KGB FIS FSB

===

see russia, collusion

putin ussr oligarchs

new node GRU russia intel (disambig?)

=<div>=</div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/putin--trump-kremlin-documents/">https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/putin--trump-kremlin-documents/</a></div><div>
</div><div>Joe Biden may be president, but in too many ways the Age of Trump marches on. American political and civic life continues to resemble a <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/07/19/dr-john-gartner-on-america-after-trump-dystopian-science-fiction--is-actually-happening/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">spy thriller, a horror movie or a science fiction dystopia</a> that keeps spawning sequels. Most Americans want to escape the theater, but the doors are locked. Those who remain in their seats love these movies and can't get enough of their charismatic star.The ending of this saga has been obvious since the beginning: Donald Trump is a malevolent force, with no loyalty to the United States and its people; yet his followers worship him as a god and nothing can tear them away from the cult.Almost every day there are new plot twists. As reported last week, the highest-ranking officers and civilian leaders of the U.S. military were concerned that <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/07/16/donald-trumps-military-coup-didnt-quite-happen--but-it-was-much-closer-than-we-knew/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Trump might try to stage a military coup</a> after his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, considered a plan <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/14/politics/donald-trump-election-coup-new-book-excerpt/index.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">to resist such a move through mass resignations</a>, a last-ditch effort to save democracy.As detailed in Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker's new book "<a href="https://bookshop.org/a/2464/9780593298947" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">I Alone Can Fix It</a>," Trump became so enraged after losing to Joe Biden that some feared he would stage a "Reichstag fire" incident, in the mode of Adolf Hitler, that might allow him to seize absolute power. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi even asked Milley to ensure that Trump would not launch a nuclear attack and use the ensuing crisis as an excuse to suspend the Constitution and remain in power.More "revelations" have followed: Last Thursday <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/15/kremlin-papers-appear-to-show-putins-plot-to-put-trump-in-white-house" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">the Guardian reported</a> that it had obtained classified documents from a 2016 meeting where the Russian government launched its secret campaign in support of Trump:<blockquote style="margin: 1em 40px 1em -5px; border-left: 4px solid rgb(11, 13, 101); line-height: 32px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; width: 602.531px; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">Vladimir Putin personally authorised a secret spy agency operation to support a "mentally unstable" Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election during a closed session of Russia's national security council, according to what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents.
The key meeting took place on 22 January 2016, the papers suggest, with the Russian president, his spy chiefs and senior ministers all present.
They agreed a Trump White House would help secure Moscow's strategic objectives, among them "social turmoil" in the US and a weakening of the American president's negotiating position.
Russia's three spy agencies were ordered to find practical ways to support Trump, in a decree appearing to bear Putin's signature.
Western intelligence agencies are understood to have been aware of the documents for some months and to have carefully examined them. The papers, seen by the Guardian, seem to represent a serious and highly unusual leak from within the Kremlin.
The Guardian has shown the documents to independent experts who say they appear to be genuine. Incidental details come across as accurate. The overall tone and thrust is said to be consistent with Kremlin security thinking.
</blockquote>At this purported Kremlin meeting, Putin and the Russian intelligence services concluded that Trump could be easily manipulated to serve Russia's strategic goals because he is an <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/07/06/dr-justin-frank-laughing-at-trump-is-unhealthy-and-it-wont-protect-us-from-reality/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">"impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex."</a> This document concludes, "It is acutely necessary to use all possible force to facilitate [Trump's] election to the post of US president."The Guardian further concludes that the Kremlin's internal report was likely the work of Vladimir Symonenko, a senior Kremlin official who "provides Putin with analytical material and reports, some of them based on foreign intelligence." He discussed various "American weaknesses" Russian agents could exploit, including "a 'deepening political gulf between left and right," the U.S. 'media-information' space, and an anti-establishment mood under President Barack Obama."The Guardian report has been met with considerable skepticism, some of it from the usual suspects who continue to claim — despite an abundance of known and proven facts — that the scandal sometimes dubbed "Russiagate" was all a hoax, or at least grossly exaggerated. But it's also fair to say that some <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/07/15/intelligence-security-experts-react-to-bombshell-new-trump-putin-allegations-with-skepticism/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">respected national security experts</a> are suspicious about the timing of the Guardian story, and the authenticity and provenance of the documents in question.But other national security and intelligence experts believe the Guardian story is true and the Kremlin documents are authentic. Robert Baer, a former CIA case officer and author of several bestselling books who serves as an intelligence and security analyst for CNN, believes the Kremlin document is legitimate and was likely leaked to the Guardian by British intelligence.In a recent conversation with journalist Ian Masters, Baer said that Donald Trump may indeed have served as a "useful idiot" on behalf of Russian interests, sent into the heart of American democracy as a "Trojan horse to cause problems." He suggests that Russian intelligence used the technique of "framing a guilty man" to muddy the waters around Trump and make him a more effective chaos agent.Writing at Esquire, <a href="https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a37034679/kremlin-putin-trump-documents-leak/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Charles Pierce explains</a> how he reconciles concerns about the veracity of the Kremlin papers:<blockquote style="margin: 1em 40px 1em -5px; border-left: 4px solid rgb(11, 13, 101); line-height: 32px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; width: 602.531px; background: rgb(245, 245, 245);">Are experts within the Western intelligence agencies divided about the authenticity of the documents, and did someone who believes them to be the smoking gun leak them in order to force the action? I'd certainly want to know more about their provenance than I do now.
Frankly, my impulse is to believe what The Guardian reported. The revelations certainly seem believable given some of the otherwise inexplicable actions of the previous president* and his administration, and they also conform to the methods of ratfcking Russia has used in other democracies in Europe. <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/39655415" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">(What up, Estonia?)</a> And they also track with what we've learned recently about the former president's rabid-badger attempts to stay in power after he'd clearly lost the election — and, for that matter, his continued attempts to undermine confidence in this country's electoral system.
But my innate caution against leaping to conclusions based on leaks from intelligence services of any kind makes me cautious about this being a conclusive Eureka moment. Too many shadowy people have too many shadowy agendas for me to accept anything emerging from those shadows too readily. But there is one conclusion I will stand by, based on the Guardian story and its conformity to what a lot of us suspected was true about the previous president*: We simply have got to get rid of the Electoral College. Now.
</blockquote>Whatever one concludes about the authenticity of these Kremlin papers, one conclusion is obvious: Their observations about Donald Trump, and about the vulnerability of American society to disinformation and subversion, are correct.Both Robert Mueller's report and the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the 2016 election (the latter completed under Republican leadership) have conclusively shown that Russia interfered to help Donald Trump win as a way of advancing its strategic goals. Moreover, it is a matter of public record that <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/u-s-has-new-intel-manafort-friend-kilimnik-gave-trump-n1264371" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Trump's inner circle included at least one Russian agent</a>.At almost every key juncture in his presidency, Trump made decisions that advanced Russia's interests to the disadvantage of the United States. In both public and private, he was strikingly submissive and deferential to Putin. Whether that reflects blackmail and control, or simply hero worship and admiration, is an unsettled question.Even members of Trump's administration and Republican elected officials questioned his loyalty to the country, especially after the astonishing <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44852812" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Helsinki summit</a> of 2018.In the end, Russia's strategy would prove to be brilliant: Trump left the White House with the U.S. a weakened world power, gripped by a plague that has killed at least 600,000 people, along with a <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/06/30/tucker-carlson-prepares-white-nationalists-for-war-dont-ignore-the-power-of-his-rhetoric/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">neofascist insurgency</a> that shows no signs of dying out. Right-wing terrorism and other violence is escalating, and the nation has <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/07/08/republicans-want-18-more-months-of-chaos--followed-by-the-end-of-democracy/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">become irreparably polarized </a>by the increasing radicalism of Republicans and the right.In recent weeks I have reflected a great deal on my <a href="https://www.salon.com/2019/12/02/former-cia-profiler-jerrold-post-on-donald-trumps-dangerous-charisma/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">2019 conversation with the late Dr. Jerrold Post</a>, the founding director of the CIA's Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior. In Post's long and distinguished career, he served as the CIA's head psychological profiler under five presidents of both political parties. He described Donald Trump this way:<blockquote style="margin: 1em 40px 1em -5px; border-left: 4px solid rgb(11, 13, 101); line-height: 32px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; width: 602.531px; background: rgb(245, 245, 245);">If one were to subtract from the ranks of political leaders all those with significant narcissistic personality features, the ranks would be perilously impoverished. I see Donald Trump as representing the quintessential narcissist. Using that phrase, though, is not to make a diagnosis, but to say he has a preponderance of these traits. Someone such as Donald Trump with that trait has no capacity to empathize with others, no constraints of conscience. Donald Trump also demonstrates a paranoid orientation. Whenever anything goes wrong, there is someone to blame.
There is also unconstrained aggression. This is very important. Never apologize, never admit you're wrong. That is part of Donald Trump's political style. But negotiating foreign policy is different from negotiating how to buy a skyscraper. Donald Trump also shows through his behavior a deep underlying insecurity. His grandiosity aside, Donald Trump is extremely fragile, and that trait is associated with extreme sensitivity.
</blockquote>Post also warned, nearly two years before it happened, that Donald Trump was unlikely to leave office peacefully:<blockquote style="margin: 1em 40px 1em -5px; border-left: 4px solid rgb(11, 13, 101); line-height: 32px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; width: 602.531px; background: rgb(245, 245, 245);">In the last chapter of my new book I quote one of my favorite poems, which is, "Do not go gentle into that good night, but rage, rage at the dying of the light." I do not believe that Donald Trump will go gentle into that good night. In a close election, there is a very real hazard in terms of both potential outcomes. Should Trump win, as he did in 2016, he will make it a much bigger win and talking about the fraudulent election support on the Democratic side. But should Trump lose narrowly, I think we can be assured that he will not concede early. Trump may not even recognize the legitimacy of the election.
</blockquote>How will the American people deal with these continuous "revelations" about Trump and his regime? To this point, the response seems to be impotent rage. Because Trump and his inner circle are almost entirely rich white men, they will face no <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/06/25/why-isnt-trump-in-jail-former-george-w-bush-lawyer-says-bidens-doj-is-protecting-him/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">serious punishment</a> for their crimes and other wrongdoing. Many Americans feel justifiable rage about a system which has one set of rules and laws for the rich and powerful (who are white) and another set for everyone else.America is not just experiencing a democracy crisis caused by the Trump movement and the Jim Crow Republicans. The problem goes much deeper: America's political and social institutions are experiencing a legitimacy crisis, in which Trumpism is one symptom of a much larger disease.The American people must decide whether their rage can be turned to productive or regenerative possibilities, or whether they continue to live in a state of learned helplessness, shrugging their shoulders as even more of the Trump regime's crimes are revealed. On that decision rests the future of democracy.<div class="around-the-web" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="from-your-siteheadline" style="font-weight: 700; text-transform: uppercase;">FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES</div><ul class="around-the-weblist" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline-block; width: 589.438px; list-style: none;"><li class="from-your-siteitem"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/trump-barr/" class="from-your-sitelink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Documents about fake Bill Barr investigation of Trump obstruction of ... ›</a></li><li class="from-your-siteitem"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/trump-and-kremlin/" class="from-your-sitelink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Intelligence security experts react to bombshell new Trump-Putin ... ›</a></li><li class="from-your-siteitem"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/kremlin-and-trump/" class="from-your-sitelink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">'Beyond Putin's wildest dreams': Kremlin's backing of Trump had ... ›</a></li></ul><div class="around-the-webheadline" style="font-weight: 700; text-transform: uppercase; margin-top: 10px;">RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB</div><ul class="around-the-weblist" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline-block; width: 589.438px; list-style: none;"><li class="around-the-webitem"><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2021/07/15/trump-kompromat-claimed-report-says-kremlin-documents-show-putin-conspiring-for-billionaire/" class="around-the-weblink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Trump Kompromat Claimed: Kremlin Documents Reportedly Show ... ›</a></li><li class="around-the-webitem"><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/15/the-person-to-weaken-america-what-the-kremlin-papers-said-about-trump" class="around-the-weblink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">The person to 'weaken' America: what the Kremlin papers said about ... ›</a></li><li class="around-the-webitem"><a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/kremlin-leak-appears-to-confirm-existence-of-trump-kompromat" class="around-the-weblink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Reported Kremlin Leak Appears to Confirm Existence of Trump ... ›</a></li></ul></div></div><div>
</div><div>=</div>=<a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/oldest-living-cia-agent-believes-russia-infiltrated-gop-long-before-trump-took-over/">https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/oldest-living-cia-agent-believes-russia-infiltrated-gop-long-before-trump-took-over/</a>raw The oldest living CIA agent believes Russia sank its hooks into the Republican Party well before President Donald Trump emerged as a viable candidate.Peter Sichel was one of the CIA's first agents at the start of the Cold War, and he sees evidence of Russia's spycraft against Trump and the GOP in the Senate Intelligence Committee, <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/oldest-living-cia-agent-says-russia-probably-targeted-trump-decades-ago?ref=home" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">reported The Daily Beast</a>."One great advantage the Soviets always had over us, is that they played the long game. We thought in terms of quarters, whereas they thought in terms of years or even decades," Sichel said. "They were opportunistic, willing to let matters gradually develop until the right political faction or right leader to support had emerged."Senate investigators found the Kremlin sought to infiltrate the Republican Party long before Trump became its nominee as part of Russian president Vladimir Putin's effort to deny the White House to Hillary Clinton.Putin had fostered right-wing political movements across Europe to gain influence there, and Trump's presidential campaign promoted many of the same nationalist themes, and Sichel found numerous instances where Trump campaign operatives opened themselves up to possible Russian blackmail."The KGB were absolute masters at it," Sichel said, "and they would use whatever they could get their hands on. A favorite was honey traps [or sexual entrapments], but bribes, favors, whatever they could find. And once they had their hooks into you, they owned you."Paul Manafort stayed in close contact with Russian spy Konstantin Kilimnik throughout the campaign, while Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Michael Flynn met with Russian intelligence operatives promising dirt against Clinton."The key thing is that all of them then lied about it to investigators, and that's where the potential blackmail comes in. Imagine if the FBI hadn't caught Flynn out, and he had remained in his post," Sichel said. "The Russians knew he lied — I'm sure they taped all their communications with him — so they would have had him over a barrel forever."The 97-year-old Sichel said the president himself continued to compromise himself by lying about his own dealings with Russia."I know he doesn't see it this way, but by having all this stuff brought out in public, it removes the blackmail threat," Sichel said. "The smartest thing Trump could have done when all this started to break was to just come out and say, 'Yes, it appears there was Russian involvement with my campaign, but that's over with now, I'm the president, so let's move on.' But he didn't do that, obviously. Perhaps there were reasons why he couldn't."<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/40538571/jailed-russian-hacker-heres-how-i-hacked-the-u-s-election" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://www.fastcompany.com/40538571/jailed-russian-hacker-heres-how-i-hacked-the-u-s-election</a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">3/5/18</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style=""><div class="postbyline" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; border-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 1.125rem; padding-top: 1.5rem;"><cite class="postby" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700; letter-spacing: 0.0875rem; line-height: 0.8125rem; text-transform: uppercase; font-style: normal; display: inline-block; margin: 0px 0.625rem 0px 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0.125rem;">DARIA SOLOVIEVA</cite></div><article class="post__article " style="box-sizing: border-box; letter-spacing: 0.2px; line-height: 1.75rem;"><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box;">MOSCOW–Konstantin Kozlovsky is ready to talk. The 29-year-old blonde-haired Russian hacker at the center of the intrigue surrounding the Kremlin’s cyberattacks on the 2016 U.S. presidential election currently sits in a high-security prison with the forbidding name of Matrosskaya Tishina (Sailor’s Silence) in northeastern Moscow. Kozlovsky is officially charged with stealing millions from Russian banks, but he’d prefer to brag about how he built the software used to hack the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and other U.S. targets.</div><div style="box-sizing: border-box;">At a small hearing in a Moscow court earlier this month, with only a handful of media outlets present, <a href="https://www.unian.info/world/2393684-russian-hacker-elaborates-on-moscows-meddling-in-us-elex.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box;">Kozlovsky said he was ready to present detailed evidence</a> that the Kremlin was directly involved in a series of high-profile attacks, including compromising the DNC’s computer systems in 2016, as well as those of the U.S. government, military, social media companies, and leading U.S. publishers.In an interview with Fast Company conducted over the last two weeks via a verified representative, Kozlovsky was able to provide more details for his claims about the role of the Russian government, and how the program he developed was designed to wreak havoc.“I’m ready to collaborate with the U.S. specialists, to show evidence and to confirm information,” he said in response to questions. Kozlovsky claims the program he developed, the so-called LDCS, was able to “replace information on Twitter, Facebook, Google and leading U.S. media outlets.” But he didn’t go into more details, so it remains unclear how the program really works and how extensively it was used during and after the 2016 election. It appears similar to trojans, a type of malware disguised as legitimate software that enables hackers to get full access to your computer, allowing them to change and delete files, monitor your computer activities, or steal your confidential information.Kozlovsky noted that the Russians’ use of social media for propaganda purposes, as described by the defendants named in the indictment recently handed down by special prosecutor Robert Mueller, actually played a less significant role in achieving Russia’s objectives than hacking.Since Kozlovsky’s been in jail since late 2016, he doesn’t know the current activities of Russian hackers, but said it’s likely they are using his software to manipulate news reports. “The FSB could easily continue to develop and add other information resources.”On February 13, Kozlovsky asked the court for an IT specialist to prove his claims, a request he tells Fast Company was never granted. He also says that his detainment at Matrosskaya Tishina has been extended through May 18.</div><div style="box-sizing: border-box;"><h2 style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 0.4375rem; padding-top: 0.3125rem; letter-spacing: 0.03125rem; line-height: 1.375rem; text-transform: uppercase;">VICTIMS RANGED FROM OLIGARCHS TO THE OLYMPIC COMMITTEE</h2>Born in the Russian city of Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), Kozlovsky rose to prominence primarily by hacking Russia’s financial institutions. He is one of 50 members of a hacker group called Lurk, which successfully hacked “all of Russia’s banks,” according to Group-IB, a cybersecurity company based in Moscow. Kozlovsky was been in prison for almost a year and eight months.The tale of how someone like Kozlovsky found himself in prison, caught up in the middle of a high-stakes international drama involving Russia’s counterintelligence agencies, rogue hackers turned government agents, and allegations of Russia’s multilayered plot to interfere in the U.S. elections reveals much about Russia’s cybersecurity landscape and the murky relationship between the country’s counterintelligence operations and criminal hacking groups.The cyberfraud charges against Kozlovsky include “organization of criminal community,” as well as the creation and distribution of harmful software programs. Lurk, the group he belonged to, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-cyber-arrests/russia-says-arrests-hacker-gang-who-defrauded-banks-of-millions-idUSKCN0YN43L" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;">reportedly stole</a> more than $50 million (3 billion rubles) over a period of five years, according to Group-IB’s data.Back in December, <a href="http://fortune.com/2017/12/11/russian-hacking-election-confession/" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102); text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box;">Kozlovsky first claimed his role in hacking the DNC</a> amid the heated U.S. primary season in 2016, <a href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article191857354.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box;">saying he was acting on the orders of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB),</a> the country’s counterintelligence agency that has retained the ethos and global ambitions of the Soviet era.Outside of court hearings every few months, Kozlovsky has relied on his Facebook page to fill in the blanks.In a recent post, Kozlovsky confirmed his involvement in the attacks on the U.S. Democratic Party, the World Anti-Doping Agency, the Olympics Committee, and FIFA on the orders of FSB Major Dmitry Dokuchaev, who worked at the agency’s Center for Information Security. He was one of four intelligence officials arrested a year ago and accused of treason by Russia, a move that rattled the cybersecurity community in Russia and beyond.</div><div style="box-sizing: border-box;">Dokuchaev began to communicate with Kozlovsky in 2005, collecting compromising material to recruit him and become his handler, according to Kozlovsky’s version of events. Kozlovsky says his testimony detailing his connection to Dokuchaev and his work for the FSB was omitted from the official record by Russian authorities.Prominent cybersecurity experts in the country tend to find Kozlovsky’s account convincing. “I believe this is really true,” says Pavel Vrublevsky, a cybersecurity expert and founder of CronoPay, a payments operator with offices in Moscow and Amsterdam, of Kozlovsky’s recruitment account.Vrub levsky has had his own run-in with FSB, serving one and a half years in prison after being <a href="https://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/08/pavel-vrublevsky-sentenced-to-2-5-years/" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" px="px" text-decoration-line="text-decoration-line" none="none" font-weight="font-weight" bold="bold" color="color" rgb="rgb" outline="outline" box-sizing="box-sizing" border-box="border-box">found guilty of hiring bot makers</a> to attack a rival company. He is an official witness in the Dokuchaev case.“If Kozlovsky was an informant of Dokuchaev, and therefore was the organizer of Lurk, then Dokuchaev was the true organizer of Lurk,” Vrublevsky says, noting the Russian government “is not ready” to investigate the Lurk story fully. “This may lead to even more questions about how that department of FSB actually operated,” he says.Dokuchaev has disputed this version of events and denies knowing Kozlovsky, reports RBK, a Russian business publication.According to the FBI, Dokuchaev is responsible for a range of cybercrimes, including “gaining unauthorized access to the computer networks of and user accounts hosted at major companies providing worldwide webmail and internet-related services in the Northern District of California and elsewhere.”<h2 style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 0.4375rem; padding-top: 0.3125rem; letter-spacing: 0.03125rem; line-height: 1.375rem; text-transform: uppercase;">DOES HIS SOFTWARE REALLY WORK ON SUCH A SCALE?</h2><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">...</div></div></article></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/crowdstrike-the-truth-about-trumps-insane-ukraine-server-conspiracy" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://www.thedailybeast.com/crowdstrike-the-truth-about-trumps-insane-ukraine-server-conspiracy</a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style=""><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">no lnx many</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Truth About Trump’s Insane Ukraine ‘Server’ Conspiracy</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Trump asked Ukraine’s president to help prove a bonkers, Russia-friendly conspiracy theory that U.S. intel relied on manufactured evidence to blame the 2016 DNC hack on Moscow.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Kevin Poulsen</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Sr. National Security Correspondent</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Updated 10.16.19 12:47PM ET / Published 09.25.19 </div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Update: President Donald Trump on Wednesday once again promoted the baseless idea that a Democratic National Commitee server that was hacked in 2016 is being held in Ukraine. Below is a story The Daily Beast published last month about this conspiracy theory amid revelations that Trump asked the president of Ukraine to investigate it.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Donald Trump asked for more than a criminal investigation of his political opponent’s son in his call with Ukraine’s president. Trump also sought help in reviving a long-ago debunked conspiracy theory that challenges the basic underpinnings of the U.S. intelligence community’s findings on Russia’s 2016 election interference, in a bizarre spectacle that sees an American president trying to conscript a foreign leader into undermining his own intelligence agencies.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike,” Trump said, according to a compilation of notes on the call released by the White House. “I guess you have one of your wealthy people. The server, they say Ukraine has it.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">To those not versed in fringe-right canon, it’s a curious thing to say. “It almost sounds like he was babbling to the president of Ukraine,” said Robert Johnston, CEO of Adlumin, who led the DNC breach investigation while at Crowdstrike. “I imagine it would have confused the Ukranian president. Like, ‘What are you talking about?’”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Conservative websites are spinning the odd exchange as a reference to a Justice Department investigation ordered by William Barr into the origins of the Mueller probe. “It is unclear specifically what Trump was referring to with Crowdstrike,” reads one article in this vein on The Federalist. In truth, it’s actually quite clear. Trump is referencing a conspiracy theory pushed by Russian trolls and far-right pundits that imagines the Democratic National Committee fabricating all the evidence in Russia’s 2016 breach of the DNC network.  </div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“Trump has shown a pronounced preference for the pretend version of events.”</div><div>
</div><div>The hoax has its roots in a GRU persona, “Guccifer 2.0,” created to cast doubt on Russia’s culpability in the DNC hack. Today it’s buttressed by deceptive blog posts, memes, and putative forensic analysis of metadata in documents leaked from the DNC and John Podesta intrusions, and has spun out several related theories and offshoots, including the Seth Rich hoax that blames the hack on a slain DNC staffer with previously-unknown hacking skills.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Crowdstrike enters the picture because it’s the security firm the DNC hired to investigate the breach back in 2016, and the first of many to identify Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, as the perpetrator. A publicly-traded company headquartered in California, Crowdstrike has nothing to do with Ukraine, except in conspiracyland, which pretends that Crowdstrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch is Ukrainian, and that he framed Russia for election interference both on the DNC’s orders and to punish Putin for invading his homeland.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In real life, Alperovitch is an American citizen born in Russia who escaped to the U.S. with his family during the Soviet era. But Trump has shown a pronounced preference for the pretend version. </div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“Why wouldn’t Podesta and Hillary Clinton allow the FBI to see the server?” Trump asked the AP in 2017. “They brought in another company that I hear is Ukrainian-based… I heard it’s owned by a very rich Ukrainian, that’s what I heard.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The “server” in the conspiracy is the hacked DNC server that the Democrats, the claim goes, won’t let the FBI examine because it would expose their elaborate plot. “What is the server saying?” Trump asked in one tweet last year. </div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">That part’s made up, too. The DNC turned down one unusual FBI request early in the hack investigation. The bureau wanted access to the DNC’s network while the Russians were still in it, most likely to stage a counter operation against the GRU. The DNC declined, perhaps reluctant to have two intelligence agencies playing capture-the-flag in their systems five months before a presidential election. The DNC later authorized Crowdstrike to share full copies of the hacked servers with the bureau, giving the FBI access to the same evidence Crowdstrike had. </div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“With regards to our investigation of the DNC hack in 2016, we provided all forensic evidence and analysis to the FBI,” Crowdstrike said in a statement Wednesday. “As we’ve stated before, we stand by our findings and conclusions that have been fully supported by the US Intelligence community.”...</div></div><div>=</div>AN no lnx50 years ago, the KGB weaponized the fire at Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque to sow discord between Israel and the United StatesWritten by Oren Nahari / History News Network August 30, 2019Oren Nahari is the World News Commentator for the prominent Israeli site Walla News.A notorious, murderous intelligence agency of one country finances and organizes a covert operation in another country, ostensibly against a third country but actually targeting a fourth. Such was international intrigue during the Egyptian-Israeli War of Attrition (1969-1970), and the cast of this hot regional drama of the Cold War were the Soviet Union, the United States, India and Israel.
Fifty years ago, on 28 August 1969, KGB Chairman and future Soviet leader Yuri Andropov wrote a memorandum to the Central Committee of the Communist Party. It suggested fomenting agitation in the Moslem world – specifically, in India – following the fire that broke out a few days earlier in Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque. The means was to be a rent-a-crowd demonstration staged and budgeted by the agency, which perceived several advantages in such an operation – primarily fueling Indian resentment again the United States and Israel. But the document is intriguing from many other angles too – from the barefaced lie it builds upon to the timing and purposes of its promulgation“The arson by Israelis at the Moslem mosque of Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem,” Andropov wrote, has caused a severe response in the Indian public. On 26 August, this issue was debated in the Indian Parliament, and Foreign Minister Dinesh Singh declared that ‘the Government of India is profoundly shocked by this incident.’ The KGB rezidentura [station] in India has the capability to organize, in this context, a protest demonstration in front of the US Embassy in India, with the participation of up to 20,000 Moslems. The cost of implementing this demonstration would be 5,000 rupees [about $650 at the time] and would be covered from the funds budgeted by the Central Committee of the Communist Party for special operations for 1969-1971. Request evaluation. Andropov.” In the left-hand margin, a handwritten note adds: “To be implemented. [General Secretary Leonid] Brezhnev,” the top Soviet leader.
After the demise of the USSR, the document was presented as evidence in Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s attempt to outlaw the Communist Party. The Constitutional Court rejected his suit, an so it was that the Party leader Gennadi Zyuganov remained a perennial, if unsuccessful, candidate for president. It was at the time of this trial that the document was obtained by Gideon Remez and Dr. Isabella Ginor, now associate fellows of the Hebrew University’s Truman Institute, who included it in the mass of evidence for their recent book The Soviet-Israeli War, 1967-1973 (Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2017).
“Andropov wrote what he and the memo’s recipients knew to be a lie,” Remez stressed to Walla News. The Russian language has no definite article, so he might be imputing the “arson” at al-Aqsa to unidentified Israelis or to the Israelis, meaning the state or its agents. But by the time of writing, it was already clear that no Israelis had set the mosque on fire on 21 August. Rather, it was a deranged young Australian, Denis Michael Rohan. Falsely exploiting an incident is what states, and certainly intelligence agencies, do all the time – but why lie in an internal communication? Every such Soviet document, let alone one from Andropov to the Central Committee, was checked and re-checked. The answer can be found in instructions that then-Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko issued to his underlings: some day the archives will be opened and their contents will be seen. So, any papers must be phrased as if for public view – that is, to reflect the propaganda line.
India was, at the time, no adversary of the USSR. On the contrary, the “non-aligned” orientation of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the socialist policies of her Congress Party were actually friendly to Moscow, and had significant domestic Moslem support (as against the Hindu-nationalist Janata Party – now BJP – which took power later and is now led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi). Consequently, Israel had no diplomatic ties with India; their relationship improved, and relations were established, only in the 1990s after the disintegration of the Soviet Bloc.
So, for lack of an Israeli embassy in New Delhi to picket, it had to be the American one — but the KGB’s target was not there anyway. “This involved the superpower struggle,” said Ginor, “The arena was not merely India or the Moslem world, nor was it about al-Aqsa. It was the Suez Canal. It was the Cold War, and specifically its Egyptian-Israeli theater in the War of Attrition. What the USSR sought was first and foremost to use the fire as a wedge issue between the United States and Israel, to cast Israel as a burden on Washington by staging mass demonstrations throughout Islam against Israel for supposedly burning down a Moslem holy site.”The War of Attrition was raging along the Suez Canal, with Israel getting US support while the USSR sponsored Egypt, but the opposing forces were not symmetrical. After being hammered since March 1969 by the numerically far superior, Soviet-supplied Egyptian cannon, Israel turned the tables in late July – a month before Andropov’s memo — by fielding its air force as “flying artillery.” This effectively countered Egypt’s guns and caused heavy casualties as well as collapsing morale in Egyptian formations. It also destroyed Egypt’s likewise Soviet-made SAM-2 anti-aircraft batteries. The Kremlin had already resolved to send in newer, Soviet-manned SAM-3s – but the Israelis bombed out their newly-dug emplacements before they could be deployed. However, this campaign, carried out largely by the A-4 Skyhawk tactical bombers that Israel began to receive in late 1967, also created a political problem. The US had provided these planes on condition that they not be used for “offensive operations.” Was hitting Egyptian positions that had been firing on Israeli forces in Sinai, which Israel had captured from Egypt in the Six-Day War of June 1967, by way of an offensive or defensive operation? That depended on the eye and address of the beholder, in Jerusalem or Washington. One of President Lyndon Johnson’s last decisions in office was to approve the sale to Israel of the newer, powerful F-4 Phantom jets, much feared by the Egyptians and Soviets. It was up to the fledgling administration of Richard Nixon to implement – or not — the scheduled supply, at the slow pace of two planes at a time, which was scheduled to begin in September.
Faced with the turning tide against its client in the War of Attrition, the Soviet leadership resolved not only to dispatch better weapons to Egypt but also to man them with regular Soviet crews, as distinct from the advisers that were hitherto attached to Egyptian units. “On 1 August, recruitment and training of Soviet fighter pilots for action in Egypt was begun,” stated Remez. Ginor added: “previous scholarship held that the direct Soviet military intervention, which included those SAM-3s too, started only in January 1970, after the first Phantoms to arrive in Israel began deep-penetration bombings in and around Cairo and a desperate President Gamal Abdel Nasser supposedly flew secretly to Moscow to plead for help. We have shown that it actually began as early as the previous summer.”
This set the scene for Andropov’s memo. The USSR had every interest to legitimize its massive, direct intervention. What could be better than to smear Israel – in Moslem view, of course, but mainly as seen from Washington, which had become Israel’s sole source for weapons, especially those vital planes? The effect of each specific “special measure” could not be measured, but a steady drumbeat might – Andropov hoped – cumulatively achieve a result. Thousands of screaming protesters outside the US Embassy in India would not only resonate in the media, but doubtless be reported by the ambassador to his home office.
The United States had just landed a man on the moon, but it was deeply mired in the mud of Vietnam and torn apart by domestic dissent. Moscow had reason to believe that capitalism was approaching its final phase and needed just another push. Western Europe was barely recovering from the upheaval of May ’68, and was still at odds with Uncle Sam. Leanings in “nonaligned” Latin America, Africa and Asia were more pro-Soviet than pro-American. The KGB, along with its dedicated junior partners such as the Romanian Securitate and the East-German Stasi, were fostering anti-western terrorist groups from Palestinian and Irish nationalist organizations through ultra-left urban terrorists such as the Italian Red Brigades and the (West-)German Red Army or Baader-Meinhof Gang. Through this prism, it was not too hard to portray Israel as damaging US efforts to improve relations with the Moslem world. The KGB constantly underwrote anti-Israeli and anti-Western subversion – the notorious “Jackal” Carlos was recruited and financed by the Soviets through Palestinian allies and much of his activity was aimed at Israel. The superpower contest was waged by proxy wars in the Middle East, Latin America, Asia and any other scene of opportunity from the space race to the Olympic Games.
The Phantoms did arrive in Israel and went into action, but so many of them were shot down by the Soviet regulars’ SAMs that Israel was constrained to accept a cease-fire, ending the War of Attrition a year after Andropov’s initiative. The USSR immediately resumed preparation of the Egyptian Army for the complex operation of crossing the Suez Canal; more importantly, the Egyptians and Soviets  violated the truce right away by advancing the anti-aircraft missile shield up to the canal bank, creating the protective envelope that would enable the cross-canal attack in the Yom Kippur War three years later.
One can’t tell whether Andropov considered those 5,000 rupees well spent. This was one of many small operations that the fearsome Soviet superpower conducted against real or perceived adversaries. We do know that since soon after Israel’s establishment in 1948, it was a major target for the KGB, and remains one for the latter’s successor agency in foreign intelligence, the SVR. Andropov progressed from spy chief to the top leadership of the Soviet Union; decades after the USSR broke up, another KGB product now occupies the same Kremlin office in post-Soviet Russia. History has come full circle.<div></div><div>wow, we thought the russians did not need to make stuff up, just harvest and amplify our own BS conspir theory:</div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/russian-intelligence-planted-fake-story-that-seth-rich-was-killed-by-assassins-working-for-hillary-clinton-report">https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/russian-intelligence-planted-fake-story-that-seth-rich-was-killed-by-assassins-working-for-hillary-clinton-report</a></div><div>
</div><div>no lnx</div><div>
</div><div><div>Henderson July 9, 2019</div><div>
</div><div>After Seth Rich — a 27-year-old employee of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) — was killed by two gunshot wounds in Washington, D.C. on July 10, 2016, his death inspired numerous right-wing conspiracy theories. And according to a report by Yahoo News, some of them came from Russian government intelligenceofficials, who falsely claimed that Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton was to blame.</div><div>
</div><div>Yahoo News’ Michael Isikoff reports that after Rich’s death — which police believe was the result of a robbery attempt gone wrong — Russia’s intelligence agency, SVR, circulated a false report that Rich was fatally shot by a group of assassins working for Clinton. According to former federal prosecutor Deborah Sines, Isikoff reports, SVR circulated that bogus story on July 13, 2016 — which was only three days after the killing. Rich was killed while walking home in the Bloomingdale area of Washington, D.C. [wikileak trove published? 4 days after death]</div><div> </div><div>Russian intelligence, in the fake report, claimed that Rich was killed because he planned to tell the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) about corrupt activities by Clinton. And Sines, the former U.S. attorney assigned to Rich’s case, found that story ridiculous and ascertained that it was “coming from the SVR.”</div><div>
</div><div>“To me, having a foreign intelligence agency set up one of my decedents with lies and planting false stories — to me, that’s pretty outrageous,” Yahoo News quoted Sines as saying. “Maybe other people don’t think it’s that outrageous. I did.”</div><div>
</div><div>When Sines was investigating SVR’s false claims about Rich’s death, Yahoo News reports, she wrote a memo documenting SVR activity — and she  personally briefed prosecutors in former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office during the Russia investigation.</div><div>
</div><div>The claim that Rich was murdered for leaking DNC e-mails to WikiLeaks has been promoted by some allies of President Donald Trump, including long-time GOP operative Roger Stone and former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon — who, according to Yahoo News, described Rich’s death as a “contract kill, obviously” when he sent a text to a producer for CBS’ “60 Minutes” on March 17, 2017.</div><div>
</div><div>But law enforcement, Yahoo News reports, have no reason to believe that Rich’s death was anything other than a robbery attempt gone bad. Rich was shot twice in the back, and police believe he was shot after resisting two assailants.</div><div>
</div><div>No one has been charged in connection with Rich’s death.</div></div><div></div>==<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/21/world/europe/trump-russian-lawyer-fsb-kgb.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/21/world/europe/trump-russian-lawyer-fsb-kgb.html</a>

== how was hacked intel weaponized/

===

mojo

Hackers and Hacks<p style="font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial; margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">

Julian Assange

Conservatives once called for the WikiLeaks founder to be locked up. During the 2016 campaign, Trump allies, including Roger Stone and Alex Jones, hailed him as a hero for releasing hacked emails from the DNC and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. (Stone claimed to have “back-channel communications” with the hacktivist during the campaign.) Assange—who has taken refuge in Ecuador’s London Embassy since 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden over rape allegations (the case was dropped in May)—has claimed the source for the hacked messages was not the Russian government. The US intelligence community begs to differ. WikiLeaks’ release of the first batch of Podesta’s emails was curiously timed: It dropped less than an hour after a video clip of Trump bragging about sexual assault went public. Thereafter, the material was released in daily batches—that is, in a manner designed to inflict maximum harm to the Clinton campaign.

Guccifer 2.0<p style="font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial; margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">

Guccifer was the handle of a notorious Romanian hacker who was sentenced to 52 months in prison in 2016. Guccifer 2.0 is the online persona that surfaced in June 2016 to take credit for hacking the DNC. The persona has claimed to be a lone wolf from Romania, but the intelligence community and outside experts have concluded that Guccifer 2.0 (which direct-messaged with Stone) is almost certainly a front for Russian intelligence. It’s a misogynistic one at that. “I’ve never met a female hacker of the highest level,” Guccifer 2.0 wrote last year. “Girls, don’t get offended, I love you.”

DC Leaks<p style="font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial; margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">

The mysterious website and its associated Twitter feed popped up in June 2016. Over the course of the campaign, it published the hacked emails of military and political targets, including Colin Powell, NATO commander General Philip Breedlove, and the campaign staffs of Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham. The people behind DC Leaks, which is no longer active, claimed to be “American hacktivists,” but the US intelligence community reported that the site was a front for Russia’s military intelligence service.<p style="font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial; margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">

Trump is already guilty in the Russia scandal—here’s the evidence

RT and Sputnik

In its joint report on Moscow’s election meddling, the US intelligence community described RT, the TV network formerly known as Russia Today, as “the Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet.” The report noted it “has actively collaborated with WikiLeaks”; Assange hosted a show for the network in 2012. RT also has controversial ties to Flynn, who was paid to speak at a 2015 gala for RT in Moscow and frequently appeared as an analyst on the network. Another Kremlin-supported outlet, Sputnik, spread fake news while boosting Trump and attacking Clinton. In late May, newly elected French President Emmanuel Macron confronted Putin about Russian meddling in the French elections and slammed the two news outlets as instruments of “lying propaganda.”

Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear

The shadowy groups are affiliated with different branches of the Russian security apparatus. Cozy Bear has been linked to a variety of cyberattacks against government and corporate targets throughout the world, including a 2015 spear-phishing attack on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. According to CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC, Cozy Bear first targeted the DNC in the summer of 2015. Fancy Bear penetrated the DNC’s network in April 2016, apparently unaware Cozy Bear had gotten there first. The group’s targets have ranged from the World Anti-Doping Agency to the German parliament.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/at-height-of-russia-tensions-trump-campaign-chairman-manafort-met-with-business-associate-from-ukraine/2017/06/18/6ab8485c-4c5d-11e7-a186-60c031eab644_story.html   August, as tension mounted over Russia’s role in the U.S. presidential race, Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, sat down to dinner with a business associate from Ukraine who once served in the Russian army. Konstantin Kilimnik, who learned English at a military school that some experts consider a training ground for Russian spies, had helped run the Ukraine office for Manafort’s international political consulting practice for 10 years.At the Grand Havana Room, one of New York City’s most exclusive cigar bars, the longtime acquaintances “talked about bills unpaid by our clients, about [the] overall situation in Ukraine . . . and about the current news,” including the presidential campaign, according to a statement provided by Kilimnik, offering his most detailed account of his interactions with the former Trump adviser.Kilimnik, who provided a written statement to The Washington Post through Manafort’s attorney, said the previously unreported dinner was one of two meetings he had with Manafort on visits to the United States during Manafort’s five months working for Trump. The first encounter was in early May 2016, about two weeks before the Trump adviser was elevated to campaign chairman.The August dinner came about two weeks before Manafort resigned under pressure amid reports that he had received improper payments for his political work in Ukraine, allegations that he has denied. anafort spokesman Jason Maloni said that Kilimnik was a “longtime business associate” who would have naturally been in touch with Manafort. Manafort told Politico, which first reported his relationship with Kilimnik, that his conversations included discussions about the cyberattack on the Democratic National Committee and the release of its emails.“It would be neither surprising nor suspicious that two political consultants would chat about the political news of the day, including the DNC hack, which was in the news,” Maloni said.He added, “We’re confident that serious officials will come to the conclusion that Paul’s campaign conduct and interaction with Konstantin during that time was perfectly permissible and not in furtherance of some conspiracy.”Before joining Trump’s campaign, Manafort had built a practice in Ukraine as an adviser to the Russia-friendly Party of Regions and helped elect former president Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted in 2014 and fled to Russia. Manafort kept his Kiev office open until mid-2015.Federal investigators have shown an interest in Manafort on several fronts beyond his work on behalf of Trump.Subpoenas in New York have sought information about Manafort’s real estate loans, according to NBC News. Justice Department officials also are exploring whether Manafort should have more fully disclosed his work for foreign political parties, as required by federal law.Former FBI director Robert S. Mueller III has been appointed special counsel to oversee the Russia inquiry, and people familiar with his work said his office has now taken over investigations of Manafort’s conduct unrelated directly to the Russia probe.A spokesman for the Eastern District of Virginia declined to discuss the subpoena there. A spokesman for Mueller also declined to comment.Manafort’s relationship with Kilimnik shows the challenge facing investigators as they seek to determine whether contacts between Russian allies and Trump associates during the height of Russian interference in the campaign amounted to collusion or reflected routine interactions between people with relationships unrelated to the campaign.Kilimnik said he grew up in southeastern Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union. He said he moved to Moscow in 1987, when he was 17, and enrolled in the Military Institute of the Ministry for Defense, an elite academy for training military translators.Kilimnik said he was trained in English and Swedish and spent the early 1990s serving as a military translator, including in 1993 on a trade mission of a Russian arms company.He said the GRU, the military intelligence service that U.S. officials have linked to the 2016 cyberattacks, did not recruit from his language academy.“No one ever spoke to me ever about doing any intelligence work — neither Russians or Ukrainians or any other foreign country,” he said.Some experts disputed Kilimnik’s description of the Moscow academy.Stephen Blank, a Russia expert at the American Foreign Policy Council, a Washington think tank, and a longtime former instructor at the U.S. Army War College, called the institute a “breeding ground” for intelligence officers.Mark Galeotti, a Russia security specialist at the Institute of International Relations, a Prague-based foreign policy think tank, said the school is one of the “favored recruiting grounds” of the GRU.In 1995, amid uncertainty in the post-Soviet economy, Kilimnik said he needed money and took a job as a translator for the International Republican Institute, a pro-democracy group affiliated with the U.S. Republican Party.People who worked with Kilimnik said he was proficient in several languages and a savvy reader of people.“I relied on him,” said Sam Patten, who was Kilimnik’s boss at the Moscow office of IRI from 2001 to 2004.At the time, Kilimnik openly discussed his work in the Russian army, said Phil Griffin, a political consultant who hired him at the IRI. “He was completely upfront about his past work with Russian military intelligence,” Griffin said. “It was no big deal.”Julia Sibley, a spokeswoman for the IRI, confirmed that Kilimnik worked for the organization a decade ago but declined to provide additional information.In 2005, Griffin, who had left Moscow to work for Manafort in Ukraine, invited Kilimnik to join him there, according to both men.Kilimnik said he has worked largely in Ukraine ever since, although he declined to say whether he has become a Ukrainian citizen.Kilimnik’s role for Manafort grew over time. Beyond his work as a translator, Kilimnik would “help Manafort understand the political context and why people were doing what they were doing,” Patten said.People familiar with Kilimnik’s work in Ukraine for Manafort say his assignments included meeting with powerful Ukrainian politicians and serving as a liaison to Russian aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, who is close to Putin and did business with Manafort.A spokeswoman for Deripaska did not respond to a request for comment.In August, Volodymyr Ariev, a member of the Ukrainian parliament who represents a party that opposed Manafort’s clients, requested that Ukraine’s top prosecutor investigate whether Kilimnik had worked with Russian intelligence services.A spokeswoman for the prosecutor did not respond to questions from The Post. The prosecutor’s office told Politico in March that Kilimnik was “not being processed now as a witness, suspect or accused.”Others viewed Kilimnik as more aligned with Washington than Moscow....== == http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2015/07/23/who-benefits-from-doubt-online-manipulation-and-the-russian-and-us-internet/ Who benefits from doubt? Online manipulation and the Russian – and US – internetPosted on July 23, 2015 by EthanI was asked by an editor at RBC, one of Russia’s best respected independent news organizations, to offer my thoughts on the Russian/US infowar. It was a great chance to think about Adrian Chen’s provocative tale about Russia’s Internet Research Agency (a topic that Global Voices RuNet Echo has done a terrific job of covering) and broader questions about skepticism, mistrust and who benefits from doubt. The piece ran on RBC today in Russian, but my English language text follows below. In early June, the New York Times Sunday Magazine ran a story by investigative reporter Adrian Chen about a Russian “troll factory” in St. Petersburg, linked to Evgeny Prigozhin, reported to have close ties with Vladimir Putin. In the article, Chen interviewed Lyudmila Savchuk, a whistle blower who is suing the Internet Research Agency, her former employer, in hopes of shutting down their operations of posting pro-Kremlin comments on social media sites in English and Russian.Until Chen’s story, many American readers had never heard of paid Russian propagandists writing online. But followers of the RuNet, Russia’s online spaces, have seen the Russian internet as one of the world’s most fiercely contested online spaces. In 2011, internet researchers in the US and Canada published a book, “Access Contested”, which suggested that battles over online spaces were progressing from censorship – preventing the posting of controversial content or preventing a nation’s citizens from reading that content – to a more complex model of contestation, where governments used a wide range of methods to disrupt dialog online: harassing users with frivolous lawsuits, rendering sites unavailable via denial of service attacks, and flooding comment threads. While these tactics have become popular worldwide, anywhere governments wish to disrupt online speech, many of them were pioneered in Russian cyberspace. My coauthors and I documented some of these early attacks, including attacks on Novaya Gazeta, in a 2010 study published by the Berkman Center at Harvard University.What was surprising about Chen’s story was not that people were producing pro-government comments in Russian, but that this same Internet Research Agency appeared to be responsible for a set of fabricated news stories, released in English and intended to mislead US audiences. These stories have fascinated and baffled American media scholars. They are complex hoaxes, involving dozens of social media accounts, fake websites and fake YouTube videos, all towards the apparent goal of making American social media users believe that a chemical plant in Louisiana had been attacked by ISIS terrorists, or that there had been an outbreak of Ebola in Atlanta. These hoaxes were not successful in fooling many people for very long – they were quickly dismissed after mainstream news reports made clear that these tragedies had not occurred.These hoaxes suggest an interesting new chapter in the ongoing infowar between the US and Russia. The goal of the infowar may no longer be to promote or discredit either the Kremlin or the White House. The goal may be to destroy trust in the internet, in social media and in news.For decades, nations have worked to produce news that reflects their specific point of view. The United States Broadcasting Board of Governors oversees Voice of America, Radio and TV Marti (for Cuban audiences), Al-Hurra TV and Radio Sawa (for Arabic-speaking audiences), Radio Free Asia, and Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe, which includes Radio Svoboda, aimed at Russian audiences. Defenders of these projects see them as providing objective news reporting in countries where press freedom is constrained. Others – including some US legislators – see these stations as pro-US propaganda. Until 2013, Voice of America was banned from broadcasting in the US because Congress believed that these broadcasts, played in the US, would function as pro-government propaganda. In recent years, BBG has broadened its remit beyond broadcasting, and proposed spending $12.5 million in 2016 to support internet anti-censorship technologies, intended to allow citizens of countries that censor the internet to access blocked content.It should not have been a surprise that Russia would take to international broadcasting to promote a national agenda, joining stated sponsored channels France24 (France), CCTV (China), and Al Jazeera (Qatar). These channels have experimented with different mixes of news reporting and public diplomacy, sometimes coming under fire for compromising journalistic standards in favor of national interests.Russia Today (RT) has taken some unusual and surprising approaches in deploying this tool of soft power. The network promotes a view of Russia as defender of the principle of international sovereignty in the face of relentless US-led globalization, a viewpoint that turns not only protests in Armenia into a US-led grab for power, but the arrest of FIFA officials for corruption into a plot to strip Russia of the 2018 World Cup. While Al Jazeera, in particular, has worked hard to gain respect as a journalistic outlet rather than a government mouthpiece, Russia Today seems content to take an explicitly pro-Russian, anti-US stance.And then there’s the weird stuff. As Ilya Yablokov of the University of Leeds has observed, Russia Today seems to be trying to cultivate a US audience of conspiracy theorists. Yablokov notes that one of the first stories RT ran after launching RT America in 2010 was titled “911 Reasons Why 9/11 Was (Probably) an Inside Job”. The idea that the US government killed over 3000 of its own citizens, including 500 police officers and firefighters, as a pretext to invade Iraq, is deeply offensive to most Americans, and unlikely to win RT a broad US audience. But as Yablokov notes, that may not be the point.There’s a long history in American politics of conspiracy theories gaining wide audiences. Historian Richard Hofstadter identified this in 1964 as “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, a tendency for those who feel alienated and dispossessed to see America as controlled by a secret cabal. Knowing that it is unlikely to persuade the majority of Americans to see their government as a global hegemon and Russia as the tireless defender of sovereign nations, perhaps RT is appealing to those who are predisposed to “Question More”, as the network’s slogan suggests. While that approach won’t work for most Americans, it may work for the 19% of Americans who believe the government was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev suggests that a Russian focus on conspiracy theories, especially about outside agitation in creating “color revolutions” is consistent with Russia’s preferred framing of the world – sovereignty versus agitation – rather than the US’s preferred framing – democracy versus authoritarianism. Brian Whitmore, a senior correspondent for RL/RFE, argues that conspiracy theories suggest a government incapable of taking citizen movements seriously documented attempts by the government of Azerbaijan to portray the internet as a dangerous and lawless space, linking internet usage to sexual abuse of children, trafficking of women, breakdowns of marriages and mental illness. The campaign has been quite successful, keeping 86% of Azeri women offline, and helping ensure that internet penetration in Azerbaijan has stayed far behind of its neighbors, Georgia and Armenia. Turkish media scholar Zeynep Tufekci suggests that Erdogan’s government has deployed similar tactics in Turkey, working to demonize social media in the hopes of keeping his large support base off these networks, which are heavily used by opposition organizers.Raising doubt in online media as a whole might help explain why a Russian firm would start easily dismissed rumors on American social networks. The net effect of these rumors has been to remind American Internet users that everything they read online should be doubted before being vetted and verified. And RT’s main brand message is that Americans shouldn’t trust their government or their media, as both are hiding the “other side” of the narrative, and the secrets behind far-reaching conspiracies.But the question remains: who benefits from doubt?Historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway have a possible answer. Their book “Merchants of Doubt” looks at techniques used by energy industry lobbyists in the US to create uncertainty and doubt about climate change. They trace these techniques back to the tobacco industry, which used similar tactics for decades to prevent tobacco from being regulated as a drug. Their key weapon was doubt. Tobacco companies sponsored legitimate medical research on other causes for cancer and heart disease. The net result was that they kept alive the appearance of a debate about whether tobacco use was the primary cause of lung cancer for far longer than there was an actual scientific debate. Similarly, climate scientists sponsored by energy companies insist that there is a diversity of opinion about humans’ role in creating climate change, relying on the media’s tendency to tell both sides of a story and keep a “debate” alive years beyond when it would otherwise be settled.Who benefits from doubt? Ask instead who benefits from stasis. So long as there was doubt that cigarettes caused cancer, regulators were less willing to label packages, restrict their sales or ban them altogether. So long as there is doubt about humanity’s role in climate change, governments are less likely to pass carbon taxes, ban the burning of coal or subsidize the shift to renewable energy. It’s not necessary to persuade people that cigarettes are safe to smoke or that we can burn coal indefinitely without raising global temperatures – it’s enough to raise sufficient doubt to lead to paralysis.Stasis benefits the Russian state. People baffled by claims and counterclaims over whether Russian troops are in Ukraine or whether the US toppled the Yanukovych government are less likely to demand NATO military intervention in Crimea. Russian citizens who wonder whether Alexei Navalny is an embezzeler are less likely to support his candidacy. Internet users who doubt whatever they see online are less likely to use social media to organize and topple those who are currently in power.It’s expensive to persuade someone to believe something that isn’t true. Persuading someone that nothing is true, that every “fact” represents a hidden agenda, is a far more efficient way to paralyze citizens and keep them from acting. It’s a dark art, one with a long past in Russia and in the US, and one we’re now living with online. =http://www.spin.com/2017/03/infowars-breitbart-fbi-russia-inquiry/Yesterday, FBI Director James Comey confirmed in a congressional hearing that the Bureau is investigating alleged Russian attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election. Now, McClatchy DC is reporting that the investigation includes an inquiry into Breitbart News and Alex Jones’s InfoWars, two outlets that worked hard to get Trump elected.McClatchy’s report, which is sourced to two anonymous people “familiar with the inquiry,” alleges that investigators are interested in a network of apparently Kremlin-controlled social media bots that published millions of links to articles from InfoWars and Breitbart, as well as known Russian state media outlets like RT and Sputnik News. The key question is whether anyone at the far-right American publications did anything to assist the Russian social media campaign.The existence of a Russian botnet created to help elect Trump isn’t hard to believe at all–it fits neatly with the Kremlin’s strategy of using a government-funded “troll farm” to influence American internet discourse. And it’s also not surprising that such a network would select InfoWars and Breitbart as publications to amplify, as both unambiguously favored Trump in the election, as did the Russians. What’s harder to believe is that the campaign would have required active assistance or collaboration from the sites themselves. You don’t need a publisher’s consent to tweet out their stories, and conducting a Twitter search for any randomly selected internet article will frequently turn up tweets that look like they came from bots–usually operated for some less nefarious purpose than destabilizing a government. It seems more likely that the Russians correctly recognized InfoWars and Breitbart as essentially pro-Trump propaganda outlets, and co-opted their content for use as actual propaganda.Jones denied the story to McClatchy reporters who reached him by calling into his show, telling them any allegations about InfoWars collusion with the Russian government are “a (expletive) lie.” But who knows? Either way, there’s a delightful irony in seeing Jones and InfoWars–longtime paranoiacs about covert state operations and shadowy global conspiracies–used as pawns in an actual international government information war, whether wittingly or not.= flynn sanctions nb no link yet=http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/313108-declassified-report-putin-ordered-election-interference-to-help Declassified report: Putin ordered election interference to help TrumpBY KATIE BO WILLIAMS - 01/06/17 03:59 PM EST  16,308    Declassified report: Putin ordered election interference to help Trump Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a widespread influence campaign intended to help elect Donald Trump, the intelligence community said in a declassified report released Friday afternoon.  “Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump,” the report reads.  “We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.” The bombshell document details the intelligence community's findings but provides little in the way of forensic evidence backing up its assessment, citing the need to protect sources and methods. “While the conclusions in the report are all reflected in the classified assessment, the declassified report does not and cannot include the full supporting information, including specific intelligence and sources and methods,” the report reads.  The document is made up of publicly available information, painting a portrait of Moscow as making a shrewd decision to back a candidate it saw as friendlier to its interests. According to the document, Putin “most likely” wanted to discredit Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, because “he has publicly blamed her since 2011 for inciting mass protests against his regime in late 2011 and early 2012, and because he holds a grudge for comments he almost certainly saw as disparaging him.” But the former KGB agent saw Trump as having “Russia-friendly positions on Syria and Ukraine” and approved of his stated policy to work with Russia.  Moscow also reportedly saw the election of Trump as “a way to achieve an international counterterrorism coalition” against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Officials note that Putin publicly contrasted the president-elect’s approach to Russia with Clinton’s “aggressive rhetoric” — but the report offers no previously unknown information.  There is some level of minor disagreement among intelligence agencies as to the strength of its judgment that Russia intended to help Trump.  The CIA and FBI have high confidence in the judgment, while the National Security Agency has moderate confidence, the report acknowledges.  The report — devoid of a “smoking gun” — is unlikely to silence skeptics who are unconvinced that the intelligence community can prove Russia’s motivations.  Trump has repeatedly refused to accept the community's conclusions and has treated its assessment as an attack on the legitimacy of his presidency.  The president-elect has instead focused on the intelligence community's long-public assessment that no physical voting machines were impacted by the Russian campaign. After receiving a briefing from senior intelligence officials earlier on Friday, Trump issued a statement claiming that the hacks had “absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election.” Prominent Republicans echoed the approach following the release of the report. “We must also be clear that there is no evidence that there was any interference in the voting or balloting process,” House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said in a statement.  “We cannot allow partisans to exploit this report in an attempt to delegitimize the president-elect’s victory. Donald Trump won this election fair and square because he heard the voices of Americans who felt forgotten.” Russian intelligence did obtain access to multiple state and local electoral boards, according to the report, but the Department of Homeland Security assessed that none of the systems the hackers targeted or compromised were involved in vote tallying.  Democrats immediately pushed back on the assertion that the campaign had no impact on the election. “It is one thing to say that there was no tampering with vote tallying — which is true — it is another thing to say that the daily dumping of documents disparaging to Secretary Clinton that was made possible by Russian cyber operations had no effect on the campaigns,” said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. “Whether [Russia] had a decisive impact on the outcome will never be known and was certainly not the subject of the intelligence community's analysis, but that they were of great consequence is undeniable." The Russian campaign involved more than just hacking. According to the report, it also included propaganda campaigns in the media and a “troll campaign” on social media.  Russian state-run outlets Sputnik and RT both amped up campaigns to delegitimize the Clinton campaign, including English-language videos like one headlined “Clinton and ISIS Funded with the Same Money,” and promoted the idea that WikiLeaks had an email that would “put Clinton in Prison.” “In August, Kremlin-linked political analysts suggested avenging negative Western reports on Putin by airing segments devoted to Secretary Clinton’s alleged health problems,” said the report, which describes Clinton’s health as a focal point of the campaign.  Russia’s “Internet Research Agency,” a paid army of social media “trolls,” also got in on the act. Accounts once devoted to supporting Russian annexation of the Ukraine flipped to support Trump. According to officials and lawmakers who have seen both, the report is identical to the classified version of the document prepared for President Obama. The so-called Gang of Eight — House and Senate leaders and the heads of the two Intelligence committees — reviewed the complete document earlier on Friday. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Friday morning lamented that more of the document would not be made public, perhaps hinting at frustration that the Obama administration hasn’t done more to silence doubters. “I would hope that we could get more," she said Friday morning. "I know we have to respect sources and methods. But I think that even Congress has the right to know more than they want to disclose to Congress, beyond the Gang of Eight." "So this will be interesting in terms of what the disclosure is, of this report," she added. "But suffice to say, it's stunning in its conclusions, and you'll see some of it."
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/01/read-us-intelligence-report-russian-hacking-2016-campaign  Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Friday released its declassified report on Russia's efforts to influence the outcome of the 2016 election by hacking Democratic outfits during the campaign.The report comes a day after top intelligence officials, including Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on the issue. During the hearing, Clapper said the intelligence community has grown more "resolute" in its assessment that Russian intelligence was involved in the hacks aimed at the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. On Friday, Clapper, Rogers, FBI Director Jim Comey, and CIA Director John Brennan briefed President-elect Donald Trump on the classified evidence linking Russia to the hacks and the leaking of the swiped emails. After the briefing, Trump released a statement noting that Russia is one of many actors that try to hack US targets, but the statement did not acknowledge the US intelligence community conclusion that Moscow had mounted the cyberattack against the United States as part of an operation to help elect Trump president. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/us/politics/russia-intelligence-communications-trump.html  Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said. The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.The officials interviewed in recent weeks said that, so far, they had seen no evidence of such cooperation.But the intercepts alarmed American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, in part because of the amount of contact that was occurring while Mr. Trump was speaking glowingly about the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. At one point last summer, Mr. Trump said at a campaign event that he hoped Russian intelligence services had stolen Hillary Clinton’s emails and would make them public.Continue reading the main storContinue reading the main storyThe officials said the intercepted communications were not limited to Trump campaign officials, and included other associates of Mr. Trump. On the Russian side, the contacts also included members of the government outside of the intelligence services, they said. All of the current and former officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the continuing investigation is classified.The officials said that one of the advisers picked up on the calls was Paul Manafort, who was Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman for several months last year and had worked as a political consultant in Ukraine. The officials declined to identify the other Trump associates on the calls.The call logs and intercepted communications are part of a larger trove of information that the F.B.I. is sifting through as it investigates the links between Mr. Trump’s associates and the Russian government, as well as the hacking of the D.N.C., according to federal law enforcement officials. As part of its inquiry, the F.B.I. has obtained banking and travel records and conducted interviews, the officials said.He added, “It’s not like these people wear badges that say, ‘I’m a Russian intelligence officer.’”Mr. Manafort, who has not been charged with any crimes, dismissed the officials’ accounts in a telephone interview on Tuesday. “This is absurd,” he said. “I have no idea what this is referring to. I have never knowingly spoken to Russian intelligence officers, and I have never been involved with anything to do with the Russian government or the Putin administration or any other issues under investigation today.”Several of Mr. Trump’s associates, like Mr. Manafort, have done business in Russia. And it is not unusual for American businessmen to come in contact with foreign intelligence officials, sometimes unwittingly, in countries like Russia and Ukraine, where the spy services are deeply embedded in society. Law enforcement officials did not say to what extent the contacts might have been about business.The officials would not disclose many details, including what was discussed on the calls, the identity of the Russian intelligence officials who participated, and how many of Mr. Trump’s advisers were talking to the Russians. It is also unclear whether the conversations had anything to do with Mr. Trump himself.A report from American intelligence agencies that was made public in January concluded that the Russian government had intervened in the election in part to help Mr. Trump, but did not address whether any members of the Trump campaign had participated in the effort.The intercepted calls are different from the wiretapped conversations last year between Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, and Sergey I. Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador to the United States. In those calls, which led to Mr. Flynn’s resignation on Monday night, the two men discussed sanctions that the Obama administration imposed on Russia in December.But the cases are part of American intelligence and law enforcement agencies’ routine electronic surveillance of the communications of foreign officials. ...security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, was forced to resign on Monday night as a result of getting caught lying about whether he discussed sanctions in a December telephone call with a Russian diplomat. The only reason the public learned about Flynn’s lie is because someone inside the U.S. government violated the criminal law by leaking the contents of Flynn’s intercepted communications.oopz greeenwald:?In the spectrum of crimes involving the leaking of classified information, publicly revealing the contents of SIGINT — signals intelligence — is one of the most serious felonies. Journalists (and all other nongovernmental citizens) can be prosecuted under federal law for disclosing classified information only under the narrowest circumstances; reflecting how serious SIGINT is considered to be, one of those circumstances includes leaking the contents of intercepted communications, as defined this way by 18 § 798 of the U.S. Code:Whoever knowingly and willfully communicates … or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes … any classified information … obtained by the processes of communication intelligence from the communications of any foreign government … shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.That Flynn lied about what he said to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak was first revealed by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who has built his career on repeating what his CIA sources tell him. In his January 12 column, Ignatius wrote: “According to a senior U.S. government official, Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials as well as other measures in retaliation for the hacking.”That “senior U.S. government official” committed a serious felony by leaking to Ignatius the communication activities of Flynn. Similar and even more extreme crimes were committed by what the Washington Post called “nine current and former officials, who were in senior positions at multiple agencies at the time of the calls,” who told the paper for its February 9 article that “Flynn privately discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with that country’s ambassador to the United States during the month before President Trump took office, contrary to public assertions by Trump officials.” The New York Times, also citing anonymous U.S. officials, provided even more details about the contents of Flynn’s telephone calls.That all of these officials committed major crimes can hardly be disputed. In January, CNN reported that Flynn’s calls with the Russians “were captured by routine U.S. eavesdropping targeting the Russian diplomats.” That means that the contents of those calls were “obtained by the processes of communication intelligence from the communications of [a] foreign government,” which in turn means that anyone who discloses them — or reports them to the public — is guilty of a felony under the statute.Yet very few people are calling for a criminal investigation or the prosecution of these leakers, nor demanding the leakers step forward and “face the music” — for very good reason: The officials leaking this information acted justifiably, despite the fact that they violated the law. That’s because the leaks revealed that a high government official, Gen. Flynn, blatantly lied to the public about a material matter — his conversations with Russian diplomats — and the public has the absolute right to know this.This episode underscores a critical point: The mere fact that an act is illegal does not mean it is unjust or even deserving of punishment. Oftentimes, the most just acts are precisely the ones that the law prohibits.That’s particularly true of whistleblowers — i.e., those who reveal information the law makes it a crime to reveal, when doing so is the only way to demonstrate to the public that powerful officials are acting wrongfully or deceitfully. In those cases, we should cheer those who do it even though they are undertaking exactly those actions that the criminal law prohibits.This Flynn episode underscores another critical point: The motives of leakers are irrelevant. It’s very possible — indeed, likely — that the leakers here were not acting with benevolent motives. Nobody with a straight face can claim that lying to the public is regarded in official Washington as some sort of mortal sin; if anything, the contrary is true: It’s seen as a job requirement.Moreover, Gen. Flynn has many enemies throughout the intelligence and defense community. The same is true, of course, of Donald Trump; recall that just a few weeks ago, Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer warned Trump that he was being “really dumb” to criticize the intelligence community because “they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”It’s very possible — I’d say likely — that the motive here was vindictive rather than noble. Whatever else is true, this is a case where the intelligence community, through strategic (and illegal) leaks, destroyed one of its primary adversaries in the Trump White House.But no matter. What matters is not the motive of the leaker but the effects of the leak. Any leak that results in the exposure of high-level wrongdoing — as this one did — should be praised, not scorned and punished. IT IS, OF COURSE, bizarre to watch this principle now so widely celebrated. Over the last eight years, President Obama implemented the most vindictive and aggressive war on whistleblowers in all of U.S. history. As Leonard Downie, one of the editors at the Washington Post during the Watergate investigation, put it in a special report: “The [Obama] administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration.”It’s hard to put into words how strange it is to watch the very same people — from both parties, across the ideological spectrum — who called for the heads of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Tom Drake, and so many other Obama-era leakers today heap praise on those who leaked the highly sensitive, classified SIGINT information that brought down Gen. Flynn.It’s even more surreal to watch Democrats act as though lying to the public is some grave firing offense when President Obama’s top national security official, James Clapper, got caught red-handed not only lying to the public but also to Congress — about a domestic surveillance program that courts ruled was illegal. And despite the fact that lying to Congress is a felony, he kept his job until the very last day of the Obama presidency.But this is how political power and the addled partisan brain in D.C. functions. Those in power always regard leaks as a heinous crime, while those out of power regard them as a noble act. They seamlessly shift sides as their position in D.C. changes.Indeed, while Democrats have suddenly re-discovered the virtues of illegal leaking, Trump-supporting Republicans are insisting that the only thing that matters is rooting out the criminal leakers. Fox News host Steve Doocey and right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham today both demanded to know why the leakers weren’t being hunted, while congressional Republicans are vowing investigations to find the leakers. And Trump himself today — echoing Obama-era Democrats — said that “the real story” isn’t the lies told by his national security adviser but rather the fact that someone leaked information exposing them: