wikibak
<div>wiki119</div><div>
</div><div>WIKILEAKS/ANONYMOUS</div><div>
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</div><div>Stone, veteran Republican Party operative and a long-time confidant of President Donald Trump, has been indicted on seven felony charges in connection with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Around 5 a.m. EST today, a group of well-armed FBI agents showed up at the 66-year-old Stone’s home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida with an arrest warrant. And the charges include five counts of making false statements, one count of obstruction of justice and one count of witness tampering.</div><div>
</div><div>Here are some of the most shocking revelations in the indictment and arrest of Trump’s long-time ally.</div><div>
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</div><div>Stone’s arrest was completely unannounced</div><div>
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</div><div>Although journalists who have been reporting on Mueller’s probe have been predicting that Stone would be arrested at some point, the way in which he was arrested this morning nonetheless comes as somewhat of a shock. Other Trump associates who have faced felony charges in connection with Russiagate moreless turned themselves in at their convenience; the FBI didn’t show up unannounced in the wee hours. But Stone was the target of the type of pre-dawn arrest that occurs when FBI agents fear that valuable evidence could be destroyed. This was the type of arrest that takes place when the FBI wants to surprise suspects and catch them off guard.</div><div>
</div><div>Stone is accused of obstructing the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation</div><div>
</div><div>Mueller’s team aren’t the only ones who have been investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election; the House Intelligence Committee and the FBI, among others, have investigated the matter as well—in fact, they were doing so before Mueller launched his investigation in 2017. And Stone, in the indictment, is accused of obstructing the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation.</div><div>
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</div><div>The indictment notes, “After the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (“HPSCI”), the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (“SSCI”), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) opened or announced their respective investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which included investigating STONE’s claims of contact with Organization 1.”</div><div>
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</div><div>Organization 1 in the indictment is believed to be WikiLeaks</div><div>
</div><div>The indictment of Stone specifically mentions an organization that is identified as “Organization 1,” and Organization is widely believed to be WikiLeaks—a major target of Mueller’s probe. In 2016, a hacker who went by Guccifer 2.0 stole the e-mails of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, and those stolen e-mails were published online by WikiLeaks. Stone is suspected of knowing, in 2016, that the hacking had occurred and that the Democratic e-mails would be published online. Although Mueller believes that Guccifer 2.0 is a Russian intelligence official based in Moscow, Stone has claimed that there is no proof that Guccifer was part of the Russian government.</div><div>
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</div><div>The indictment of Stone states, “By in or around May 2016, the Democratic National Committee (“DNC”) and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (“DCCC”) became aware that their computer systems had been compromised by unauthorized intrusions and hired a security company (“Company 1”) to identify the extent of the intrusions…. On or about June 14, 2016, the DNC—through Company 1—publicly announced that it had been hacked by Russian government actors.”</div><div>
</div><div>Stone is accused of discussing WikiLeaks’ activities with ‘senior Trump campaign officials’ in 2016</div><div>
</div><div>The indictment of Stone states, “During the summer of 2016, STONE spoke to senior Trump Campaign officials about Organization 1 and information it might have had that would be damaging to the Clinton Campaign. STONE was contacted by senior Trump Campaign officials to inquire about future releases by Organization 1…. By in or around early August 2016, STONE was claiming both publicly and privately to have communicated with Organization 1.”</div><div>
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</div><div>The head of ‘Organization 1’ is believed to be Julian Assange</div><div>
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</div><div>The person described as the head of “Organization 1” in the indictment is widely believed to be WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange. The indictment states, “By in or around June and July 2016, STONE informed senior Trump Campaign officials that he had information indicating Organization 1 had documents whose release would be damaging to the Clinton Campaign. The head of Organization 1 was located at all relevant times at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, United Kingdom.”</div><div>
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</div><div>London’s Ecuadorian Embassy, of course, is where Assange has been seeking refuge. The indictment of Stone goes on to allege that in 2016, “STONE also corresponded with associates about contacting Organization 1 in order to obtain additional e-mails damaging to the Clinton Campaign.”</div><div>
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</div><div>primary on russian dccc hack</div><div>
</div><div>assange warrant, 7/18 might leave emb? https://www.alternet.org/julian-assanges-departure-ecuador-embassy-london-imminent</div><div>
</div><div>neglected? see collusion</div><div>
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</div><div>hosted climategate stolen emails</div><div>
</div><div>https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/12/climategate-wikileaks-russia-trump-hacking/</div><div>
</div><div>many lnx graf docs</div><div>
</div><div>7 Years Before Russia Hacked the Election, Someone Did the Same Thing to Climate Scientists</div><div>
</div><div>“Why does this story sound so darned familiar?”</div><div>REBECCA LEBER AND AJ VICENSJANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018 ISSUE</div><div> </div><div>
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</div><div>The Heads of State</div><div>One Saturday morning in June, two days after the president had announced his intention to withdraw the United States from the landmark Paris climate agreement, Michael Mann was tweeting about Donald Trump.</div><div>
</div><div>Mann, a Penn State professor who is one of the world’s most prominent climate scientists, was thinking about the daily barrage of revelations surrounding Russia’s efforts to help Trump win the previous year’s election. The hacked Democratic documents posted on WikiLeaks. The media craze over private emails that had been ripped out of context. Smear campaigns circulating on social media.</div><div>
</div><div>“#Russia #Wikileaks #HackedEmails #Sabotaged #ClimateAgreements,” tweeted Mann. “Why does this story sound so darned familiar?”</div><div>
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</div><div>Seven years earlier, Trump was riffing on a very different set of hacked emails. The real estate mogul had called into Fox News after a blizzard to declare that climate change was a hoax. Trump claimed that “one of the leaders of global warming” had recently admitted in a private email that years of scientific research were nothing but “a con.”</div><div>
</div><div>Trump was referring to the 2009 Climategate scandal, in which emails from climate scientists were hacked and disseminated across the internet. Climate change deniers claimed the messages showed scientists engaging in misconduct and fabricating a warming pattern that didn’t really exist. Multiple investigations ultimately exonerated the researchers, but not before a media firestorm undercut public confidence in the science—just as world leaders were meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark, to attempt to rein in greenhouse gas emissions.</div><div>
</div><div>In hindsight, the Climategate hack, clearly timed to disrupt the Copenhagen negotiations, looks like a precursor to the hack that helped shape the outcome of the 2016 election. That’s how John Podesta, the Clinton campaign chairman whose stolen emails were posted on WikiLeaks in the final weeks of the campaign, sees it. The parallels go beyond the hacks themselves. “I think it was the intentionality of influencing the public debate,” he says.</div><div>
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</div><div>Stolen Emails. Wikileaks. White Supremacists. Donald Trump. It All Happened in 2009. The Heads of State</div><div>
</div><div>At its core, Climategate was a story about emails—some admittedly embarrassing or poorly phrased—that were dumped online with the intent of altering a crucial global event. WikiLeaks republished the scientists’ emails. Talk radio and Fox News had a field day. Politicians soon followed. Mainstream reporters amplified out-of-context quotes. And the victims of the hack—especially Mann and the University of East Anglia’s Phil Jones—were not prepared for the deluge of investigations, personal attacks, and even death threats that followed.</div><div>
</div><div>At the time, some observers openly wondered whether Russia might have orchestrated the Climategate hack. Investigators and other experts haven’t found much to support that hypothesis—the true culprit remains a mystery. Mann himself has pointed to the incident’s “curious connections” to Russia and WikiLeaks, but he, too, notes there’s no specific evidence that Moscow was to blame. Still, Mann sees other ways in which the episode was similar to what Hillary Clinton experienced in 2016. Both hacks, he notes, were “intended to impact the global political scene in a significant manner.”</div><div>
</div><div>Podesta, a leading advocate of climate action during the Obama years, describes Climategate as an early example of hackers conspiring “to take the fruits of illegal behavior, weaponize them, then use them in a political context.” And though the emails contained no evidence of scientific misconduct, Podesta notes, climate change deniers successfully used them to “change public perception and increase skepticism about the need for action at a pivotal moment.”</div><div>
</div><div>Climategate began in the fall of 2009, when someone accessed thousands of emails and other documents stored on a backup server at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit—a prestigious institution in Norwich, England, that is one of the leading centers of global warming research. It wasn’t just CRU employees who were caught up in the hack; their communications with dozens of scientists around the world, including Mann, were stolen as well.</div><div>
</div><div>On November 17 of that year, links to a zip file containing the stolen material—labeled “FOIA.zip”—began appearing in the comments sections of blogs run by climate change skeptics. The file name had a clear meaning: Skeptics had been engaged in a long-running battle with the university to gain access to scientists’ raw data and communications using the United Kingdom’s Freedom of Information Act. The file itself was stored on a server in Russia, though that server space could have been used by anyone in the world.</div><div>
</div><div>The hacker also broke into RealClimate—a website run by a group of climate scientists—and drafted a post promoting the emails. NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt found the hacker’s post before it was published; it still sits in RealClimate‘s content management system today.</div><div>
</div><div>Within days, WikiLeaks published the emails. Its founder, Julian Assange, told PBS that the university had been trying “to suppress information from the Freedom of Information Act.” (At the time, Assange was considered an advocate of radical transparency. After WikiLeaks’ role in publishing Democratic documents hacked by the Russians and corresponding with the Trump campaign, his motives seem far more suspect.)</div><div>
</div><div>The emails in no way altered the well-established fact that humans are changing the climate. Still, skeptics zeroed in on a 1999 message sent by CRU’s Jones, in which he mentioned Mann’s research and also used the phrase “hide the decline.” Given that Mann was best known for the “hockey stick” chart showing the dramatic increase in global temperatures, the wording sounded nefarious. But it turned out that Jones wasn’t describing an attempt to conceal a decline in temperatures. (The world was warming rapidly, after all.) Instead, he was referring to a scientific method for dealing with complications in tree-ring data.</div><div>
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</div><div>Michael Mann’s groundbreaking “hockey stick” chart—named after the steep rise in global temperatures it depicts—has been validated by numerous independent studies since its publication two decades ago. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change</div><div>A series of independent inquiries would later conclude that while the University of East Anglia had improperly dodged open records requests, none of the scientists had engaged in any type of academic misconduct or fabrication. But that wasn’t the story taking shape on the news networks and in major papers.</div><div>
</div><div>On November 20, a New York Times front-page story opened by noting that skeptics “say [the emails] show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change.” The Washington Post quoted climate skeptic Myron Ebell—who would later run Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team—as saying the emails exposed an “alarmist political agenda.” The Post even ran an op-ed by Sarah Palin, who claimed that scientists had “manipulated data to ‘hide the decline’ in global temperatures.”</div><div>
</div><div>Television coverage was even worse. NBC told viewers that “those who doubt that man-made greenhouse gases are changing the climate say these emails…show climate scientists massaging data.” ABC inaccurately claimed that “one of the most damning email exchanges credits Mann with a trick to hide the decline in temperatures.”</div><div>
</div><div>Mann quickly became a central target for climate change deniers. Right-wing groups and Republican politicians called for the federal government to revoke his research funding and for his university to investigate him. He received an envelope in the mail containing white powder; it turned out to be cornstarch. “You and your colleagues who have promoted this scandal ought to be shot, quartered, and fed to the pigs along with your whole damn families,” declared one emailer. Along with other climate experts, Mann was featured in an anti-Semitic post on the white supremacist website Stormfront—an ominous foreshadowing of 2016.</div><div>
</div><div>“I could easily brush off many of the attacks,” Mann would later write in his book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, which discusses the right’s assault on his research. “But to the extent that the industry-funded disinformation machine was taking direct aim not just at me—my livelihood, my reputation, my safety—but even my family, I was becoming incensed.”</div><div>
</div><div>Mann was cleared of wrongdoing by multiple subsequent investigations, including by Penn State. But the personal attacks would continue for years. In a 2012 blog post for the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, Rand Simberg called the university investigation a “whitewash” and compared Mann to Jerry Sandusky, the Penn State assistant football coach convicted of sexually abusing children. “Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science,” wrote Simberg, “except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science.” (CEI later removed that comparison from the post. Mann is suing CEI and Simberg over the incident.)</div><div>
</div><div>Other climate scientists experienced similar harassment. Jones, who was the target of much of the media scrutiny and online abuse, was eventually cleared of wrongdoing by his university and has since returned to work. He doesn’t want to speculate on who was behind the hack. “I’ve tried to move on from that,” he told Mother Jones.</div><div>
</div><div>After three weeks of relentless Climategate coverage, the UN climate conference in Copenhagen, which was intended to lay the groundwork for an international agreement to slash emissions, began. It was supposed to be an inflection point, in which the world would move past debating long-settled science and take serious steps to solve the problem. In the lead-up to the talks, even Trump signed on to a full-page ad in the Times calling on President Barack Obama and other leaders to take bold action to combat climate change. Instead, the negotiations broke down—a diplomatic failure that set climate action back years.</div><div>
</div><div>For Julian Gregory, the Norfolk, England, detective in charge of investigating the hack, the timing was obvious. The Climategate emails “were selectively taken and portrayed in a way…intended to undermine the scientists and therefore the validity of their science,” he later told Climatewire, after a second batch of stolen emails was released shortly before another round of climate talks. “The conclusion you are led to is that it was done with the intention of influencing the outcome of those conferences.”</div><div>
</div><div>The hack probably wasn’t the primary reason the Copenhagen talks collapsed. Even before the emails surfaced, there were warning signs that diplomats could be headed for an impasse. Former US officials who participated say they don’t remember Climategate coming up during negotiations. Instead, the Obama administration and other governments simply hadn’t done enough to bridge the divides between the United States, China, and the developing world.</div><div>
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</div><div>But the scandal provided a convenient talking point for those seeking to block climate action. Days before the conference began, Mohammad al-Sabban, the lead negotiator from oil-rich Saudi Arabia, told the BBC that the emails would have a “huge impact” on the talks. “It appears from the details of the scandal that there is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change,” he said. James Inhofe, the Senate’s leading climate denier, traveled to Copenhagen, where he told throngs of reporters that Climategate was proof of what he’d been saying all along: Global warming was a hoax.</div><div>
</div><div>The most obvious fallout was in the United States, where the emails played an outsize role in the media’s coverage of climate change. According to a study by Matthew Nisbet, then a professor at American University, more than 20 percent of the news and opinion stories about climate change published by five major outlets in December 2009 mentioned the hacked emails.</div><div>
</div><div>Perhaps even more significantly, the scandal seemed to have a big impact on US public opinion, helping climate change denial and obstructionism become even more entrenched on the right. After Climategate, notes Podesta, “you see attitudinal change [in] people’s willingness to believe the scientific community that climate change is happening.” It’s no coincidence that Trump publicly reversed his own views on the issue just three months later, when he joked that Al Gore’s Nobel Prize should be rescinded and cited the stolen emails. He’s been an outspoken denier ever since.</div><div>
</div><div>Public trust in the science was already on the decline in the months before the emails came to light. But according to a study by researchers at Yale and George Mason University, Climategate appears to have “deepened and perhaps solidified” Americans’ growing skepticism. That was especially true on the right. Fully 80 percent of conservatives who followed the scandal said they had less trust in scientists as a result. Seventy-three percent said it made them more certain that global warming wasn’t happening. A whopping 69 percent of all respondents who followed the story, and 94 percent of conservatives, agreed with the statement that “scientists changed their results to make global warming appear worse than it is”—an allegation later proved to be unequivocally false.</div><div>
</div><div>Another study found a similar effect among a particularly influential group of media figures, noting that Climategate had “eroded global warming belief certainty among a large minority of TV meteorologists, at least temporarily.”</div><div>
</div><div>Sound familiar? Russian intelligence agents followed a strikingly similar blueprint in 2016 after they hacked the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Podesta’s personal Gmail account.</div><div>
</div><div>“If you were a Russian operative [and] pitching influence ops for the DNC, and somebody’s like, ‘Eh, I don’t know about that,’ literally you just turn around and go, ‘Look at how well it worked [with Climategate],'” says Jake Williams, a cybersecurity expert and former analyst at the National Security Agency. “I wouldn’t necessarily say one influenced the other, but certainly it’s good proof that that’s a technique that works.”</div><div>
</div><div>To access Podesta’s emails, the hackers used a targeted phishing attack that led his office to inadvertently turn over his login credentials. The DNC was hacked by two groups associated with Russian intelligence—one starting in 2015 and another in 2016—also via targeted phishing attacks. Tens of thousands of emails were eventually made public, along with Democratic fundraising reports and other planning materials. Batches of the stolen documents were given to individual news outlets, while other chunks were published directly to the blog of Guccifer 2.0—an online persona thought to be a front for Russian intelligence.</div><div>
</div><div>By far the most damage was done via WikiLeaks, which published the DNC emails days before the Democratic National Convention. And when the Trump campaign was thrown into chaos after the Washington Post unearthed a 2005 video of Trump boasting about grabbing women “by the pussy,” WikiLeaks began publishing the Podesta emails less than an hour later. WikiLeaks then rolled out new batches of emails on a near-daily basis in the month leading up to the election. Once again, the timing was clearly designed for maximum impact.</div><div>
</div><div>Mann had been compared to a child molester; Podesta was actually accused of child molestation.</div><div>
</div><div>The emails exposed Democrats’ dirty laundry and fueled the impression that the DNC had helped Clinton defeat Sen. Bernie Sanders in the hotly contested Democratic primary. They also revealed excerpts from paid speeches that Clinton had given to big banks—transcripts that she had refused to release earlier and that seemed to contradict her public rhetoric. “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders,” Clinton said in one excerpt that was repeatedly highlighted by Trump. Another email revealed that Clinton had assured union officials that she would defend fracking—a disclosure that angered some environmentalists.</div><div>
</div><div>But as with Climategate, what made the 2016 Russian hacks particularly successful was the obsessive—and often inaccurate—coverage of the emails in the media. “The hacking is only one half of the story,” Podesta says. “It’s a media story, too, because it’s the voyeurism of reading the emails, whether there is much serious in them or not, that is captivating to the media. [It] throws them into high relief, sensationalizes little bits of them. And then at the end of the day when people go back and look at the whole story, they say, ‘Well, what was that about?'”</div><div>
</div><div>Political jargon was misinterpreted, and innocuous phrases were presented out of context. Years-old private emails were dumped into the public sphere. Benign interactions between reporters and their sources were twisted to imply collusion between the Clinton campaign and the mainstream media. In one particularly absurd example highlighted by the liberal group Media Matters for America, Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives breathlessly reported that Podesta had “admitted” that Clinton hated “everyday Americans.” Podesta had actually meant that Clinton hated the phrase “everyday Americans”—a slogan that her campaign frequently used at the time.</div><div>
</div><div>The 2016 hacks had devastating personal consequences for their targets. Mann had been compared to a child molester; Podesta was actually accused of child molestation by conspiracy theorists who declared they had detected code words in his emails designed to conceal a child sex ring supposedly operating out of a DC pizzeria. Every piece of the so-called Pizzagate scandal was a lie, but that didn’t stop restaurant staffers from receiving hundreds of death threats. In December 2016, a North Carolina man who claimed to be investigating Pizzagate fired an assault rifle inside the restaurant. Luckily, no one was injured.</div><div>
</div><div>We still know very little about “Mr. FOIA”—the online persona who claimed to be behind Climategate. His own words suggest he was a lone individual with no government or corporate backing. (Guccifer 2.0 also claimed to have no connection to Russian intelligence, an assertion that US intelligence agencies say is false.)</div><div>
</div><div>“It was me or nobody, now or never,” wrote Mr. FOIA. “The circus was about to arrive in Copenhagen. Later on it could be too late.”</div><div>“It was me or nobody, now or never,” Mr. FOIA wrote in 2013. “Combination of several rather improbable prerequisites just wouldn’t occur again for anyone else in the foreseeable future. The circus was about to arrive in Copenhagen. Later on it could be too late.”</div><div>
</div><div>A November 2009 memo from the University of East Anglia’s IT department, obtained through a public information request, tells us more about the hack itself. This probably wasn’t phishing, like Podesta experienced. Instead the hacker seems to have obtained the files by breaking into the university’s backup servers through a compromised account—CRU’s servers were illegally accessed at least three times in September and October 2009 using stolen or cracked passwords. Once inside, the attacker was able to retrieve the files.</div><div>
</div><div>Steve Lord, a British cybersecurity expert who reviewed the university memo on the incident, told Mother Jones that the methods used to steal the climate emails, at least according to materials provided by the university, showed “no real sophistication.”</div><div>
</div><div>“It’s not a particularly complicated setup,” said Lord. “It’s not clear how they got in, but once they’re in, from the information we do have, this is not rocket science.” (You can read the university memo below.)</div><div>
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</div><div>Mr. FOIA has reemerged twice since 2009. In November 2011—just days before the start of another UN climate conference—a new batch of more than 5,000 emails, part of the original set stolen from CRU, was, as before, posted on a Russian server and uploaded to the comments sections of several prominent climate skeptics’ blogs.</div><div>
</div><div>Theories still abound about who Mr. FOIA was. “The hypothesis, unfortunately, remains today where it started,” Gregory, the local detective, told the BBC in 2012 as the statute of limitations on the crime ran out and investigators dropped the case. “It ranges from a lone individual through to commercial or governmental interests…It could have been anyone on that spectrum. We can’t say.” The Norfolk police declined to discuss the investigation with Mother Jones, and Gregory, who has since left the force, didn’t return requests for comment.</div><div>
</div><div>The US Justice Department appears to have gotten involved after the second email leak in 2011, though it’s unclear what became of that inquiry. The DOJ, the FBI, and the National Crime Agency, the United Kingdom’s top law enforcement body, would not comment on the existence of investigations.</div><div>
</div><div>In a 2012 interview with the Guardian, Gregory said his inquiry spanned “most continents”—which likely means computer proxy servers around the world were used to mask the hacker’s true identity. The perpetrator, Gregory said, tried to “leave a false trail” to throw off investigators.</div><div>
</div><div>Some have speculated that Russia or another petrostate was behind the hack—an idea that gained new currency in the wake of the 2016 election. Vladimir Putin, after all, has periodically flirted with climate change denial, and Russia—which recently overtook Saudi Arabia as the world’s leading crude oil producer—is highly dependent on fossil fuel extraction.</div><div>
</div><div>But Gregory told the BBC that he’d found no specific information indicating that a government was behind the hack. Other experts agree: With the evidence at hand, it would be “a stretch” to point the finger at Russian hackers, says Lord.</div><div>
</div><div>Another theory, popular among climate change skeptics, was that a University of East Anglia insider, frustrated by scientists’ resistance to freedom-of-information requests, released the documents and made it look like an outsider had taken them. But according to Gregory, investigators were confident this wasn’t the case.</div><div>
</div><div>In March 2013, when Mr. FOIA released a third tranche of hacked documents and announced himself in a note published on climate-skeptic blogs, he mocked the idea that the hack had been funded by energy industry groups. “I wasn’t aware of the arrangement but warmly welcome their decision to support my project,” Mr. FOIA wrote, adding that he’d opened a bitcoin wallet to accept online donations. The wallet remains active, and nine payments have been made to the account over the past five years. The value, as of mid-November, was roughly $37,400.</div><div>
</div><div>“That’s right; no conspiracy, no paid hackers, no Big Oil,” Mr. FOIA wrote. “The Republicans didn’t plot this. USA politics is alien to me, neither am I from the UK. There is life outside the Anglo-American sphere.”</div><div>
</div><div>It wasn’t until December 2015 that the Obama administration was finally able to piece together a global climate agreement in Paris. Podesta, who had briefly joined the Obama White House the previous year, helped lay the groundwork for the deal. It was immediately denounced by much of the Republican presidential field. One of those critics, of course, was Trump, who on the campaign trail called US involvement in the Paris talks “ridiculous” and promised to pull out of the deal.</div><div>
</div><div>Just seven months after Russian hackers helped him win the presidency, Trump began to follow through on his pledge.</div><div>
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</div><div>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/us/russia-interference-election-trump-clinton.html</div><div>
</div><div>nyt</div><div>...By midsummer 2016, the Russian contacts sounded alarms inside the F.B.I., where agents had received a tip about Mr. Papadopoulos and puzzled over Mr. Page’s Moscow visit. The bureau sent a trusted informant to help understand what was happening: Stefan Halper, a former Nixon and Reagan adviser and professor at Cambridge University, reached out to Mr. Page and Mr. Papadopoulos under false pretenses.</div><div>
</div><div>American officials have defended Professor Halper’s work, saying the use of such a confidential informant is routine in a counterintelligence investigation. Mr. Trump and his allies in Congress and the media have called him something different: a “spy” sent by the Obama administration to infiltrate the campaign.</div><div>
</div><div>Eventually, Mr. Trump would use such episodes as a foundation for his view that America’s law enforcement agencies had been aligned against him from the beginning — ammunition for a looming war with the “deep state.” This idea would consume Mr. Trump after he became president, feeding his sense of grievance that the legitimacy of his victory was under attack and shaping his decisions as he tried to blunt the widening Russia investigation.</div><div>
</div><div>The long-promised “dirt” the Russians had on Mrs. Clinton would soon be made public. Three days after the Trump Tower meeting, the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, appeared on a British Sunday television show.</div><div>
</div><div>He said that his website would soon be publishing a raft of emails related to Mrs. Clinton. And he said something at once ominous and prescient: “WikiLeaks has a very big year ahead.”</div><div>
</div><div>Guccifer’s Game</div><div>
</div><div>Using a hacker persona, Russian military intelligence officers began to reveal documents stolen from the Democrats.</div><div>
</div><div>A website made its splashy debut three days later, presenting a jaunty hacker who called himself Guccifer 2.0. He had broken into the Democratic National Committee’s computer network, Guccifer said, offering as proof a selection of purloined documents.</div><div>
</div><div>“Here are just a few docs from many thousands I extracted when hacking into the DNC’s network,” Guccifer wrote on June 15. “The main part of the papers, thousands of files and mails, I gave to WikiLeaks,” he added — which seemed to explain Mr. Assange’s boast.</div><div>
</div><div>Russian intelligence had worked fast. Just the day before, D.N.C. officials and their cybersecurity contractor, CrowdStrike, had announced that Russian hackers had penetrated the committee’s computer network.</div><div>
</div><div>Overnight, Russian military intelligence officers set up the website and created the Guccifer persona to counter the D.N.C. accusations. Guccifer — a name borrowed from a real Romanian hacker — was presented as a jovial Romanian, a “lone hacker,” who in his posts wanted to make one thing very clear: He had nothing whatsoever to do with Russia.</div><div>
</div><div>“It seems the guys from CrowdStrike and the DNC,” he wrote, “would say I’m a Russian bear even if I were a catholic nun.”</div><div>
</div><div>In fact, beyond the conclusions of CrowdStrike and the F.B.I., there were clues from the start that Guccifer’s posts came from Moscow: The name of the founder of the Soviet secret police was embedded in Guccifer’s documents, written using a Russian version of Microsoft Word.</div><div>
</div><div>Yet the Guccifer gambit would prove remarkably effective at creating doubt about Russia’s responsibility for the hack. Republican operatives working on congressional campaigns emailed “Guccifer” and received hacked documents relevant to their races. For journalists, the claims of the supposed “lone hacker” made the role of Russian intelligence seem to be a disputed allegation rather than a proven fact.</div><div>
</div><div>Today there is no doubt who hacked the D.N.C. and the Clinton campaign. A detailed indictment of 12 officers of Russia’s military intelligence agency, filed in July by Mr. Mueller, documents their every move, including their break-in techniques, their tricks to hide inside the Democrats’ networks and even their Google searches.</div><div>
</div><div>See the timeline of hacking that led to the indictment.</div><div>
</div><div>The agency, now called the Main Directorate but often referred to by its former abbreviation, the G.R.U., proved agile, brazen and not terribly discreet — the same pattern it would show two years later in the nerve-agent poisoning in England of its former officer, the defector Sergei V. Skripal.</div><div>
</div><div>The hacking might have drawn little attention had the G.R.U. stopped there, simply stealing emails to peruse for intelligence clues. But the Russians’ decision to leak the emails to undercut Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy was a huge escalation.</div><div>
</div><div>The Russian officers’ political skills proved equal to their hacking expertise. They deftly manipulated a long list of Americans and Europeans, many of whom embraced Guccifer’s tall tale and took seriously the claim that the other Russian false front, DCLeaks.com, was run by American “hacktivists.”</div><div>
</div><div>“Guccifer 2.0” addressed a cybersecurity conference in London via messages to one of the organizers. The purported Romanian jousted with a suspicious reporter for Motherboard, insisting: “I don’t like Russians and their foreign policy. I hate being attributed to Russia.” When Twitter suspended the DCLeaks account, the Fox Business host Lou Dobbs accused the company of “Leftist Fascism.” The account was swiftly reinstated.</div><div>
</div><div>But the Russians’ masterstroke was to enlist, via the Guccifer persona, the help of WikiLeaks. Neither of the Russians’ websites, Guccifer 2.0 or DCLeaks.com, had much reach. But WikiLeaks had a large global audience. Its editor, Mr. Assange, shared Mr. Putin’s hatred of Mrs. Clinton and had a soft spot for Russia.</div><div>
</div><div>Mr. Assange assisted with the subterfuge. He repeatedly denied that he’d received the documents from Russia; whether he was really taken in by the “Guccifer” ruse is uncertain.</div><div>
</div><div>Video</div><div>Fox News via YouTubePublished OnSept. 17, 2018]</div><div>
</div><div>But he also obscured the Russian role by fueling a right-wing conspiracy theory he knew to be false. He offered a $20,000 reward for information about the murder in Washington of Seth Rich, a young D.N.C. staffer shot to death in an apparent bungled street robbery. Trump supporters were suggesting Mr. Rich had leaked the D.N.C. emails and been killed in retaliation, and Mr. Assange played along.</div><div>
</div><div>In a discussion about WikiLeaks’ sources on Dutch television in August 2016, Mr. Assange suddenly brought up Mr. Rich’s killing.</div><div>
</div><div>“That was just a robbery, I believe, wasn’t it?” the interviewer said. “What are you suggesting?”</div><div>
</div><div>“I’m suggesting that our sources take risks,” Mr. Assange said — and then declined to say if Mr. Rich was a source.</div><div>
</div><div>Such misleading interviews helped camouflage the Russian origin of the leak, and WikiLeaks’ adept timing gave the emails big impact. After some technical problems, according to Mr. Mueller’s indictment, “Guccifer” passed the entire archive of D.N.C. emails to WikiLeaks. The website published 19,252 of them on July 22, 2016 — three days before the Democratic National Convention.</div><div>
</div><div>The Russians’ work detonated with powerful political effect. The emails’ exposure of D.N.C. staffers’ support for Mrs. Clinton and scorn for Senator Bernie Sanders, her chief rival, forced the committee’s chairwoman, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, to resign. The resentment of the Sanders delegates deepened, leaving the party even more bitterly divided as it turned to the general election.</div><div>
</div><div>Unknown to the feuding Democratic delegates, a cyberdrama had been playing out in secret for weeks, as CrowdStrike experts tried to root out the Russian hackers who had penetrated the D.N.C. and its sister organization, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.</div><div>
</div><div>Robert S. Johnston, a lead investigator for CrowdStrike, said the Russian hackers, uniformed officers of military intelligence, were “like a thunderstorm moving through the system — very, very noisy.”</div><div>
</div><div>CrowdStrike had begun watching the Russians in April, asking D.N.C. staffers to keep quiet about the intrusion. “We only talked over Signal,” an encrypted text and call service, said Mr. Johnston, a former Marine and veteran of the United States Cyber Command who is now chief executive of the cybersecurity firm Adlumin. Only by following the hackers for several weeks could CrowdStrike be certain it had found the Russians’ tools and blocked their access.</div><div>
</div><div>But somehow, possibly by intercepting communications inside the D.N.C. or the F.B.I., which was investigating the breach, the G.R.U. officers learned they had been spotted. On May 31, two weeks before the public disclosure of the hack, Ivan Yermakov, a G.R.U. hacker who had used American-sounding online personas — “Kate S. Milton,” “James McMorgans” and “Karen W. Millen” — suddenly began searching online for information about CrowdStrike. He sought to find out what the cybersleuths knew about the Russians’ main tool, a nasty piece of malware called X-Agent, the indictment noted.</div><div>
</div><div>After that, the spy-versus-spy contest escalated. “We knew it was the Russians, and they knew we knew,” Mr. Johnston said. “I would say it was the cyber equivalent of hand-to-hand combat.”</div><div>
</div><div>The candidate favored by the Russians alternated between denying their help and seeming to welcome it. On June 15, the day after the D.N.C. hack was disclosed, the Trump campaign pitched in with a novel idea to deflect blame from the Russians: The D.N.C. had somehow hacked itself.</div><div>
</div><div>“We believe it was the D.N.C. that did the ‘hacking’ as a way to distract from the many issues facing their deeply flawed candidate,” the statement said. Later, Mr. Trump tried out other alternative theories: Perhaps the hack had been carried out by “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds,” or a “some guy in his home in New Jersey,” or the Chinese, or almost anyone.</div><div>
</div><div>But at other times, he appeared to accept that Russia was responsible.</div><div>
</div><div>“The new joke in town,” Mr. Trump tweeted on July 25, “is that Russia leaked the disastrous DNC emails, which should have never been written (stupid), because Putin likes me.”</div><div>
</div><div>And two days later, he famously invited the Russians to try to retrieve 30,000 emails that Mrs. Clinton had deleted from her computer server on the basis that they involved personal matters and not State Department business.</div><div>
</div><div>“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Mr. Trump said during a Florida news conference. The Mueller investigation discovered that the Russians were evidently listening: The same day as the news conference, the G.R.U. hackers began sending so-called spearphishing emails to accounts associated with Mrs. Clinton’s personal office.</div><div>
</div><div>Video</div><div>The Associated PressPublished OnSept. 17, 2018]</div><div>
</div><div>Mr. Trump’s pronouncements stood in striking contrast to the responses of past presidential candidates who had been offered assistance by foreign powers. In 1960, both Adlai E. Stevenson and John F. Kennedy refused quiet offers of help from Khrushchev.</div><div>...</div><div></div><div>
</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/julian-assange-lawyer-justice-department-wikileaks</div><div>
</div><div>Assange's lawyer blasts Justice Department as 'irresponsible' for doing exactly what WikiLeaks does</div><div>It is unclear what the charges are against Assange or whether the Justice Department will move forward.</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div>the Wall Street Journal has doggedly pursued a strand of the Russa investigation that has largely flown under the radar as other avenues of investigation such as President Donald Trump's financial ties to Moscow and Paul Manafort's dealings in Ukraine garnered more attention. But a new report from the paper on Friday reveals that it not only the Journal that's been paying attention — Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team has zeroed in on the curious case of GOP operative Peter Smith as well.</div><div>
</div><div>Smith, who died shortly before the Journal first began reporting on his actions in 2017, was conducting a wide-ranging effort in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election to track down Hillary Clinton's emails. Along the way, he developed a relationship with disgraced Trump campaign aide and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. </div><div>
</div><div>And now, the Journal says there is evidence that could tie Smith to WikiLeaks' dispersal of stolen emails from Hillary Clinton's Campaign Chair John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee.</div><div>
</div><div>"Investigators also have evidence that the late GOP activist Peter W. Smith may have had advance knowledge of details about the release of emails from a top Hillary Clinton campaign official by WikiLeaks, one person familiar with the matter said," the Journal wrote.</div><div>
</div><div>The article also says that the investigators have pursued related lines of inquiry, including examining Trump ally Roger Stone's and conservative pundit Jerome Corsi's connections with WikiLeaks.</div><div>
</div><div>New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait explained the significance of these potential connections:</div><div>
</div><div>If true, this would mean that Smith wasn’t merely attempting to get ahold of stolen Clinton emails. He got through to WikiLeaks and was, in some form, a channel of collusion between the hackers and the Trump campaign.</div><div>
</div><div>Flynn long ago started cooperating with Robert Mueller. So if Flynn discussed any of this information with Trump during the campaign, the special counsel probably knows about it.</div><div>
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</div><div>https://YYY.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/21/julian-assange-russia-ecuador-embassy-london-secret-escape-plan</div><div>
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</div><div>gr grreenwald has a piece up at the Intercept declaring that Julian Assange’s tenure at Ecuador’s London embassy may be coming to an end very soon.</div><div>
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</div><div>Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno traveled to London on Friday for the ostensible purpose of speaking at the 2018 Global Disabilities Summit(Moreno has been confined to a wheelchair since being shot in a 1998 robbery attempt). The concealed, actual purpose of the President’s trip is to meet with British officials to finalize an agreement under which Ecuador will withdraw its asylum protection of Julian Assange, in place since 2012, eject him from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and then hand over the WikiLeaks founder to British authorities.</div><div>
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</div><div>Now it is Glenn Greenwald, so take it with an appropriately large grain of salt, but apparently this has been in the works for some time.</div><div>
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</div><div>A source close to the Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry and the President’s office, unauthorized to speak publicly, has confirmed to the Intercept that Moreno is close to finalizing, if he has not already finalized, an agreement to hand over Assange to the UK within the next several weeks. The withdrawal of asylum and physical ejection of Assange could come as early as this week. On Friday, RT reported that Ecuador was preparing to enter into such an agreement.</div><div>
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</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/meet-12-russians-us-government-indicted-last-week</div><div>
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</div><div>12 Russian officials who were indicted by the Grand Jury of the District of Columbia. It is the fact that these people were indicted that prompted Russian President Vladimir Putin to insist that American President Donald Trump turn over Americans like one of our former ambassadors, Michael McFaul, over to his government in order to be interrogated.</div><div>
</div><div>The key difference, of course, is that Putin is fabricating charges against McFaul and others like whistleblower Bill Browder, while the accusations against the 12 Russian officials are rooted in serious investigative work. Yet who are these dozen Russians that have been identified by Robert Mueller's investigation?</div><div>
</div><div>According to the indictment, the Russian officials singled out by the government were Boris Alekseyevich Antonov, Dmitriy Sergeyevich Badin, Anatoliy Sergeyevich Kovalev, Nikolay Yuryevich Kozachek, Aleksey Viktorovich Lukashev, Artem Andreyevich Malyshev, Sergey Aleksandrovich Morgachev, Viktor Borisovich Netyksho, Aleksandr Vladimirovich Osadchuk, Aleksey Aleksandrovich Potemkin, Ivan Sergeyevich Yermakov and Pavel Vyacheslavovich Yershov. With the exception of Kovalev, the indictment describes all of these individuals as "GRU officers who knowingly and intentionally conspired with each other, and with persons known and unknown to the Grand Jury (collectively the 'Conspirators'), to gain unauthorized access (to 'hack') into the computers of U.S. persons and entities involved in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, steal documents from those computers, and stage releases of the stolen documents to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election."</div><div>
</div><div>The indictment claims that these individuals hacked the email accounts of staffers and volunteers at Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign by at least March 2016, hacked into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Democratic National Committee by at least April 2016 and began releasing tens of thousands of stolen emails and documents by at least June 2016, continuing to do so through the month of the presidential election.</div><div>
</div><div>And who are they specifically?</div><div>
</div><div>According to the indictment, Netyksho is a Russian military officer whose unit (Unit 26165) "had primary responsibility for hacking the DCCC and DNC, as well as the email accounts of individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign." Antonov was assigned to that same unit and oversaw a department within it that was "dedicated to targeting military, political, governmental, and non-governmental organizations with spearphishing emails and other computer intrusion activity." Antonov is accused of having "supervised other co-conspirators who targeted the DCCC, DNC, and individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign." Badin held the title of "Assistant Head of Department" in that unit and supervised various attacks on the Democratic and Clinton-related targets chosen by the Russian government.</div><div>
</div><div>Then there is Yermakov, who the indictment claims was a master of aliases, using "various online personas" in order to engage in a number of hacking operations. These names included "Kate S. Milton," "James McMorgans" and "Karen W. Millen." Lukashev was a senior lieutenant in the Russian military and, like Yermakov, used a number of online pseudonyms, including "Den Katenberg" and "Yuliana Martynova." Lukashev "sent spearphishing emails to members of the Clinton Campaign and affiliated individuals, including the chairman of the Clinton Campaign." Morgachev, by contrast, was in charge of a department at the unit that developed and managed malware, including one hacking tool called "X-Agent," and is charged with supervising the agents who implanted the X-Agent malware on DCCC and DNC computers and then monitored it.</div><div>
</div><div>READ MORE: Donald Trump, Brexit and the Russians: A dangerous turning point in "World War IV"</div><div>
</div><div>Kozachek is described in the indictment as a lieutenant captain who had been assigned to Morgachev's department within Unit 26165 and employed pseudonyms like "kazak" and "blablabla1234565" in order to do his job. He also "developed, customized, and monitored X-Agent malware used to hack the DCCC and DNC networks beginning in or around April 2016." Yershov, meanwhile, is accused of having "assisted Kozachek and other co-conspirators in testing and customizing X-Agent malware before actual deployment and use." Malyshev, on the other hand, was a second lieutenant whose work for Morgachev's department involved monitoring X-Agent malware that had been implanted on Democratic Party machines. He used pseudonyms like "djangomagicdev" and "realblatr." </div><div>
</div><div>Osadchuk is a Russian colonel and the commanding officer of Unit 74455, which "assisted in the release of stolen documents through the DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0personas, the promotion of those releases, and the publication of anti-Clinton content on social media accounts operated by the GRU." Meanwhile Potemkin was a Russian military officer assigned to Unit 74455 who supervised a department "responsible for the administration of computer infrastructure used in cyber operations. Infrastructure and social media accounts administered by Potemkin's department were used, among other things, to assist in the release of stolen documents through the DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 personas." </div><div>
</div><div>Throughout the document, considerable detail is given about how various email accounts owned by either the Clinton campaign or other Democratic Party bodies were deliberately targeted by individuals or groups of individuals on this list. It explains how they hacked into these accounts and what they ultimately gained from doing so. Kovalev specifically is accused, among other things, of hacking the website of a state board of elections and stealing information about roughly 500,000 voters "including names, addresses, partial social security numbers, dates of birth, and driver’s license numbers." He is also accused of hacking into the computers of a company that supplied voter registration verification software, targeting "state and county offices responsible for administering the 2016 US. elections" and visiting the websites of counties in states like Florida, Georgia and Iowa in order to find vulnerabilities.</div><div>
</div><div>It is worth reminding the reader, at this point, of what McFaul told Salon earlier in the week — namely, that Putin is trying to create a false equivalency between the crimes he ordered committed by Russian officials and the fabricated charges he has created against McFaul and Browder.</div><div>
</div><div>"But let's be clear: What Putin was doing was assigning moral equivalency to a legitimate indictment with lots of evidence against several Russian military intelligence officers for violating American sovereignty in 2016 during the presidential elections, with a completely fabricated, cockamamie story invented by Putin," McFaul told Salon. "To even, for a moment, give any kind of dignity to what President Putin proposed was not in America's national interest, from my point of view."</div><div>
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</div><div>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/13/us/politics/mueller-indictment-russian-intelligence-hacking.html</div><div>
</div><div>https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/rod-rosenstein-expected-to-announce-new-indictment-by-mueller/2018/07/13/bc565582-86a9-11e8-8553-a3ce89036c78_story.html</div><div>
</div><div>no lnx</div><div>
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</div><div>A dozen Russian military intelligence officers were indicted Friday on charges they hacked Democrats’ computers, stole their data and published those files to disrupt the 2016 election — the clearest connection to the Kremlin established so far by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of interference in the presidential campaign.</div><div>
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</div><div>The indictment against members of the Russian military agency known as the GRU marks the first time Mueller has taken direct aim at the Russian government, accusing specific military units and their named officers of a sophisticated, sustained effort to hack the computer networks of Democratic organizations and the Hillary Clinton campaign.</div><div>
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</div><div>Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein announced the charges at a midday news conference. Mueller, as has been his practice, did not attend the announcement. Court records show that a grand jury that Mueller has been using returned an indictment Friday morning.</div><div>
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</div><div>The suspects “covertly monitored the computers, implanted hundreds of files containing malicious computer code, and stole emails and other documents,” Rosenstein said. “The goal of the conspirators was to have an impact on the election. What impact they may have had .?.?. is a matter of speculation; that’s not our responsibility.”</div><div>
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</div><div>The indictment comes days before President Trump is due to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Finland. Rosenstein said he briefed Trump earlier this week on the charges.</div><div>
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</div><div>Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani said on Twitter that the indictments “are good news for all Americans. The Russians are nailed. No Americans are involved.” He then called on Mueller “to end this pursuit of the president and say President Trump is completely innocent.”</div><div>
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</div><div> Who has been charged in Russia probe and why VIEW GRAPHIC </div><div>
</div><div>The 11-count, 29-page indictment describes in granular detail a carefully planned and executed attack on the information security of Democrats, as Russian government hackers implanted hundreds of malware files on Democrats’ computer systems to steal information. The hackers then laundered the pilfered material through fake personas called DC Leaks and Guccifer 2.0, as well as others, to try to influence voters.</div><div>
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</div><div>One of their conduits, identified in the indictment only as “Organization 1,” was WikiLeaks, the global anti-secrecy group led by Julian Assange, according to people familiar with the case. The indictment describes WikiLeaks communicating with Guccifer 2.0 to obtain material.</div><div>
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</div><div>On July 6, 2016, according to the indictment, WikiLeaks wrote, “if you have anything Hillary related we want it in the next tweo [sic] days prefable [sic] because the DNC [Democratic National Convention] is approaching and she will solidify bernie supporters behind her after,” referring to Clinton’s rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). WikiLeaks explained, “we think trump has only a 25% chance of winning against hillary .?.?. so conflict between bernie and hillary is interesting.”</div><div>
</div><div>WikiLeaks released nearly 20,000 Democratic National Committee emails on the eve of the convention later that month, providing an embarrassing look at party operations and attitudes toward the Sanders campaign.</div><div>
</div><div>[Read the indictment of 12 Russians charged with hacking Democrats]</div><div>
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</div><div> 2:43</div><div>
</div><div>Rod Rosenstein announces indictment of 12 Russian agents</div><div>
</div><div>The deputy attorney general announces the indictment of 12 Russian intelligence agents in connection with hacking during the 2016 election. (The Washington Post)</div><div>
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</div><div>A former Justice Department official who was previously involved in the Russia probe said the charges should serve as a warning for the United States to buttress its election security as Americans prepare to vote in congressional elections in November.</div><div>
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</div><div>“The detailed charges in this indictment make it unmistakably clear that the United States faces an aggressive, sophisticated adversary bent on using cyber means to subvert our democratic processes and institutions,” said David Laufman, a former chief of the Justice Department’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section. “Now is the time for unequivocal recognition of this threat by both the executive branch and Congress, and for a unified and well coordinated commitment to confront it.”</div><div>
</div><div>The indictment offers troubling new accusations about the extent of Russian hacking efforts and interactions with Americans.</div><div>
</div><div>“On or about August 15, 2016, the conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, received a request for stolen documents from a candidate for the U.S. Congress,” the indictment states. “The conspirators responded using the Guccifer 2.0 persona and sent the candidate stolen documents related to the candidate’s opponent.” The indictment does not identify the candidate.</div><div>
</div><div>The indictment also describes an online conversation between the GRU, posing as Guccifer 2.0, and a “person who was in regular contact with senior members of the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump.”</div><div>
</div><div>People familiar with the case said that person is longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone. In August 2016, the hacker persona wrote: “please tell me if i can help u anyhow .?.?. it would be a great pleasure to me.”</div><div>
</div><div>Stone’s lawyer Grant Smith said, “It is clear from the indictment issued today that our client, Roger Stone, was not in any way involved with any of the alleged hacking of the 2016 election. As he testified before the House Intelligence Committee under oath, his 24-word exchange with someone on Twitter claiming to be Guccifer 2.0 is benign, based on its content, context and timing.”</div><div>
</div><div>U.S. officials identified one of the GRU sections that carried out the operations as Unit 26165, which worked out of a building about four miles from the Kremlin. It was responsible for hacking the DNC and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, according to the indictment, which accuses Viktor Netyksho of being the military officer in command of Unit 26165 at the time.</div><div>
</div><div>Although the DNC was able to partially kick the Russian hackers out of its system in June 2016, the indictment says three months later, the GRU “successfully gained access to DNC computers hosted on a third-party cloud-computing service” which held “test applications related to the DNC’s analytics,” according to the indictment. The hacker stole that data from the DNC, the indictment said.</div><div>
</div><div>Another group of Russian military officers, Unit 74455, working out of a building that GRU officers referred to as the “Tower,” used fake online personas to spread stolen files, officials charged. The indictment identifies Col. Aleksandr Osadchuk as the commanding officer of that unit.</div><div>
</div><div>The indictment also notes an interesting development on July 27, 2016 — the day then-candidate Trump gave a press conference declaring his hope that missing Clinton emails would be found and made public, saying: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”</div><div>
</div><div>The indictment says “on or about” that same day, “the conspirators attempted after hours to spearphish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provider and used by Clinton’s personal office. At or around the same time, they also targeted seventy-six email addresses at the domain for the Clinton campaign.”</div><div>
</div><div>The Russian Foreign Ministry rejected the indictment’s allegations as lacking evidence and described the charges as a clear effort to derail the Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki.</div><div>
</div><div>“It is unfortunate that distributing false information has become the norm in Washington, and that criminal cases are being initiated based on clearly political motives,” the ministry said. Referring to the Mueller investigation, the statement went on: “The question remains how long this shameful comedy that is embarrassing the United States will go on.”</div><div>
</div><div>Rosenstein said the hackers interacted with some Americans in the course of their efforts but noted that those people had not been charged with a crime.</div><div>
</div><div>“When we confront foreign interference in American elections, it is important for us to avoid thinking politically as Republicans or Democrats and instead to think patriotically as Americans. Our response must not depend on who was victimized,” he said. “There will always be adversaries who work to exacerbate domestic differences and try to confuse, divide and conquer us. So long as we are united in our commitment to the values enshrined in the Constitution, they will not succeed.”</div><div>
</div><div>Mueller and a team of prosecutors have been working since May 2017 to determine whether any Trump associates conspired with Russia to interfere in the election. With the new indictment, his office has filed charges against 32 people on crimes including hacking, money laundering and lying to the FBI. Twenty-six of those charged are Russians who are unlikely to ever be put on trial in the United States.</div><div>
</div><div>In February, Mueller indicted a group of Russian Internet trolls who worked out of the Internet Research Agency, a company based in St. Petersburg and owned by a wealthy associate of Putin.</div><div>
</div><div>[Russian troll farm, 13 suspects indicted in 2016 election interference]</div><div>
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</div><div>Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, is in jail in Alexandria, Va., awaiting trial this month on financial fraud charges brought by Mueller but stemming from activities that predated the Trump campaign.</div><div>
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</div><div>Mueller’s probe has come under sustained attack from Trump and at a press conference in England on Friday before Rosenstein spoke, the president again labeled the investigation a “witch hunt.”</div><div>
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</div><div>“I think that we’re being hurt very badly by the — I would call it the witch hunt,” said Trump as he stood beside British Prime Minister Theresa May. “It really hurts our relationship with Russia.”</div><div>
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</div><div>Rosenstein said of his decision to brief Trump, “It was important for the president to know what information we’ve uncovered because he’s got to make very important decisions for the country. He needs to understand what evidence we have of foreign election interference.”</div><div>
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</div><div>https://www.democracynow.org/2018/6/19/headlines/former_cia_software_engineer_accused_of_vault_7_leak_indicted</div><div>
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</div><div>http://wjla.com/news/nation-world/cambridge-analytica</div><div>
</div><div>no linx twit</div><div>
</div><div>Cambridge Analytica whistleblower: Russia may have accessed Facebook data of 87M Americans</div><div>
</div><div>by Leandra BernsteinWednesday, May 16th 2018</div><div>
</div><div>Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, departs after meeting with House Judiciary Democrats, on Capitol Hill, Tuesday, April 24, 2018 in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)</div><div>
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</div><div>WASHINGTON (Circa) — Amid reports the data firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) is under investigation by the FBI and Department of Justice, a former research director turned whistleblower suggested the company engaged in voter suppression, "black ops" and coordinated its U.S. election operations with Russian government entities.</div><div>
</div><div>Much has been said about Cambridge Analytica's misuse of millions of Facebook users' data for sophisticated political targeting operations. On Wednesday, Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee revealed that massive dataset could have been "easily" shared with a Russian intelligence-linked company.</div><div>
</div><div>According to a Tuesday report by The New York Times, the FBI and Department of Justice appear to be in the "early stages" of an investigation into Cambridge Analytica. Federal investigators are reportedly looking into the company's business practices and financial dealings. </div><div>
</div><div>Investigations of CA and its parent company, SCL, are currently underway in Britain, Australia, Canada, Nigeria, Kenya and India.</div><div>
</div><div>Christopher Wylie indirectly confirmed the investigation of his former employer, Cambridge Analytica. Asked by reporters if he was cooperating with the special counsel investigation into Russian election interference, he replied, "I have been contacted by the FBI."</div><div>
</div><div>In his testimony, Wylie again confirmed cooperating with U.S. authorities, saying he had provided relevant documents and information. He added, "It should be made clear, I am not the target of these investigations."</div><div>
</div><div>Cambridge Analytica was asked to participate in the Wednesday hearing but after announcing bankruptcy and shutting its doors earlier this month declined the invitation.</div><div>
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</div><div>View image on Twitter</div><div>
</div><div> Cambridge Analytica, the data firm at the center of Facebook's privacy scandal is closing. https://bit.ly/2w3WgXK </div><div>
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</div><div>1:45 PM - May 2, 2018</div><div>
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</div><div>HOW RUSSIA MAY HAVE ACCESSED THE DATA</div><div>
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</div><div>In his testimony Wednesday, Wylie faced questions about Cambridge Analytica's numerous ties to Russian government entities, at one point suggesting the Facebook data of 87 million Americans may have been acquired by the Russians.</div><div>
</div><div>That massive data transfer may have been facilitated, knowingly or uknowingly by Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica and its parent company SCL. Nix's London-based company was known for providing "strategic communications" and had defense contracts, commercial engagements and political campaign operations around the globe.</div><div>
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</div><div>@Circa</div><div>
</div><div> Senate panel agrees with US intel that Russia intervened in 2016 election to help Trump. https://bit.ly/2IoWTkc </div><div>
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</div><div>10:55 AM - May 16, 2018</div><div>
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</div><div>See Circa's other Tweets</div><div>
</div><div>Wylie described a "high level of engagement" between CA's executive, Alexander Nix and Lukoil, Russia's second largest oil company. Lukoil, which has known ties to Russian intelligence services, was sanctioned in 2017 in connection with the Russian annexation of Crimea.</div><div>
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</div><div>According to Wylie's account, Nix was in "close contact" with Lukoil executives and in 2014 gave them a whitepaper written by Wylie outlining Cambridge Analytica's U.S. data mining and voter targeting project, which was reportedly of special interest.</div><div>
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</div><div>Asked by Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., if CA's dataset, with information on tens of millions of U.S. Facebook users was also shared with Lukoil, Wylie did not dismiss the possibility. He noted the information could have been "easily acquired" with or without CA's knowledge or consent.</div><div>
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</div><div>"I can't say definitively, one way or the other, if these datasets did end up in Russia but what I can say is that it would have been very easy to facilitate that," Wylie said.</div><div>
</div><div>CBS News</div><div>
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</div><div>@CBSNews</div><div>
</div><div> Feinstein: Do you think it's possible Facebook data harvested by Cambridge Analytica ended up in Russia? </div><div>
</div><div>Wylie: "I can't say definitively, one way or the other, if these data sets did end up in Russia but what I can say is that it would have been very easy to facilitate that."</div><div>
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</div><div>7:49 AM - May 16, 2018</div><div>
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</div><div>In their conversations with Nix, Lukoil executives were informed of "the scale of the data and the location of the data," Wylie said. "What was made known was that this data could have been easily acquired by something as simple as a keylogger on Dr. [Aleksandr] Kogan's computer when he was visiting Russia," he added.</div><div>
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</div><div>Aleksandr Kogan was a researcher at Cambridge University and professor at Russia's St. Petersburg University and responsible for developing the Facebook quiz app that harvested thousands of datapoints from approximately 87 million unsuspecting Facebook users.</div><div>
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</div><div>Around 2013, Kogan teamed up with Cambridge Analytica and gained access to the Facebook data. Facebook terminated its contract with Kogan in 2014 and in 2015 sent a letter requesting he delete the harvested data.</div><div>
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</div><div>Facebook did not follow up and the user data, shared with Cambridge Analytica, was not deleted. Facebook officially suspended Cambridge Analytica's account in March 2018.</div><div>
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</div><div>The Guardian</div><div>
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</div><div>@guardian</div><div>
</div><div> Cambridge Analytica kept Facebook data models through US election https://trib.al/uw0yqVr </div><div>
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</div><div>5:48 AM - May 6, 2018</div><div>
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</div><div>Cambridge Analytica kept Facebook data models through US election</div><div>
</div><div>Social network failed to make firm delete valuable models derived from data until campaign was over</div><div>
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</div><div>WIKILEAKS AND 'BLACK OPS'</div><div>
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</div><div>Among Wylie's other concerns about SCL and Cambridge Analytica's tactics included the firm's so-called "black-ops" capabilities, which he said involved hackers breaking into computers to obtain intelligence or compromising material to use against opposition candidates.</div><div>
</div><div>"Some of the targets of these intelligence operations are currently heads of state in various countries," Wylie asserted, saying his former employer hired former members of Russian and Israeli intelligence services for these "special IT services."</div><div>
</div><div>In addition, CA also recruited at least two individuals who were "closely associated" with WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, according to Wylie.</div><div>
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</div><div> DNC sues Trump campaign, Russia, WikiLeaks over alleged 2016 election conspiracy. http://bit.ly/2JaN0CC </div><div>
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</div><div>2:38 PM - Apr 20, 2018</div><div>
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</div><div>These individuals were reportedly chosen because of their closeness to WikiLeaks, which was deemed a "hostile intelligence service," by former CIA director Mike Pompeo.</div><div>
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</div><div>The company has been accused of using a playbook that resembles the WikiLeaks dumping of hacked emails during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, notably in the 2015 Nigerian presidential election. SCL and Cambridge Analytica denied allegations of hacking.</div><div>
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</div><div>VOTER SUPPRESSION</div><div>
</div><div>Among the allegations Wylie made against his former employer is that it used social media data and complex algorithms to try to suppress the vote. The effort was reportedly done under the banner of "voter disengagement," and was cited by Wylie as one of the main reasons he left CA in July 2014.</div><div>
</div><div>At that time, Cambridge Analytica was a relatively new company. It was set up as a U.S. subsidiary of the London-based SCL.</div><div>
</div><div>In 2013, SCL's CEO, Alexander Nix, a British citizen, partnered with billionaire conservative donors Robert and Rebecca Mercer and then-Breitbart editor in chief Steve Bannon to set up Cambridge Analytica, or SCL USA. The firm worked on at least 44 congressional campaigns in 2014 and in 2016 managed the data and voter targeting services for President Donald Trump's campaign.</div><div>
</div><div> Cambridge Analytica whistleblower says Bannon wanted "weapons" to fight a "culture war" at the firm http://hill.cm/FRBTlQl </div><div>
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</div><div>Wylie suggested this arrangement violated U.S. campaign laws and the U.K.-based parent company to handle "all" of CA's clients. The company reportedly received memos from lawyers warning against using foreign nationals in its U.S. political operations, but it "installed a non-American as its CEO [Nix] and embedded non-U.S. citizens in American campaigns," Wylie said.</div><div>
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</div><div>Steve Bannon, who went on to serve as President Trump's chief strategist, was the company's vice president during Wylie's tenure and was reportedly very interested in how social media data could be used to identify, target and "exploit" certain subsets of the population, Wylie reported.</div><div>
</div><div>Much of Cambridge Analytica's political targeting was informed by the work of Stanford University behavioral researcher Michael Kosinski. Among other things, Kosinski found it was possible to accurately determine a person's sexual orientation, political party and race by analyzing 68 Facebook "likes." Deeper analysis of "likes" resulted in predictive powers that led some to conclude Facebook knows you better than your family.</div><div>
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</div><div>CNN</div><div>
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</div><div>@CNN</div><div>
</div><div> Facebook knows you better than you think:</div><div>
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</div><div>• With 10 likes, a computer model fundamentally knows you better than a colleague</div><div>
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</div><div>• With 70 likes, it knows you better than a friend or roommate</div><div>
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</div><div>• With 300 likes, Big Data knows you better than your spousehttps://cnn.it/2IIWc0Y </div><div>
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</div><div>9:31 PM - Apr 10, 2018</div><div>
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</div><div>What you 'like' on Facebook says a lot about you</div><div>
</div><div>Big Data can analyze your Facebook "likes" to accurately predict your race, religion, sexual orientation and more.</div><div>
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</div><div>cnn.com</div><div>
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</div><div>Twitter Ads info and privacy</div><div>
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</div><div>According to Wylie, Cambridge Analytica's targeting operations were "designed to activate some of the worst characteristics in people, such as neuroticism, paranoia and racial biases." </div><div>
</div><div>Before he left the company, there were "the beginnings of discussions" about how to use the profiling data for "voter disengagement," Wylie told lawmakers. This activity, he said, "was intended to focus on African-American voters."</div><div>
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</div><div> Whistleblower Christopher Wylie tells Sen. @amyklobuchar that he left Cambridge Analytica in part because of the “beginnings of discussions about voter disengagement” with ads intended to suppress African American voters #tictocnews</div><div>
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</div><div>Asked by Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., if one of Bannon's goals was "to suppress voting or discourage certain individuals in the United States from voting," Wylie said that was his understanding. </div><div>
</div><div>Questioned further about whether "voter suppression" was "a service that U.S. clients could request in their contracts" with the company, Wylie referenced documents indicating clients had made that request.</div><div>
</div><div>There is room for doubt about the accuracy of Wylie's claims, according to testimony from Eitan Hersh, an expert in civic engagement and voter targeting at Tufts University.</div><div>
</div><div>"Persuasion is very, very hard," Hersh said, asserting CA's claims about its targeting accuracy seem "implausible."</div><div>
</div><div>"From everything I have seen publicly disclosed about Cambridge Analytica, I am skeptical of the idea that its strategies of voter persuasion were unusually effective or contributed meaningfully to the election outcome," he asserted.</div><div>
</div><div>It is not yet clear whether Wylie's allegations are being investigated by the FBI and Department of Justice. The FBI is reportedly coordinating with British authorities in the U.K. investigation of Cambridge Analytica.</div><div>
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</div><div>According to reports, Robert Mueller's special counsel investigation is looking at Cambridge Analytica's data practices, finances and other activities.</div><div>
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</div><div>bizarre?</div><div>
</div><div>Ecuador’s government announced Wednesday it had pulled the plug on Julian Assange’s internet access at its embassy in London, where the WikiLeaks founder has been living since 2012. Ecuador seemed to have had enough of Assange’s provocations online and appears concerned the 46-year-old’s social media conduct could have real-world diplomatic consequences for the South American nation that granted Assange political asylum and citizenship. In a statement Wednesday, the Ecuadorian government said Assange’s social media presence was threatening “the good relations that the country maintains with the United Kingdom, with the rest of the states of the European Union, and other nations.”</div><div>
</div><div>The government of Ecuador said Assange had violated “a written commitment made to the government at the end of 2017 not to issue messages that might interfere with other states,” but didn’t specify what about Assange’s social media sparked the clampdown. The timing of the move, however, indicates it is in response to Assange’s recent comments on Twitter questioning the U.K.’s assigning blame to Russia for the recent nerve agent poisoning of Russian former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England. Assange also criticized the coordinated expulsion of dozens of Russian diplomats by the U.K, the U.S., and other European allies in response to the poisoning.</div><div>
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</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/mueller-wikileaks-foundation-russia-case</div><div>
</div><div> Robert Mueller’s emerging focus on Donald Trump’s knowledge of hacked Democratic National Committee emails shows he’s “laid the foundation” for a collusion case against Donald Trump, a former White House lawyer said.</div><div>
</div><div>Wednesday, NBC News reported Mueller’s team is probing how much Trump knew about the stolen DNC emails and whether he was aware the radical transparency organization WikiLeaks planned to publish those exchanges.</div><div>
</div><div>Andrew Wright, who served for two years as Barack Obama’s associate counsel, told Business Insider that line of questioning is a bad sign for the president.</div><div>
</div><div>“The one specious thing about Trump’s lawyers’ strategy is that they’re saying there’s no substantive focus on Trump when it comes to the collusion inquiry, that this is all about obstruction of justice, and that Mueller already has everything he needs from other witnesses and documents for the obstruction case,” Wright said, referring to reported attempts by Trump’s attorneys to shield their client from sitting for an interview with the special counsel.</div><div>
</div><div>“Setting the obstruction case aside, what has happened over the last couple of weeks is that Mueller laid the foundation [for a collusion case] by showing the crimes of the Russians, in at least some form,” Wright continued. “And now we’re seeing his focus on Trump about the hacked emails. At this point, it’s a matter of proving whether Americans were participants in this conspiracy to commit these crimes, and whether they aided or abetted these acts.”</div><div>
</div><div>WikiLeaks—which the U.S. intelligence community considers an arm of the Russia government—played a pivotal role in the 2016 presidential election, releasing troves of DNC emails during times of peak tumult for then-candidate Trump. As the Atlantic reports, the organization was in touch with Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., from September 2016 to at least July 2017.</div><div>
</div><div>According to leaked private Twitter messages, longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone also corresponded with WikiLeaks—despite assertions from both parties they’d never communicated during the campaign. Mueller has asked witnesses about Trump’s interactions with Stone throughout the campaign, Business Insider reports.</div><div>
</div><div>Trump, meanwhile, publicly touted the emails leaked by WikiLeaks, using them as proof of his claim former rival Hillary Clinton was “corrupt.”</div><div>
</div><div>“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said during a July 27, 2016, press conference.</div><div>
</div><div>Last month, Mueller indicted 13 Russian nationals and three corporations on conspiracy charges for their role in interfering in the 2016 presidential election. Robert Deitz, former general counsel at the National Security Agency, told Business Insider the charges could be a stepping stone in Mueller’s quest to find whether any Americans aided Russia’s effort.</div><div>
</div><div>“In these kinds of investigations, prosecutors typically move up the food chain,” Deitz said.”I suspect that Mueller, through earlier interviews or documents, finally has sufficient evidence to begin putting a story together that involves Trump.”</div><div>
</div><div>Deitz told Business Insider Mueller “will continue to fill in the dots until he has enough to seek an interview with [or indictment or] Trump.”</div><div>
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</div><div>Kellyanne Conway got into a heated exchange with CNN’s Alisyn Camerota on Friday over connections between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.</div><div>
</div><div>In particular, Camerota asked Conway to comment on the revelations that Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix, whose company was instrumental in helping Trump’s election victory last November, sent out an email to Assange to offer the WikiLeaks founder his company’s help in tracking down emails that were deleted from Hillary Clinton’s private email server.</div><div>
</div><div>Conway insisted that it wasn’t a big deal that the CEO of a company that the Trump campaign paid $6 million for its services had reached out to a man whom American intelligence services allege runs a propaganda website that is a front for the Russian government.</div><div>
</div><div>“Are you comfortable that the Trump campaign, through Cambridge Analytica, had a connection to WikiLeaks?” Camerota asked.</div><div>
</div><div>“They didn’t have a connection to WikiLeaks,” Conway responded.</div><div>
</div><div>“They reached out to help with the data,” Camerota shot back.</div><div>“No, not to help with the data,” Conway insisted. “It was something about releasing the e-mails. I was the campaign manager and I couldn’t be bothered with that.”</div><div>
</div><div>Conway then insisted that reaching out to Assange was completely unnecessary anyway because Hillary Clinton ran such a bad campaign that the Trump campaign didn’t need WikiLeaks’ assistance to beat her.</div><div>
</div><div>Unprompted, Conway suddenly grew defensive about the fact that she had once again brought up Hillary Clinton as a way to deflect from alleged wrongdoing committed by associates of the Trump campaign.</div><div>
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</div><div>missle and MOAB press cheers; wikileake assange Jeff sessions pompeo</div><div>
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</div><div>https://www.democracynow.org/2017/4/21/headlines/cnn_trump_administration_seeks_to_arrest_wikileakss_julian_assange</div><div>
</div><div>CNN is reporting the Trump administration has prepared an arrest warrant for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. At a Thursday news conference, Attorney General Jeff Sessions confirmed that the Justice Department is seeking to put Assange in jail.</div><div>
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</div><div>Attorney General Jeff Sessions: "We have professionals that have been in the security business of the United States for many years that are shocked by the number of leaks. And some of them are quite serious. So, yes, it is a priority. We’ve already begun to step up our efforts. And whenever a case can be made, we will seek to put people in jail."</div><div>
</div><div>Last week, CIA chief Mike Pompeo blasted WikiLeaks as a "hostile intelligence service," calling Julian Assange and his supporters "demons." That’s despite Pompeo’s praise for WikiLeaks on Twitter last year and despite this comment from Donald Trump on the campaign trail last October.</div><div>
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</div><div>Donald Trump: "This just came out. This just came out. WikiLeaks! I love WikiLeaks!"</div><div>
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</div><div>We’ll have more on the Trump administration’s plans to seek the arrest of Julian Assange after headlines. We’ll speak with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, co-founder of The Intercept.</div><div>
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</div><div>http://mediamatters.org/blog/2017/01/19/new-york-times-trump-ally-roger-stone-under-investigation-possible-russia-ties/215068</div><div>
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</div><div>The New York Times is reporting that American law enforcement and intelligence agencies are investigating “intercepted communications” that potentially show ties between longtime Donald Trump ally Roger Stone and Russian officials.</div><div>
</div><div>The report confirming the ongoing investigation comes after U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that the Russian government meddled in the 2016 election by hacking the Democratic National Committee, as well as reports that the FBI and five other intelligence agencies have been investigating whether money from the Kremlin covertly aided Trump’s presidential run.</div><div>
</div><div>In July, reports surfaced that Trump’s foreign policy advisor on Russia and Europe, Carter Page, made almost his entire fortune off of investments in Russia. Soon after, NBC News reported on alleged payments to Donald Trump’s then-campaign manager Paul Manafort from former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych from 2007-2012. Roger Stone, a racist, sexist conspiracy theorist -- who has previously claimed that there’s “greater freedom of the press” and expression in Russia than in the U.S. -- has now also been implicated as another one of Trump’s associates currently under investigation. Media Matters first exposed Stone in August 2016, after he claimed to be in contact with Julian Assange regarding an "October Surprise." In early October, Stone reassured anxious Alex Jones listeners that the "motherload" was coming.</div><div>
</div><div>The report, which will appear in the January 20 edition of The New York Times, confirms that intelligence agencies are investigating “intercepted communications and financial transactions” between Russian officials and Trump allies Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and Carter Page. The report notes that the “continuing counterintelligence means that Mr. Trump will take the oath of office on Friday with his associates under investigation and after the intelligence agencies concluded that the Russian government had worked to help elect him.” From The New York Times:</div><div>
</div><div>American law enforcement and intelligence agencies are examining intercepted communications and financial transactions as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump, including his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, current and former senior American officials said.</div><div>
</div><div>The continuing counterintelligence investigation means that Mr. Trump will take the oath of office on Friday with his associates under investigation and after the intelligence agencies concluded that the Russian government had worked to help elect him. As president, Mr. Trump will oversee those agencies and have the authority to redirect or stop at least some of these efforts.</div><div>
</div><div>The counterintelligence investigation centers at least in part on the business dealings that some of the president-elect’s past and present advisers have had with Russia. Mr. Manafort has done business in Ukraine and Russia. Some of his contacts there were under surveillance by the National Security Agency for suspected links to Russia’s Federal Security Service, one of the officials said.</div><div>
</div><div>[...]</div><div>
</div><div>The F.B.I. investigation into Mr. Manafort began last spring, and was an outgrowth of a criminal investigation into his work for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine and for the country’s former president, Viktor F. Yanukovych. In August, The Times reported that Mr. Manafort’s name had surfaced in a secret ledger that showed he had been paid millions in undisclosed cash payments.</div><div>
</div><div>The Associated Press has reported that his work for Ukraine included a secret lobbying effort in Washington aimed at influencing American news organizations and government officials.</div><div>
</div><div>Mr. Stone, a longtime friend of Mr. Trump’s, said in a speech in Florida last summer that he had communicated with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy group that published the hacked Democratic emails. During the speech, Mr. Stone predicted further leaks of documents, a prediction that came true within weeks.</div><div>
</div><div>In a brief interview on Thursday, Mr. Stone said he had never visited Russia and had no Russian clients. He said that he had worked in Ukraine for a pro-Western party, but that any assertion that he had ties to Russian intelligence was “nonsense” and “totally false.”</div><div>
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</div><div>evil is perversion on the commons for the self-ish:</div><div>
</div><div>http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/new-poll-finds-republicans-have-growing-fondness-russia-vladimir-putin-and-wikileaks</div><div>
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</div><div>Thanks to a recent Wikileaks’ leak, certain truly onerous provisions of President Obama’s secret trade deals are no longer secret. As reported this week in the New York Times, the Transpacific Partnership (TPP) would “grant broad powers to multinational companies operating in North America, South America and Asia. Under the accord, still under negotiation but nearing completion, companies and investors would be empowered to challenge regulations, rules, government actions and court rulings—federal, state or local—before tribunals organized under the World Bank or the United Nations.”</div><div>
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</div><div>This machine kills secrets : how WikiLeakers, cypherpunks, and hacktivists aim to free the world's information / Andy Greenberg</div><div>
</div><div>Greenberg, Andy.</div><div>Book Book | 2012</div><div>Available at Bascom Nonfiction (364.168 Greenber) plus 5 more see all</div><div></div><div>
</div><div>Created: 24th October, 1pm GMT</div><div>
</div><div>WikiLeaks has published the biggest leaks in journalistic history. This has triggered aggressive retaliation from powerful groups. Since 7th December 2010 an arbitrary and unlawful financial blockade has been imposed by Bank of America, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal and Western Union. The attack has destroyed 95% of our revenue. The blockade came into force within ten days of the launch of Cablegate as part of a concerted US-based, political attack that included vitriol by senior right wing politicians, including assassination calls against WikiLeaks staff. The blockade is outside of any accountable, public process. It is without democratic oversight or transparency. The US government itself found that there were no lawful grounds to add WikiLeaks to a US financial blockade. But the blockade of WikiLeaks by politicized US finance companies continues regardless. [vid]</div><div>
</div><div>As a result, WikiLeaks has been running on cash reserves for the past eleven months. The blockade has cost the organization tens of millions of pounds in lost donations at a time of unprecedented operational costs resulting from publishing alliances in over 50 countries, and their inevitable counter-attacks. Our scarce resources now must focus on fighting the unlawful banking blockade. If this financial attack stands unchallenged, a dangerous, oppressive and undemocratic precedent will have been set, the implications of which go far beyond WikiLeaks and its work. Any organization that falls foul of powerful finance companies or their political allies can expect similar extrajudicial action. Greenpeace, Amnesty International, and other international NGOs that work to expose the wrongdoing of powerful players risk the same fate as WikiLeaks. If publishing the truth about war is enough to warrant such aggressive action by Washington insiders, all newspapers that have published WikiLeaks’ materials are on the verge of having their readers and advertisers blocked from paying for their subscriptions.</div><div>
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</div><div>The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has openly criticized the financial blockade against WikiLeaks, as have the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression. The blockade erects a wall between us and our supporters, preventing them from affiliating with and defending the cause of their choice. It violates the competition laws and trade practice legislation of numerous states. It arbitrarily singles out an organization that has not committed any illegal act in any country and cuts it off from its financial lifeline in every country. In Australia, a formal, US triggered investigation into our operations found that WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange have no case to answer. In the US, our publishing is protected by the First Amendment, as has been repeatedly demonstrated by a wide variety of respected legal experts on the US Constitution. In January 2011 the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy C. Geithner, announced that there were no grounds to blacklist WikiLeaks. There are no judgements, or even charges, against WikiLeaks or its staff anywhere in the world.</div><div>
</div><div>[vid]</div><div>
</div><div>The most powerful players in the banking industry have shown themselves to be a politicized arm of Washington. This collusion has occurred outside of any judicial or administrative process. The reach of these companies is global and violates the most basic principles of sovereignty. In Europe, VISA and MasterCard together control 97% of the card payment market. Alternatives have been aggressively opposed by VISA and US embassies. The European Central Bank announced plans in 2008 to introduce a European card system. A similar 2010 proposal in Russia together with a bill banning individualized VISA transaction records from going to the US were met with intervention by the US Embassy in Moscow. VISA calls itself the world’s largest currency, but every transaction is controlled by the VISA corporation and the groups that influence it. VISA is a national security problem and a threat to state sovereignty. No state, individual or organization has full economic autonomy or privacy if they rely on VISA. It is able to provide significant intelligence on not only individual behaviour and economic relationships but on large sections of the entire microeconomy and the movement of labour.</div><div>
</div><div>The Bank of America is one of the principle promoters of the WikiLeaks financial blockade; it is also the creator of VISA, which until 1976 was called the “Bank Americard”. In February this year, it was revealed in detail that the Bank of America had commissioned, through Washington lawyers Hunton & Williams, a consortium of three US intelligence contractors, including HBGary, to propose a systematic US $2 million/month multi-pronged attack to hack and smear WikiLeaks. HBGary was referred to the bank’s lawyers by contacts within the US Department of Justice. The correspondence and proposals, which include plans to target journalists and lawyers supporting WikiLeaks, are now public. An extract from the proposal to sabotage WikiLeaks can be found on page 16 of plan 6:</div><div>
</div><div>Feed the fuel between the feuding groups. Disinformation. Create messages around actions of sabotage or discredit the opposing organizations. Submit fake documents and then call out the error. </div><div>Create concern over the security of the infrastructure. Create exposure stories. If the process is believed not to be secure they are done. </div><div>Cyber attacks against the infrastructure to get data on document submitters. This would kill the project. Since the servers are now in Sweden and France putting a team together to get access is more straightforward. </div><div>Media campaign to push the radical and reckless nature of WikiLeaks activities. Sustain pressure. Does nothing for the fanatics, but creates concern and doubt among moderates.</div><div>
</div><div>In order to ensure our future survival, WikiLeaks is now forced to temporarily suspend its publishing operations and aggressively fundraise in order to fight back against this blockade and its proponents. We have commenced pre-litigation action against the blockade in Iceland, Denmark, the UK, Brussels, the United States and Australia. We have lodged an anti-trust complaint at the European Commission and expect a decision by mid-November as to whether the European Competition Authority will open a full investigation into the wrongdoing of VISA and MasterCard.</div><div>
</div><div>Financial Blockade: Chronology</div><div>
</div><div>- 27 November 2010: United States - US State Department intentionally and wrongfully imply (but do not formally state) illegal conduct by WikiLeaks in a letter to lawyers for Julian Assange, which they then immediately leak to the press</div><div>
</div><div>- 29 November 2010: Global - Cablegate publication starts with New York Times, Der Spiegel, El Pais & the Guardian, expanding eventually to over 90 publications in over 50 countries.</div><div>
</div><div>- 29 November 2010 and following days: United States - Assassination calls and declarations of war by US senators, pundits and media against WikiLeaks.</div><div>
</div><div>- 1 December 2010: United States/Global - Amazon stops hosting WikiLeaks</div><div>
</div><div>- 2 December 2010: United States/Global - EveryDNS stops wikileaks.org domain service....</div><div>
</div><div> </div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div> </div><div>
</div><div>Benkler, A Free Irresponsible Press, forthcoming Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review</div><div>
</div><div>A FREE IRRESPONSIBLE PRESS: WIKILEAKS AND THE BATTLE OVER THE SOUL OF THE NETWORKED</div><div>
</div><div>FOURTH ESTATE</div><div>
</div><div>Yochai Benkler http://benkler.org/Benkler_Wikileaks_current.pdf</div><div>
</div><div> </div><div>
</div><div>phases of overage/attack .....</div><div>
</div><div>C. Direct legal action: Espionage Act, Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and conspiracy</div><div>
</div><div>Within a week of the initial release of the cables, Democratic Senator and Chairman of the</div><div>
</div><div>Senate Intelligence Committee Diane Feinstein called for Assange's prosecution under the Espionage</div><div>
</div><div>Act of 1917.121 The call for using the Espionage Act of 1917 is a remarkable exercise in historical</div><div>
</div><div>amnesia. It is consistent, however, with the wording of both the Pentagon’s response in August and the</div><div>
</div><div>State Department’s letter in November.122 The Act was the primary legal tool developed in what was</div><div>
</div><div>“one of the most fiercely repressive periods in American history.”123</div><div>
</div><div>....</div><div>
</div><div>D. Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?</div><div>
</div><div>Denial of service attacks by an extralegal public-private partnership</div><div>
</div><div>1. Technical infrastructure denial of service:</div><div>
</div><div>Beginning a few hours after the release of the first embassy cables, the Wikileaks site came</div><div>
</div><div>under a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.133 A pattern of denial of service attacks continued</div><div>
</div><div>over the next few weeks. It is difficult to pin down whether these attacks came from government</div><div>
</div><div>mastercard etc...</div><div>
</div><div>...</div><div>
</div><div>3. Organizational power.</div><div>
</div><div>On December 3, 2010, the Office of Management and Budget issued a memorandum to the</div><div>
</div><div>various departments, emphasizing that the Wikileaks documents were still classified, and access to</div><div>
</div><div>them remained subject to all the legal limitations appropriate to their classification.153 As a result, a</div><div>
</div><div>wide range of federal agencies prohibited or technically blocked their employees from reading the</div><div>
</div><div>Wikileaks materials online from their federal computers.</div><div>
</div><div> </div><div>
</div><div>...</div><div>
</div><div>4. Indirect Legal Assault</div><div>
</div><div>The multisystem attack on Wikileaks employs the legal system on two dimensions which are</div><div>
</div><div>not directly aimed at the actions of Wikileaks in leaking the cables. Each attack is likely to put pressure</div><div>
</div><div>on the continued ability of the organization to function.</div><div>
</div><div>The first of these is the actual legal action against the soldier who is accused of having leaked</div><div>
</div><div>the materials: a 22 year old army intelligence analyst named Bradley Manning. As of this writing, little</div><div>
</div><div>is known about Manning or his motivations beyond a series of articles in Wired Magazine, based on</div><div>
</div><div>materials provided by the hacker who turned Manning in, Adrian Lamo.160 That Manning can be</div><div>
</div><div>prosecuted under military or civilian criminal law is certainly true. It is clear, however, from what little</div><div>
</div><div>is available here, that Manning was under stress and self-medicating, but was operating at least in part</div><div>
</div><div>from motives that we would normally consider the paradigm case of whistleblowing: moral and</div><div>
</div><div>political disagreement with the course of action of the state.161 Whether the actions exposed in the</div><div>
</div><div>documents are indeed illegal or immoral in a manner that would justify blowing the whistle is not</div><div>
</div><div>obvious. After almost a year of revelations from this set of materials, they seem more a broad</div><div>
</div><div>affirmation of what is widely believed to be the case than offering any new smoking guns.</div><div>
</div><div> </div><div>
</div><div>...</div><div>
</div><div>E. Sources of Resilience of the Networked Fourth Estate, and Their Limits</div><div>
</div><div>Despite the multi-system assaults it sustained, Wikileaks continued to operate throughout the</div><div>
</div><div>period following release of the cables, and its supporters continued to function and indeed respond to</div><div>
</div><div>the attack along many dimensions. Just as the attacks provide insight into the ways in which human</div><div>
</div><div>practice involves action in and through multiple intersecting systems, so too do the responses.</div><div>
</div><div>Jurisdictional arbitrage. The first and most obvious feature of the operation of Wikileaks is its</div><div>
</div><div> </div><div>
</div><div>technical shifts</div><div>
</div><div> </div><div>
</div><div>Socio-political framing as journalism. Throughout the events, Assange and Wikileaks</div><div>
</div><div>emphasized their role as journalists. Inverting the practices of those who sought to analogize Wikileaks</div><div>
</div><div>to terrorists, some commentators and reporters emphasized the basic argument that Wikileaks is a</div><div>
</div><div>reporting organization, fulfilling a reporting function. In particular, Glenn Greenwald of Salon</div><div>
</div><div>provided the most detailed and systematic coverage in support of Wikileaks.182</div><div>
</div><div>...</div><div>
</div><div>F. The Response to Wikileaks:Wrap up.</div><div>
</div><div>The response to Wikileaks was dramatic, extensive, overwrought, and ineffective. If the</div><div>
</div><div>purpose was to stop access to the cables, it failed. If the effort was to cast a doubt on the credibility of</div><div>
</div><div>the cables, it failed. If the purpose was to divert attention from the cables, it failed. And if the effort</div><div>
</div><div>was to prevent the future availability of decentralized dissemination of leaked documents outside of the</div><div>
</div><div>confines of the responsible press, it failed. Indeed, it is possible that, had Secretary Clinton adopted the</div><div>
</div><div>same stance as Secretary Gates and shrugged off the events as embarrassing, but not fundamentally</div><div>
</div><div>destructive, a measured response to Wikileaks could have significantly advanced the State</div><div>
</div><div>Department's Internet Freedom agenda by allowing the U.S. to exhibit integrity and congruence</div><div>
</div><div>between its public statements in support of Internet freedom and its actions.196 The actual response</div><div>
</div><div>will create a visible incongruity should the State Department continue to assert Internet freedom as a</div><div>
</div><div>major policy agenda.197</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div> </div><div>
</div><div> ellsberg ejected for speaking to Manning; lt had insignias ripped off and thrown out kpfa aug 14 Quantico forbidden to do pushups b/c he might hurt himself; stripped at night Jeff patterson guest</div><div>
</div><div> </div><div>
</div><div>http://wikileaks.org/the-gifiles.html global intelligence</div><div>
</div><div> </div><div>
</div><div>On Monday February 27th, 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files, over five million e-mails from the Texas headquartered "global intelligence" company Stratfor. The e-mails date between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal's Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defence Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor's web of informers, pay-off structure, payment laundering techniques and psychological methods.</div><div>
</div><div>Bhopal update- 03-03-11</div><div>----</div><div>
</div><div>democ now hammond pleads guilty</div><div>
</div><div> </div><div>
</div><div>MICHAEL RATNER: Jeremy Hammond pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy, of hacking into a protected computer. That count finishes the case in terms of any other charges. It carries up to a maximum of 10 years in prison. He doesn’t have to get that, and in fact the demand is that he get time served. This is part of the sledgehammer of what the government is doing to people who expose corporate secrets, government secrets, and really the secrets of an empire. And the people who should have been on that trial are the very people who Jeremy admitted to hacking into, which is the Stratfor people who have engaged in corporate spying, along with government cooperation, the public safety people in Arizona, the FBI, etc.</div><div>
</div><div> </div><div>
</div><div> </div><div>
</div><div>http://www.democracynow.org/2013/5/29/julian_assange_stratfor_hacker_jeremy_hammond says pressured banks to prevent wikileaks for getting donation</div><div>
</div><div> </div><div>
</div><div>ja claims repeatedly won in icelandic ct Visa Free Press Fdn cusak, ellsberg, workaround JPB</div><div>
</div><div> </div><div>
</div><div>http://www.wikileaks.org/Banking-Blockade.html</div><div>
</div><div> </div><div>
</div><div>Created: 24th October, 1pm GMT</div><div>
</div><div> </div><div>
</div><div>WikiLeaks has published the biggest leaks in journalistic history. This has triggered aggressive retaliation from powerful groups. Since 7th December 2010 an arbitrary and unlawful financial blockade has been imposed by Bank of America, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal and Western Union. The attack has destroyed 95% of our revenue. The blockade came into force within ten days of the launch of Cablegate as part of a concerted US-based, political attack that included vitriol by senior right wing politicians, including assassination calls against WikiLeaks staff. The blockade is outside of any accountable, public process. It is without democratic oversight or transparency. The US government itself found that there were no lawful grounds to add WikiLeaks to a US financial blockade. But the blockade of WikiLeaks by politicized US finance companies continues regardless.</div><div>
</div><div> </div><div>
</div><div> </div><div>
</div><div>secret 5 hr mtg w/ google eric schmidt</div><div>==</div>