as the timing, it’s hard for me to read all b’s bolded quotes in that font, but clearly one weirdness is that ‘the reporter’ contacted another agency on my 31 by text. wow, it sound like the whole mess was designed to out winner, which makes the whole affair sound like utter bullshit.
but ooof! rules to live by: “Points out the difficulty in finding a source of original record in journalism. When money talks, bullshit doesn’t walk, it dances.” thanks. ah, it’s okay that we’re far afield from climate change. never know where a thread will go, and climate change and ppm ain’t goin’ nowhere but…higher and higher.
All we really know about this report is that it is what at least one person at NSA put together for someone (who likely requested it) and that it came to Reality Leigh Winner’s attention at the Augusta GA campus of the NSA (Did you know that NSA had an Augusta GA campus? Who let that one slip? Augusta also has Fort Gordon.)
From Wikipedia: Fort Gordon, formerly known as Camp Gordon, is a United States Army installation established in 1917. It is the current home of the United States Army Signal Corps and Cyber Center of Excellence and was once the home of The Provost Marshal General School. The fort is located next to Augusta, Georgia to the southwest of the city. The main component of the post is the Advanced Individual Training for Signal Corps military occupational specialities. In 1966–68 the Army’s Signal Officer Candidate School (located at Fort Monmouth during World War II and the Korean War) graduated over 2,200 Signal officers. Signals Intelligence has become more visible and comprises more and more of the fort’s duties.
And this little nugget: It was named Camp Gordon in honor of John Brown Gordon, who was a major general in the Confederate army, a Georgia governor, a U.S. senator, and a businessman.
And: The post also hosts a joint-service command, National Security Agency/Central Security Service Georgia, formerly known as the Gordon Regional Security Operations Center. The Army’s 706th MI Group works there alongside units from the Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency, Naval Network Warfare Command (Navy Information Operations Command, Georgia),[4] Marine Corps Intelligence Activity as well as civilians from the National Security Agency (NSA).
So, it’s openly heavily SIGINT. Wow.
wow indeed. camp “this is not the john brown you were looking for” Gordon may not be newz so much to people in that world, both nationally & globally. I really have no idea what to make of that.
Interesting:
unR̶A̶D̶A̶C̶K̶ted @JesselynRadack 12h12 hours ago
Winner case is 2nd time Matt Cole was involved in a story where the source ended up prosecuted for Espionage
1st was my client @JohnKiriakou
Kevin Gosztola of ShadowProof has more on Esposito and Cole’s involvement in Kiriakou’s prosecution.
https://shadowproof.com/2017/06/06/notes-trump-justice-departments-first-leak-prosecution/
Wow, you guys are good! All I get out of the whole ball of wax is somebody thought up that name Reality and they’re happy to have it out there for folk to glom onto – so is that what b’s lefthandedly saying? Greenwald’s chum got rolled at some airport, and Guardian’s computer hard drives publicly smashed – gives them an out to a safe corner having effectively incinerated nine tenths of the five eyes haul by calling in Omidyar from duty in the Ukraine to sweeten the pot. Gee, if I were Putin and thankfully I’m not, the last thing I’d want to be doing is meddling in this witch’s brew of manipulations – and no old ladies counting chads no more.
(How truly quaint eons ago they were, counting those chads…)
Ai ai ai, no wonder John Le Carré retired George Smiley! They’re no longer his people, if they ever were.
I may have lived too long. I truly miss those little old lady Floridians.
lol x 10, juliania! thanks, i needed the laughs. remember the ‘fractured fairy tales’ cartoons? this was so great that if i dinnae know better…i’d have wondered if you’d been dipping into the sacramental wine. didn’t Hanging Chad finally get arrested by the fbi and spend 14 years in detention?
wow. in this one incident, greenwald & co get so much street cred. and the public gets to see the spectacle of a major newspaper meekly handing over its hard drives to security services. talk about a disinfo two-fer. thanks juliania. I had forgotten about this. all the hew & cry about g.g.’s partner being detained. tarzie, back in the day, had some nice tho’ts on this whole song & dance. g.g. gets to be tough, show us “fearless journalism” is still out there, and security gets to show everyone who is really in charge.
gotta beg off for tonight. too many sad, sad things going on here in RL communications and e-communications that i need to sit and cry, then talk to folks again. truth is, some pain we can’t solve for others, save for listening, caring, and sending love, for some wee bit of comfort.
g’nite.
Col. Pat Lang of Sic Semper Tyrannis weighs in. Note his warning about the bind that people who have signed non-disclosure statements are in in concerning commenting on the leak of NSA documents. Also notice how he discusses what the US did in Ukraine.
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2017/06/a-few-thoughts-on-the-leaks-ttg.html
Don’t base your view of what’s going on on political and espionage fiction. The national security and intelligence communities after all are government agencies, and that means they tend to operate on the principle of least effort, patronage, and kiss-up/kick-down.
Lang makes an important point. After 9/11, Congress wanted to break down the silos between the 17 intelligence community agencies and throw more resources into the intelligence community. That resulted in intelligence material being visible to more analysts in hopes that someone would notice something, and the increased use of private contractors to enrich former colleagues and provide quick and easily dropped labor resources of analysts. After all, they thought this would end quickly, not last for 16 years in war without end.
It would be very interesting to note whether the Kingsville High School yearbook for the class of 2010 has a Reality Leigh Winner pictured. And whether she was called Reality or Leigh. For Texas, I’m betting she went by Leigh. And yes, even people in Texas give their kids strange names. Remember that Texas was the home of Ima Pigg and Eura Pigg.
Remember that this lady has lived all of her political consciousness post-9/11. That might shape her thinking as strongly as those of us who have lived all of our political consciousness under the cloud of nuclear weapons. Temporary political commitments from 2016 matter less than the context of 9/11, seeing the intelligence information in language and real time going on in Afghanistan, and getting the only job she has experience in after leaving the US Air Force. What seems to me to be propaganda is riffing off her first name to try to discredit her as flippy hippy. She enlisted in the Air Force and willingly signed a non-disclosure agreement to get Top Secret clearance; she was assigned to the NSA by the Air Force.
If there’s double-dealing, we’ll likely see an stiff indictment against a journalist. Will it be Matthew Cole or one of the other Intercept writers? Or other people within the Intercept organization? What we know at this point is that there is a plea deal being negotiated for Ms. Winner. There is more to come from this case.
so pat is ttg? and he answered ttg in the comments? i’ve forgotten, but oy, is that crazy font hard to read. anyway, his assertion that assange got the dnc leaks from russia makes me look at his opinions w/ a very large hill of salt. “snowflakes”. ah… ;-) but yes, he lionizes himself to discuss it as his love of country, god, and the constitution take precedence. ah, well. but srly, as an IT spook, he never heard about ‘the Shadow Brokers in possession (and trying to sell) weaponized CIA methods, allowing any potential hacker to adopt the identity of anyone else, even the CIA or NSA. even tyler durden had.’
but a 25-yr.old woman is hired on feb. 13 is given top security clearance (he assumes ‘immediately’) and contacts unnamed agencies at the end of may, was it? well, maybe, but due to her many anti-trump tweets, her russophobia as in ‘Putin’s puppet, i’m not taking any of it as presented,, including TI’s… mmmm…biased reporting.
on edit: yes, but ima and ura Hogg, only as it turned out, there never was a ‘ura‘, lol. (my dad had laughed about their names any number of times when i’d bitched about having been named ‘wendy’, ugh. da wiki notes other Imas, as in Ima Pigg, Ima Muskrat, Ima Nut, Ima Hooker,[15] Ima Weiner, Ima Reck, Ima Pain and Ima Butt.[19] why not Ima Pain Butt, then?
He’s an old-fashioned spook, not an IT spook. He’s good on the realities of the bureaucratic culture. Yes, a supply of pinches of salt outside of that.
She had a Top Secret clearance in the Air Force, and was assigned to Fort Meade’s NSA installation. She could well have had a Top Secret clearance for 7 years if she enlisted at 18 just out of high school. The February 13 date is when she became a private contracting analyst for Pluribus International Corporation and assigned to Fort Gordon.
Chelsea Manning’s range of access seems to bear out the post-9/11 integration of information for analysts across agencies.
Top Secret as I understand it is far from the highest level clearance. It’s almost entry level for analysts.
ah, thanks for straightening me out. yes, i’d even thunk their were ‘super top secret’ and ‘eyes only’ levels, so i went to da wiiki. about midway down is:
“Information “above Top Secret” is either Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) or special access program (SAP) which are phrases used by media. It is not truly “above” Top Secret, since there is no civilian clearance higher than Top Secret. SCI information may be either Secret or Top Secret, but in either case it has additional controls on dissemination beyond those associated with the classification level alone…”, etc.
but still, this document which TTP/lang believes is the real deal, iirc, doesn’t rise to those levels, save if the PTB want it to be so. like a fool, i’ve been peeking in for info on dni coats’ and t’other dude (lol) ack, rogers testifying to the senate intel committee. Sizzling! the media say… and yes, needless secrecy breeds corruption, or however you’d phrased it.
Indeed. Overclassification makes the people with clearances feel important but it hamstrings accountability. My best example is Pat Lang’s little disclaimer at the top of his post on the Intercept story. At base it is silly, but of consequence enough that he must remind some of his readers. Violating disclosure regardless of content (the American League scores) or consequence is a crime punishable by a decade in prison if the prosecutor decides to go full Espionage Act of 1917. For disclosure, not for espionage.
If there were a real Russian hack, there should have been chapter and verse on who, where, when, how, and why from day 1. If nothing else, that would tend to get a foreign to either back off or find better communication and hacking methods.
The current classification makes it indeed look like a political stunt, which it might well be after all the facts are sorted out. Or it might be that Trump’s previous financial difficulties are coming back to haunt him the way that a Quentin Tarantino movie plot unfolds. Are we dealing with the mob or the mafia here? The fact that it is just plain crazy does not allow any sort of ideological narrative to have finality.
No white hats or black hats at all in this situation. Not even a comfortable gray hat. Trump’s posse, the rump Clintonista Democrats, the US deep state, even Putin’s nationalist oligarchy capitalist religious Orthodox state. A four- or five-way Hobson’s choice.
your paragraph beginning with ‘If there were a real Russian hack’ is great, but we’ve been told to believe that further documentation will be comin’ down the tracks soon. woot! woot! and by now, the intercept has validated that, as have all the msm who want trump gone.
and still, i think there are plenty of competing ‘deep state’ players by now. which reminds me, can you tell me what your definition of post-modern is again?
i’m guessing we’ll never know The Truth, but given that the over-arching theory that ‘we know it was the rooskies, cuz herr cheeto had made it clear that he wanted to normalize relations with The Bear’ as well as ‘T had made noises about loving wikileaks, so assange was in the pocket for herr T’ will not die, see tim kaine, is too absurd for words. now clearly assange had a major chich with the many D ruling elites who’ve called for him being assassinated, but that’s understandable. juan gonzales at the DN link below asked some pretty weird questions about assange’s opinions in all of this.
coverage of the testimonies at the senate intel committee is interesting, but many have called for fisa 702 to never sunset. coats and rogers? no, no pressure from the Prez (is he the Prez? how surreal!), of course.
yes, juliania. what’s in a name? a winner b reality by any other name…would still be suspicious. but yeah, what is in a name? weird.
one effect of this “reality’ story is to constantly push before public consciousness the notion of “R meddling in the election.” as in, “the document leaked contains details of R meddling.” bullshit.
will today’s attacks dispel the idiot idea that Iran is somehow in collusion w/”ISIS”? nah. iran is playing 10th dimensional chess. lucky for us all, Uncle Sam plays 11th dimensional chess.
i’m sorry. none of this is stuff to be joked about. a glance at the NYT headlines just now…big sigh. it’s terrible.
thinking of you wendy. hope the morning brings some sunshine.
yeah, and who’s watching dan coats testify at the senate intel committee today? and comey tomorrow, iirc. dunno which attacks today, but there are few headlines beyond those lately, no?
thanks for the good thoughts, j. sadly, i had awful dreams of being in india, never mind. no sunshine really, and i’d thought a couple cries and some sleep would bring needed perspective. but truly, i’d been doin’ fair to middlin’ with all yesterday’s march of sad and depressing stories until a friend wrote just after 7 and told me that his 11-year-old great niece…had shot herself. her suicide note read: ‘i’m so sorry i’m not strong enough’. mi amigo said ‘no 11-yr-old should be expected to be ‘strong enough; shouldn’t her parents have been strong for her?’ oof.
goddam, the tears are leaking again. but seriously, how in the multiverse can a person find any philosophical perspective for such a heartbreaking tragedy? sure, ‘all we are is dust in the wind’…but for now, i can get her wee speck of dust out of my pierced heart. how can he? yes, in time…
oh lord. I spent 3 hours on the phone yesterday w/a friend back in d.c. who has an 11 yr old boy whose father, the psychopathic ex-hub, does nothing but use this cherubic child as a weapon against her, to get back at her for fleeing his violent abusive ass.
but how many kids have to off themselves before we stop simplistically blaming the parents? (not knowing this situation…) if this friend of mine had not had an extraordinary amount of help from another friend who was close w/the director of the largest women’s shelter in d.c….well, who knows? I heard a far too common story of a young 20 yr old one weekend a month hopping the truck stops b/n Richmond va & charlotte, selling herself to have enough $$ to support her child. yes, she has some Walmart jobby type job too.
why is escape so difficult?
the children haven’t internalized all the defense mechanisms, the lying, the addictions, the blinding numbness, all the education & enculturation, etc. etc. they are just “the thing itself, unencumbered man,” the true mirror.
it’s a form of murder. it’s overwhelming. I feel it. too much.
i do hear you on the ‘simplistically blaming the parents’, but mi amigo must know the rest of the story, or he wouldn’t have inferred that. i never asked, may not even be able to handle the answer…for now, at least. any yes, i’ve at in the same metaphorical witness stands too many times, as for most ‘therapists’ i was ‘the Mother’ who’d grievously abused our foster daughter, then adopted, (along w/ a supposed male in the house) before she was 6 months old.
the flip side is that chirren, being in their perceptions, the centers of the universe, most often believe that they are the causes of parental discord, divorce, the weaponization of themselves. would it be that your amiga’s abusive ex tries to trash her to their son? maybe even try to force him to ‘choose a side’? i see that a lot, and oy, the child’s internal conflicts are vast and hellacious.
such tragic tales you’ve brought, and yes, it’s a form of murder of the worst sort, isn’t it? soul, heart, and spirit murder. why is escape so difficult? oof, what a devilishly long set of reasons that would entail. but as w/ your deecee friend’s friend, imagine that there could be, should be, an underground railroad for abused women and chirren. i have one abused friend who’s been told by well-meaning therapists to flee!!! not getting that she’d have to leave her house, her business, everything inside…to the abuser himself, and start anew w/ wit-sec sort of new identity.
parenthetically, it’s always seemed that the ‘right-to-lifers’ are often the ones who don’t believe that the state should provide any funding for those same women and chirren, who should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps…or something.
“”We are no longer going to measure compassion by the number of programs, or the number of people on those programs,” Mulvaney told reporters on Monday.
“We’re going to measure compassion and success by the number of people we help get off of those programs and get back in charge of their own lives,” he said.”
and i’m so sorry for your pain…and theirs, j.
right, I don’t know the story of your friend. but given this kid sounds like one among too many others…still, whatever the story, why didn’t she have someplace to run to? fyi the age of consent in N Carolina is 16. yeah…what’s the beer drinking, gun toting, war fighting, voting age again? hey, can a girl finish high school before her step dad legally gets her preggers?
yeah, these little bundles of narcissistic tendencies. yes, to your question. constant source of anxiety as the mom is always the sole cause of any problems in the fractured family unit or frustrations the son has. he’s the kind of guy who killed their dog after the break up. is destroying her credit, etc.
credit. the structural bullshit of capitalism makes all this other stuff so much worse, when it is not the cause.
well, it’s gonna be rough as hell on that cherubic young un, and i hope your amiga can eventually find some excellent healing help for him. i finally looked, and suicides in pre-adolescents is rare, but growing, although the sites i found group ages quite differently as in: more broadly. “In 2006, 56 American children under age 12 committed suicide. Unfortunately, so far, there’s been little research into suicidal behavior among pre-adolescents.”
but of course depression caused by bulling, whether over race, sexual identity, family violence, academic pressures, etc. is prevalent in all teen suicides.
“credit. the structural bullshit of capitalism makes all this other stuff so much worse, when it is not the cause.” amen.
thank god for the lgbtq kids at school. a friend of mine has a very high-functioning autistic son who, when he got into high school, the only kids who would befriend him were the queer kids. but then his parentals were all like, what if those fags try to do something???? convert or molest or whatever paranoid fantasies they have? I couldn’t beiieve it. I was stunned. part of me was like thankfully he’ll never be normal and a hateful idiot like you, his parents. yeah, there is hope for humanity! w/the autistic gays. they got really mad when I gave him for his birthday the complete works in the “Bi-Curious George” children’s series. and dropping him off at the “Bi-curios” shop? (2 simpson’s jokes in a row. pathetic.)
sir pathetic, them lgtbq kids mightta got their son into a unisex (see: frickin’ snowflakes) bathroom and…converted him! turns out there is a ‘Bi-Curious George’ book, simpson jokes notwithstanding.
when our son transferred for his senior year in hs to cortez west of here due to rampant Neeegro bullying in this school, it was tada! the goths who’d befriended him. and they all got busted after tada! columbine, their laptops stolen, searched, and ruined. he stood up to the PTB at school, and you know how that went.
well, I heard that joke from that corruptor of youth on the teevee.
i’m surprised the kids don’t jimmy the gun cabinets at home more often & blow their fucking parents’ brains out. nope, they break into the liquor or medicine cabinet first. or get it from big pharma’s rep at the school in the nurse’s office or whatev. someone just gave their full-throated approval to a very punitive model of child-rearing, but b/c the kid in question just turned 17, it’s ok to toss him on his ass cuz at that age he’s an “adult.” if he doesn’t shape up & fly right, that is. that’s what this person’s father did to him, and he turned out highly successful blah blah blah.
lee cobb from 12 angry men as the national child psychologist.
these “normal healthy successful” middlers’ desire to punish children arises from guilt. from repressed awareness of the parental (or societal) role in childhood development. from, to a degree, looking in a mirror. and not liking it. so smash the mirror. plus huge amounts of resentment about life in general. “you work everyday…”
and would you believe it? the kid in question is on his dad’s health insurance. “take away his insulin! that’ll teach him.” a kid whose sins are: smoking pot, not taking the bullshit in high school that seriously, being a self-involved adolescent slob around the house. that’s it. kick his ass to the curb! and can we say jealousy? the kid is laying some pipe w/his girlfriend. and that’s bad. (btw, the person giving this awful advice is not the kid’s parent, but the dad’s close friend. and mine. pissing me off.)
holy crow, what an illustrative clip to mirror your point. as a counterpoint, though, i’d bring in our son’s new blended-family son. his entire life his mother’s enabled him, no real life consequences she hadn’t mooted in one way or another. no household chores, ever, no consequences when he stole her (and now our son) blind to get heroin, i won’t go thru the whole litany. but of course he hate himself, and project that loathing onto everyone in his way.
she’d threatened him forever with throwing him out at age whatever, no job, not finishing high school, more heroin in the house, tra la la, but never did. the only reason he’s out now is cuz the building they live in (where she works) took out a restraining order on him after he threatened an old woman w/ some sort of violence (they never specified which sort). she bouth him a car to live in, he drove it, smashed it, and while he lived in it she did his laundry, brought him meals, all that ‘helpful’ stuff. and he’s 22 years old.
oh no denying parental enabling going on. but maybe the enabler, esp. as he knows he’s enabling, should not adopt a punitive, vengeful approach? is all this anxiety about “fixing this kid” really helpful? maybe try to work with him in his senior year of HS instead of kicking him out or holding that BS threat over his head? maybe at least try it? and be patient. he didn’t develop bad eating habits et al over night. he’s not gonna undevelop them overnight either.
this kid is not by a long ways where that miserable, impossible soul you describe sounds like he is at. sounds like he needs to be confined. and if anyone needs a good yelling at, it’s the parent.
popular resistance sent zero hedge’s version. i’ll link their cuz reading at zero hedge makes my brain frazzle. a few potentially illuminating bits, and as you’d read the TI long, long, version, is this what you’d seen?
“The NSA document alleges the GRU hacked the voting systems company using a false Google alert requiring a target to enter login credentials. According to the report, it also attempted a parallel campaign using a false email account meant to be confused with a second company. And yet, despite all that “sophistication”, Russia’s smartest, government hackers somehow left a trail so obvious that it would allow the NSA to conclude in under a month, that Russia’s GRU was behind it. Which is also where the story become questionable because at roughly the same time, another set of alleged Russian hackers, the Shadow Brokers, was in possession (and trying to sell) weaponized CIA methods, allowing any potential hacker to adopt the identity of anyone else, even the CIA or NSA.”
but on the other hand, he writes:
“The NSA report, the Intercept claims, “displays no doubt that the cyber assault was carried out by the GRU.”
was the intercept claiming a ‘deep throat’ in this? it’s confusing to me, esp. re: the term ‘assessment’:
“On the other hand, the same Intercept article notes that “a U.S. intelligence officer who declined to be identified cautioned against drawing too big a conclusion from the document because a single analysis is not necessarily definitive.” Still, the assessment concluded with high confidence that the Kremlin ordered an extensive, multi-pronged propaganda effort “to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.” ha ha ha.
before this thread becomes positively, absolutely, undeniably, really most sinceeeeeerely dead, i wanted to let you know that on my ‘discussing Evil’ thread, i tried to call you slackers out once again toward the end of that thread, reminding you again of this at the bottom of the OP:
(If you like what I write, and would like to contribute or subscribe, click here.)
the hyperlink, which no one save for Darling Davidly had apparently clicked into, even out of curiosity, and had said: ‘heh; now that’s Evil.’ the contribution was a mere laugh, chuckle, what.ev.er, in that the link had left to emily litella’s ‘never mind’.
but then, as mr. wd and i laugh rather knowingly, i’m the red skelton of the blogosphere; he’d always laughed harder while delivering his jokes than the room did. oh well, so it goes.
i’d been attempting to parody (a bit) the many sites who ask for contributions, ian welsh’s, to be sure, but many others, including beyond comedy: the Intercept.
ah, well, sorry you hadn’t clicked in, you incurious bastids. never mind. ;-)
yeppers: 3…2…1: ‘NSA Contractor Charged for Leak After Intercept Exposé Reveals Russian Cyberattack of 2016 Election’, from DN!, with interviews with intercept ‘consultants’ bruce schnieir and jake williams, guest appearance by tim kaine
pretty standard ‘the intercept report showed it was the roosians’, they’d done it before (dnc), might do more next time, juan is a true believer, mr. pink face kaine couldn’t help gloating a bit, yada, yada, right on TI script. the exception was jake, but i couldn’t quite make out what he was getting at in the transcript.
Tim Kaine was the guy sent to put OFA out of its misery. Interesting that he alleges compromise of Illinois Board of Elections. Has there been earlier coverage of this? Of course he just lets Winner out to hang. And then tries to spin the information.
Schneier just tells you how the system operates:
“Now, near as we can tell, nothing happened with this. If you’re going to attack voting rolls, the effect would be to deregister people, change their party affiliation, change their address—generally, sow chaos during the election. And we didn’t see any of that. So this feels much more exploratory as an attack than operational. But we don’t know. This was a document written by the NSA, so it shows the NSA analysis. Presumably, it was sent to the FBI, who would be doing the domestic investigation as to what happened. And we don’t see that. We don’t know if there were attacks against other election officials, other voting software companies, and what those effects might have been.”
But there was chaos. It was caused by state governments deregistering felons and using broad “similar name” criteria. It was caused by GOP voter caging operations trying to invalidate residency. It was caused by the way boards of elections allocated voting equipment and staff for early election and election day. It was caused by technical malfunctions with computer equipment. It was caused by shifting of voting locations and times of precinct operations. With 3080 counties in the US there was a lot of chaos. Any Russian signals are covered in noise.
Again Scheier is emphasizing that this is what the Intercept thinks the NSA thinks that the NSA knows about Russian espionage operations. Not what Russian operatives actually did or even other operatives actually did. But he still speculates on Russian motives based on the frame of the NSA report (which does not have its backup information). And again his speculation is that downloading registrations is for propaganda campaigns?!!! WTF? That makes no sense at all. How exactly does he see that being played out; he’s stretching for something.
Jake Williams is hamstrung by his disclosure agreement from saying anything remotely useful, and he has the background that could inform the public the most. But he winds up essentially waving his hands. Until this:
“I came out and said, “Oh, hey, this sounds very much like—very much like the GRU.” And the reporter says, “Hey, how do you know that?” I said, “This is like reading a playbook.” Right? The techniques that they describe, you know, while not specific to the GRU, are very, very typical of their types of—their types of operations. ”
Is this not like a physician diagnosing from someone of the TV?
And that drives that tack in the Intercept story.
And then Jake Williams the TAO guy (cyberoffense) sez:
“Look, I think, up at the state level, it gets pretty difficult to start manipulating vote totals. But I said I would go down to the county governments—right?—the individuals who are certifying the individual vote totals. We saw some—before the election, we saw some demonstrations of how to hack voting machines. And people always note that these are air-gapped voting machines. But, of course, the reality is, they’re programmed from, in some cases, PCMCIA cards, these computer cards, that ultimately are programmed on a computer that is very likely, in every case, connected to the internet. And so, again, if you look at starting to work through us, you know, we would target these low-level machines. I said the second thing I’d target would be absentee ballots. I think that—and to do that, you know, I specifically mentioned I’d go after voter rolls. It was very interesting to see that come out—come out of the story, actually felt a little eerie.”
Has Jake Williams said this elsewhere? Before the 2016 election?
So he would go after original entry and absentee ballots. Well, guess what? Go back to Frank Kent, “The Great Game of Politics” (1923), the era of paper ballots, urban machines, and the beginning of mechanical voting machines (the ones with the flip levers). Essentially the “reliable” technology. What are the folks rigging elections focusing on? Original entry and absentee ballots. Fudging totals before kicking them to the city or county for aggregation. That’s 94 years ago. (Get much earlier and you find peach brandy offered at the precincts.) If you do election proteciton operations, you focus on original entry processes, integrity of absentee ballots, and judging the counting and totaling at the precinct level.
If the Rooskis have caught up with this, they are themselves internally close to a mature democracy, eh what?
this is great ++, thd. i’d started clipping portions into this word document, but gave up, partially because the time for me to encapsulate/ characterize would be fruitless as thi s might have been a dead thread anyway. (zounds, did it veer widely from the OP, in five directions? purdy fun, actually.)
but several parts were greek to me, like the cards, etc. but srsly, you’ve given me my second and third laughs today. that said, you’ll remember the discussion concerning obama telling putin to cut it out, and someone’s answer being close to ‘nah; the timing was off’. but given that i have a few things to tend to before folding for the night, may i please say thanks for digging in, and i’ll read it all again in the morning? of course i may, lol.
but do remember: kaine may have hing winner out to dray, but he did it with so much ‘seriosity’ as to ‘any presididn’t, not just T, would prosecute her. ach, and what was juannie going on about as to why assange was supporting her, while…something or other. his construction made no sense to me. dagnabbit, i’ve forgotten, but it concerned something i’d never seen from julian. folks laughed at him for supporting michael moore’s new anti-T whistleblowing endeavor, but he’d also mentioned that his project was quite insecure.
sleep well, and my best to miz thd. she’s a peach, ain’t she?
allow me to thank you again for this good stuff, but only add a couple things as i kinda want to cover lat night’s Comey memo ‘bombshell’. but from patrick martin at wsws covering the Intercept coverage of ‘russian election hacking’:
“In only one of the states using VR Systems software, North Carolina, was there any software malfunction on Election Day. The registration system failed in Durham, forcing local officials to switch to paper ballots and extend voting hours to accommodate long lines. State election officials said the VR Systems software was not responsible for the problems, which they attributed to user errors, adding that there was no evidence of “any suspicious activity during the 2016 election.”
on edit: i should have added ‘FWIW’ to the above.
but nonetheless, what we’ve seen is that the intercept coverage has indeed reified the meme, esp for those who’d already believed it for their own political reasons, an the media who serve them…so ably. ;-)
“The ranking Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, declared Tuesday that the report in the Intercept meant that “we now have verified information” of Russian intervention. “In any other circumstances this would be an earthquake,” she said at the beginning of a committee hearing where Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly was the main witness. McCaskill pressed Kelly to take steps to protect voting systems in the future.”
also, you will all be elated to finally know the Truth: ‘Russian hackers to blame for sparking Qatar crisis, FBI inquiry finds’, the guardian
;-)
what shall we do? what shall we ever do? about the rooskies?
Mr. Comey, just how many commies are in the White House?
thanks ya’ll, lots of info, history. how many different ways can you say, fuck james comey? what was his “October surprise” intervention that seemed to tilt the electorate even more against HRC? i forget the details. and now look! he’s everyone’s favorite hero cop.
if I was in the WH, I would do everything I could to keep these Rachel maddow ken starr showboating prudes, these conscience-less, ravenous, donkey sharks in congress from stirring up an investigation. hell yeah. pleading the 5th against these creeps is obstruction of justice. ha ha ha ha. everybody knows they are all guilty of something, and w/these people, it’s not just something, it’s lots. not wanting to provide material against one’s self in a witch hunt is now proof of guilt. as is not wanting to have an investigation played out & effectively tried thru that same donkey shark media.
hey, j edgar, yer friend comey, et. al.,are just lettin’ us know that the fbi (fuller brush inc.?) can’t be bought off. donkey shark media indeed! harummmph.
https://twitter.com/calebmaupin/status/872821429531705344
ooof, it’s noon, dagnabbit. got waylaid by another oven repairman visit. might not get my comey memo/and tesifyin; thang up until after a bit of a siesta. burning eyes, burning brain…ah well, like climate change, it ain’t goin’ nowhere soon.
no nested spaces left, j. via email, i was confused as to ‘which enabling’ you were talking about. but of course the parent should have tried different approaches. but that parent arguably isn’t getting his part in his son’s development. but: i once put a diary up at my.fdl post ndy hook massacre, and used as my model some of alice miller’s work. the key part being violence on children begets…violence on others as they age, and most esp. once they’ve left home. well, plus male authoritarian culture, as well, lot of push back on that, too…
but you may or may not have been shocked by how many professed that they were hit as kids, and ‘look at me now i’m awesome!’ sorts of rubbish. oh, fiddlesticks; i can’t find your comment. but our son tried to parent the kid in what he thought were constructive ways, but long story short: ‘stay out of it’, mama said. i did try to softly tell her that he may have to ‘bottom out’ as they say, but he did go to jail, got the laird, and…stay tuned. poor schmuck, he’s hard to like, but when he’s been here, i’ve tried hard to actively love him.