Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

We can agree to disagree, but i’m right.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

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Russian Mobilization, Ukraine, and What the Hell Is Going On?!?!?!

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“Probe with bayonets. If You encounter mush, proceed; if you encounter steel, withdraw.” 

— Vladimir Lenin

Sorry for the delay, been a busy week, but I wanted to take a few moments and do the promised post on what is going on with Russia and Ukraine.

Reports have been trickling in from a variety of sources that Russia has been repositioning significant military assets near its western border with Ukraine. This has followed an increase over the past ten days or so of Russian Information and Psychological Operations directed at Ukraine, the US, NATO, and the EU.

The official US position is that this is just repositioning for a military exercise:

This includes reports that Russia has mobilized all of its military assets everywhere.

And, of course, the Information Warfare and Psychological Operations are in full swing:

What I specifically think is going on with Russia vis a vis Ukraine is something similar to what we saw back in late Winter/early Spring of 2014 before Putin moved on eastern Ukraine and Crimea once the Olympics were over. Basic maskirovka principles of diversion. Russian media has been going 24/7 on and on about how Ukraine has mobilized additional assets and is preparing to take back eastern Ukraine and, perhaps, even Crimea by force. And that the US is going to move military assets into Ukraine, which is just hyperbolic fantasy for domestic Russian consumption.

The reporting also includes an explicit threat presented as real concern that this could become a tactical nuclear war, which ignores the fact that Ukraine doesn’t have nukes. But it is effective in the Information domain of reinforcing actual Russian military doctrine that, if the Russian military is unable to win a conventional fight, then Russia will use its nuclear weapons tactically to reverse conditions in the battle space. Putting out this type of information is itself part of Russia’s Information Operations/PSYOP doctrine for setting the battle space ahead of military operations. The purpose of this is to freeze the US and NATO from taking action because neither are willing to risk a nuclear strike by Russia or escalation to a nuclear exchange. I’m not really sure this information warfare is effective, but it is in line with Russia’s military doctrine of using Information warfare and PSYOP to set the battle space ahead of actual military operation at the same time that they are physically preparing to set the theater of operations.

At the same time, all of this also provides a convenient way for Putin to change the topic from the fact that Navalny appears to have contracted either COVID or TB from the other inmates on his cell block, that they’re torturing him using sleep deprivation, and that he’s now in the infirmary as a result of a combination of whatever respiratory infection/disease he’s contracted and the effects of his hunger strike.

Russia’s build up and increased Information warfare and Psychological Operations directed at Ukraine, the US, NATO, and the EU is also not happening in a vacuum. The Russians and the PRC are in fact quietly collaborating. We’ve been watching it in real time in Libya where the Russian backed Libyan general is being supported by not only Wagner mercenaries, but also Erik Prince’s Frontier Services Group, which is wholly owned by the PRC. The attempted coup in Jordan?* We already know one of Prince’s Israeli associates was involved. And Prince is the bridging node here between the PRC/Xi and MBS of Saudi and MBZ of the Emirates, who appear to have been behind the coup. So I have no doubt that there is, at least, informal coordination by Putin and Xi, as well as regional players like Muhammed bin Salman,  Muhammed bin Zayed, and Bibi because all of them suddenly are facing a very different strategic reality with the Biden administration than they did with Trump who didn’t actually give a damn about any of this stuff beyond being able to have these authoritarians say nice things about him while they took advantage of him.

One final point: this is basically the equivalent, by Putin and Xi at the geo-strategic level and Muhammed bin Salman and Muhammed bin Zayed and Bibi at the regional strategic level, of the bad guys increasing operations during a Relief in Place/Transfer of Authority (RIP/TOA) just as the outgoing units are almost out of the area of operations (AOR) and the incoming units are just fully taking control as the left seat/right seat ride comes to an end.

And in Putin’s case it conforms to Lenin’s statement: “Probe with bayonets. If You encounter mush, proceed; if you encounter steel, withdraw.”

Right now Putin, as well as XI, Bibi, Muhammed bin Salman, Muhammed bin Zayed, and everyone else is probing to see what Biden and his team will do. In Putin’s case it is entirely possible that he is high on his own misinformation and agitprop supply that Biden is some sort of addled, neurologically ill mental case that is being taken advantage of by Ron Klain, Kamala Harris, and Tony Blinken who are really running the US government. Regardless, all of these bad actors, even the ones like Saudi, the UAE, and Israel that are supposedly partners and clients, are probing. If they find steel, they’ll withdraw. If they find mush, they’ll proceed.

That said, I’d like to see us call Putin’s bluff. The US Army has recently stood back up V Corps. It should be temporarily relocated to Kyiv and it should be plussed up with the 1st Armored Division and the rapid response brigade combat team – the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team – should be brought from FT Bliss and Vicenza respectively to keep them company. Operational Detachments Alpha (ODAs) from the 10th Special Forces Group, Civil Affairs Teams Alpha (CAT-As), and theater strategic Psychological Operations Teams should be added as enablers from Special Operations Command Europe (SOCEUR). Let the conventional elements train with our Ukrainian, NATO, and EU partners. Have the 10th Group bubbas do some Foreign Internal Defense training, the CAT-As do some military support to government work, and the PSYOPers conduct some counter-Psychological Operations with their Ukrainian, NATO, and EU partners.

Open thread!

* It’s been a busy week. I’m nowhere near caught up, but hope to be by tomorrow noon. So I’ll hopefully get to the Jordan post I promised sometime this weekend.

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There Is a Very Practical Reason That President Biden Is Not Moving Faster and/or More Overtly Against Muhammad Bin Salman

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Now that the the Biden administration has declassified and released the report into the extrajudicial execution of Jamal Kashoggi, everyone has begun slamming President Biden for not doing more. I understand why Kashoggi’s colleagues at The Washington Post feel let down. I understand why his colleagues at other major news outlets feel let down. Though Nick Kristof really should just go away and atone for his own past sins.

While I, like Cole, would like a more robustly overt response that at least inflicts some pain on Muhammad bin Salman in specific and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in specific because no one’s behavior ever changes unless they go from being rewarded to being punished for it. However, there is a real, practical reason that is not being mentioned or discussed as to why the Biden administration is worried about damaging relations that would lead to Saudi no longer cooperating on a number of issues, including counter-terrorism and trying to contain Iran.

That reason is that every US Soldier, Sailor, Sailor, Airman, Marine, DOD or Service civilian, and an exceedingly large number of Americans working in Saudi as contractors is a potential hostage for Muhammad bin Salman. And I can tell you from personal experience – more on that in a bit* – that this is a VERY LARGE CONCERN!!!!

The US has a standing military deployment – predominantly training, but also some advising and assisting – that is run through several different offices. Right now one of my former students – a colonel at 30 years of service – is overseeing the Land component training for the Saudi Army. He has a counterpart overseeing Air and Sea component training – a USAF colonel (O6) and a US Navy captain (O6). This is the US Military Training Mission – Saudi Arabia. There is also the Office of the Program Manager – Saudi Arabian National Guard, which works with the Saudi National Guard. While the standing number of uniformed personnel deployed on these two missions is several hundred, they are not the only ones in Saudi Arabia. The best open source estimates that I can link to for you that I’ve been able to find of the numbers of US military personnel in Saudi Arabia is between 2,500 and 3,000 personnel. I have not been able to find an actual number for American defense contractors working in Saudi Arabia, nor for those working in other Saudi economic sectors, but it has to be several thousand at least.

Each of these Americans – every Soldier, Sailor, Airman, Marine, DOD and Service civilian, civilians from other US departments and agencies, and contractors working in the defense and other economic sectors – is a potential hostage for Muhammad bin Salman. And until or unless you can bring each of them home so that the only Americans with any ties to the US government are those with diplomatic immunity – not that I would expect that would stop bin Salman – overtly, harshly cracking down on Muhammad bin Salman is out of the question. Bin Salman has already taken a number of his cousins hostage in a shake down to take their wealth, which is the source of their power and ability to act independent of the Saudi throne. He also took the Prime Minister of Lebanon, Saad Hariri, and his family hostage, forcing Hariri to resign on live television. So he really isn’t too concerned with things like diplomatic immunity! Bin Salman also appears to have lured a Saudi dissident who had sought asylum in Canada back to the Kingdom, which, of course, has a lot of other Saudi dissidents both inside and outside of the Kingdom concerned for their lives and those of their families. I expect that taking US personnel hostage is not a really big step for bin Salman.

There is also another major concern that I’m sure was considered by Biden’s national security team. The fact that the Saudis have been partnering with the Emiratis and the Israelis to push the limits of private electronic (ELINT) and signals intelligence (SIGINT) to advance their own interests. Members of Biden’s team – his nominee to serve as the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy – was targeted by one of these efforts. Jeff Bezos was targeted by another. And Kashoggi’s extrajudicial execution was facilitated by one as well. Jared’s brokered agreement between the Israelis and the Emiratis wasn’t a breakthrough for peace, it was just a formalization of a longstanding, largely clandestine relationship. But until the US Intelligence Community is able to get a handle on this Saudi-Emirati-Israeli ELINT/SIGINT campaign, they have to be concerned about what may have been hacked and what might be released by bin Salman, as well as his overt ally Muhammad bin Zayed of the UAE and his covert ally Benjamin Netanyahu as they pursue their own interests within their countries, within the Middle East, and within the US.

Any policy, and any strategy to achieve that policy, requires assuming a certain amount of risk. Right now anything involving Saudi Arabia and Muhammad bin Salman specifically, let alone the Middle East in general, involves a lot of strategic risk. Given that President Biden’s first priority is getting the COVID pandemic under control, followed by getting his administration staffed all while navigating a Senate whose Democratic majority survives only so long as all 48 Democrats and the 2 Independents who caucus with them remain healthy, alive, and on the team and a House that now only has a five seat Democratic majority, Muhammad bin Salman is an irritant, not a priority. If I was advising on this, and I AM NOT, my recommendation would be to stand down the US training missions and remove SOFA protections from US defense contractors pending a top to bottom review. Stand everyone down and pull them out and either stage them at CENTCOM Forward in Bahrain or redistribute them to other US bases in Europe and in the continental US (CONUS). This would definitely concentrate bin Salman’s attention that his actions have repercussions. Moreover, no one actually knows if these training missions actually have any effect, if they actually make the Saudi military more effective as a fighting force or that it is just a way to have Saudi pay the US a lot of money to do the same training year after year with the best parade military money can buy.

But until or unless we get our personnel out of the Kingdom, cracking down on bin Salman is a non-starter because he has several thousand US military personnel, DOD and Service civilians, and American defense contractors he can take hostage. And he has been very willing to take hostages in the past to get what he wants!

Open thread!

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A Pictorial Explanation of the Strategy Behind the Assassination In Iran

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Last week Bibi Netanyahu made a secret trip to Saudi Arabia to meet secretly with Mike Pompeo and Mohammed bin Salman. It didn’t stay secret for long. As the meeting was getting underway the Houthis attacked a Saudi ARAMCO facility. Which means the Iranians, who the Houthis have turned to for support, have excellent SIGINT fidelity on Bibi’s movements. Bibi should, probably, keep that in mind.

In the wake of this morning’s news, which Cheryl brought to all of our attention, we can now speculate that this morning’s operation was a likely topic of discussion at the secret Netanyahu-Pompep-bin Salman meeting.

Regardless, we need to understand the strategic reality right now that the lame duck Trump administration, as well as Bibi Netanyahu, and Mohammed bin Salman are involved in. And we can do it with pictures!

The Iranians are playing chess*:

A Pictorial Explanation of the Strategy Behind the Assassination In Iran

Bibi is this guy:

A Pictorial Explanation of the Strategy Behind the Assassination In Iran 1

And this is Trump:

A Pictorial Explanation of the Strategy Behind the Assassination In Iran 2

As a bonus, the Chinese are playing go, which, I would argue, is even harder to master than chess!

A Pictorial Explanation of the Strategy Behind the Assassination In Iran 3

The only good news is that the Iranians are smarter and better at this than Trump, Bibi, Pompeo, and bin Salman. They know Biden will be president soon. And while the Iranians may not have invented the game of chess, they’re willing to absorb the loss of a piece to win the game.

I expect we’ll eventually find out that this is the same in country team the Israelis used to kill al Masri back in July. As always, Bibi is willing to fight Iran to the last American. As I wrote back in August 2018, based on analytical work I’ve done on the issue for the Army beginning in January of 2012, going to war with Iran would be strategic malpractice and tactically stupid.

Open thread!

* Before someone starts, I am well aware that while the name for chess is derived from the Persian/Farsi word shah, meaning king, it is most likely that the game was introduced to Persia from what is now India.

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The Susan Rice Email: There Is No There There, There Never Was, and There Never Will Be

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The President, Republican members of the House and the Senate, Fox News personalities and talking heads, the President’s surrogates on other broadcast and cable news shows, the conservative social, digital, and news media, and the President’s campaign officials and surrogates have been calling for the release of the email that former Assistant to the President-National Security Advisor (AP-NSA) Susan Rice sent to herself in January 2017 as a memorialization of the meeting about what the FBI’s counterintelligence officials had been discovering about LTG (ret) Flynn and his activities before he joined the President’s 2016 campaign, during the campaign, and during the transition.

This was purposefully conflated with unmasking by Congressman Nunes as part of his agitprop that President  Obama and his senior officials spied on the President’s campaign, including seeking to unmask LTG (ret) Flynn in signals intelligence collected on foreign targets. When the Trump administration declassified and released Rice’s email to herself, they only declassified and released part of it. Which, of course, led to screaming and yelling about coverups and conspiracies. Dr. Rice has long requested they declassify the whole email, as well as the transcripts of LTG (ret) Flynn’s calls with Ambassador Kislyak, as well as other Russian officials, and officials from other countries. Earlier today the Trump administration declassified and released the remainder of Dr. Rice’s email and no surprises at all, there’s nothing untoward at all in it.

The Susan Rice Email: There Is No There There, There Never Was, and There Never Will Be

As can be clearly seen from reading the email, no one involved did anything untoward, unethical, and/or illegal. As was the case with the unmasking conspiracy theory, there is no there there.

Here is Dr. Rice’s statement from this afternoon:

The Susan Rice Email: There Is No There There, There Never Was, and There Never Will Be 1 The Susan Rice Email: There Is No There There, There Never Was, and There Never Will Be 2

And while Republican elected officials* and their surrogates are trying to spin this as evidence of illegality, it isn’t. And the most amusing part of today is that Senator Graham hung his tuchas way, way, way, way out over the edge this morning expecting to turn this into a scandal that he could weaponize on behalf of the President’s, as well as his own, reelection chances.

Ooopsie!!!!!

To quickly summarize:

  1. Dr. Rice’s email to herself memorializing the 5 JAN 2017 meeting with President Obama, VP Biden, FBI Director Comey, herself, and several others clearly indicates that nothing untoward, unethical, and/or illegal took place. Rather, President Obama made it very clear that everything was to be done by the book.
  2. The release of the entire email further undercuts the Congressman Devin Nunes created agitprop and conspiracy theory that President Obama ordered the FBI to spy on the President’s 2016 campaign and he knows this because the evidence is being covered up in Dr. Rice’s email to herself, which is classified.
  3. That email is now declassified and released and once again Congressman Nunes is unmasked as a none too bright, conspiracy mongering fabulist.
  4. The declassification and release of Dr. Rice’s entire email memorializing the 5 JAN 2017 meeting undercuts Senator Graham’s plans for a Senate Judiciary Committee investigation to get to the bottom of these allegations, because the declassified email shows those allegations to be complete bullshit.

Open thread

* Obligatory:

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Open Thread: Russian Interference Programming Note

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Peripherally related:

At 10:16 a.m. on a wet and dreary Friday morning, Russia’s energy minister walked into OPEC’s headquarters in central Vienna knowing his boss was ready to turn the global oil market upside down.

Alexander Novak told his Saudi Arabian counterpart Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman that Russia was unwilling to cut oil production further. The Kremlin had decided that propping up prices as the coronavirus ravaged energy demand would be a gift to the U.S. shale industry. The frackers had added millions of barrels of oil to the global market while Russian companies kept wells idle. Now it was time to squeeze the Americans.

For over three years, President Vladimir Putin had kept Russia inside the OPEC+ coalition, allying with Saudi Arabia and the other members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to curb oil production and support prices. On top of helping Russia’s treasury – energy exports are the largest source of state revenue – the alliance brought foreign policy gains, creating a bond with Saudi Arabia’s new leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

But the OPEC+ deal also aided America’s shale industry and Russia was increasingly angry with the Trump administration’s willingness to employ energy as a political and economic tool. It was especially irked by the U.S.’s use of sanctions to prevent the completion of a pipeline linking Siberia’s gas fields with Germany, known as Nord Stream 2. The White House has also targeted the Venezuelan business of Russia’s state-oil producer Rosneft.

“The Kremlin has decided to sacrifice OPEC+ to stop U.S. shale producers and punish the U.S. for messing with Nord Stream 2,” said Alexander Dynkin, president of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations in Moscow, a state-run think tank. “Of course, to upset Saudi Arabia could be a risky thing, but this is Russia’s strategy at the moment – flexible geometry of interests.”

The OPEC+ deal had never been popular with many in the Russian oil industry, who resented having to hold back investments in new and potentially profitable projects. In particular, Igor Sechin, the powerful boss of Rosneft and a long-time Putin ally, lobbied against the curbs, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing private conversations.

The Kremlin was also disappointed the alliance with Riyadh hadn’t yielded major Saudi investments in Russia.

For several months, Novak and his team had been telling Saudi officials they liked being in the OPEC+ alliance but were reluctant to deepen production cuts, according to people familiar with the relationship. At the last OPEC meeting in December, Russia negotiated a position that allowed it to keep production fairly steady while Saudi Arabia shouldered big reductions.

When the coronavirus started devastating Chinese economic activity in early February – cutting oil demand in Saudi Arabia’s biggest customer by 20% — Prince Abdulaziz tried to convince Novak that they should call an early OPEC+ meeting in response to cutback supply. Novak said no. The Saudi king and Putin spoke by phone ­­– it didn’t help.

As the virus spread and analysts forecast the worst year for oil demand since the global financial crisis, the Saudi camp was hopeful Moscow could be won round at the next scheduled OPEC meeting in early March. The Russians didn’t rule out deepening cuts, but kept making the point that shale producers should be made to share the pain. Putin, who has been the final arbiter of Russia’s OPEC+ policy since the alliance started in 2016, met oil Russian producers and key ministers last Sunday…

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Information Security Is Essential!

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The Guardian has now reported that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia hacked Jeff Bezos’s cell phone, which is what many of us who work in the information warfare area of national security had assessed shortly after The National Enquirer ran their hit piece on him. What we got in today’s reporting, however, were important and disturbing details! (emphasis mine)

The Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos had his mobile phone “hacked” in 2018 after receiving a WhatsApp message that had apparently been sent from the personal account of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, sources have told the Guardian.

The encrypted message from the number used by Mohammed bin Salman is believed to have included a malicious file that infiltrated the phone of the world’s richest man, according to the results of a digital forensic analysis.

This analysis found it “highly probable” that the intrusion into the phone was triggered by an infected video file sent from the account of the Saudi heir to Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post.

The two men had been having a seemingly friendly WhatsApp exchange when, on 1 May of that year, the unsolicited file was sent, according to sources who spoke to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity.

Large amounts of data were exfiltrated from Bezos’s phone within hours, according to a person familiar with the matter. The Guardian has no knowledge of what was taken from the phone or how it was used.

WhatsApp is notoriously insecure and should not be used! It is now owned by Facebook and there are serious concerns about what Facebook may be doing with the data from the app, including the personally identifying information (PII), of its users. Another security flaw is that the app itself isn’t encrypted, just the information while it is in transit from device (user) to device (user). So any spyware, on either the device on the sending or receiving end of the transmission, can pick up what is being sent and/or received.

The larger issue here is that WhatsApp is very popular. We know from reporting that Jared Kushner uses it to communicate with Muhammed bin Salman, as well as others. From the late Congressman Cummings’ March 2019 letter to White House Counsel Pat Cipollone:

During this period the Committee obtained additional information raising even more concerns about the use of private email and messaging apps by Jared Kushner and other White House officials.

For example, during a meeting with Mr. Kushner’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, Mr. Lowell confirmed that Mr. Kushner has been using the messaging app WhatsApp as part of his official White House duties to communicate with foreign leaders.

Jared isn’t the only US official using WhatsApp.

Multiple Trump administration officials are known to have used WhatsApp to carry out sensitive conversations, raising the prospect that their communications have been intercepted.

Gordon Sondland, Trump’s ambassador to the European Union and a key figure in in the administration’s campaign to pressure Ukraine to launch investigations that would benefit the president, communicated with other US diplomats about the effort over WhatsApp. During Trump’s run for the presidency campaign chairman Paul Manafort regularly sent polling data to a Russian associate via the app.

The problem isn’t isolated just to Jared and other US officials.

Senior government officials in multiple U.S.-allied countries were targeted earlier this year with hacking software that used Facebook Inc’s (FB.O) WhatsApp to take over users’ phones, according to people familiar with the messaging company’s investigation.

Sources familiar with WhatsApp’s internal investigation into the breach said a “significant” portion of the known victims are high-profile government and military officials spread across at least 20 countries on five continents. Many of the nations are U.S. allies, they said

Rudy Giuliani and Lev Parnas were also using WhatsApp!

WhatsApp messages from Parnas to Giuliani and Republican congressional candidate Robert F. Hyde are included in the evidence.

Let’s see what the President’s Cybersecurity Advisor and the First Name in Cybersecurity has to say:

Ruh Roh!

Anyone and everyone who has messaged Muhammed bin Salman using WhatsApp have likely had their phones or tablets compromised. And there is no telling what he collected, who he collected it from, and what he intends to do with it. Though we can be pretty sure it isn’t anything good. WhatsApp is not a secure form of communication. You should not be using it. More importantly, US government officials – from political appointees to civil servants to uniformed personnel to contractors – should not be using it either. Not for personal communications and certainly not for official and work related communication. That the President’s advisors, both those in the White House like his son in law Jared Kushner and those outside of it like Rudy Giuliani, and his other political appointees like Gordon Sondland are using WhatsApp means that over three years worth of official US communications have been compromised. And Muhammad bin Salman is not the only one whose intelligence and security services have compromised WhatsApp. Both the Israelis and the Russians have compromised WhatsApp, So have the Chinese.

Whatever information that Muhammed bin Salman or the Israelis or Putin or Xi have managed to pull off of the phones of US officials, as well as those of other governments, that use WhatsApp is a ticking political warfare information bomb. We don’t know when this information will be used. We don’t know how it will be used. But we do know that it will be used. It may be used subtly to try to force US officials to do something they ordinarily wouldn’t. Or it might be used, as was the case with Bezos’s data, in an almost brutish assault. But it will eventually be used.

Does anyone really want to contemplate what Mark Zuckerberg might do with the information transmitted via WhatsApp, which he owns? Zuckerberg has the ability to blackmail and extort everyone who uses his social media products because those products are designed to suck up everyone’s information and data so that Zuckerberg can monetize it. That is not a good thing.

Every one of these government officials that are using WhatsApp, from Jared Kushner to Ambassador Sondland to those we don’t even know about should have their security clearances suspended pending a full counterintelligence investigation. They have made themselves into insider threats by refusing to follow best information and operational security practices. Rudy Giuliani doesn’t have a security clearance to suspend, but he and his associates who have been using WhatsApp all need to be subjected to a full counterintelligence investigation as well given Giuliani’s pro-bono work as the President’ private attorney and all the activity he has been up to in Ukraine and other parts of Europe.

Open thread!

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Grifters Gonna Grift Open Thread: Trump Publicly Offers to Rent Out American Troops

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… which is the most generous possible framing here. Perhaps he hasn’t actually sold American soldiers’ lives to his Saudi bankers — yet. Trump says a lot of stuff that’s ‘just marketing’, after all. Maybe he’s just doing a little advertising, in case anybody in the area’s looking for some well-equipped military muscle…

Elsewhere…

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