Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn – Nancy Pelosi

Good luck with your asparagus.

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

Trump is going to draw a dick on that dog with a sharpie, isn’t he?

The house always wins.

This blog goes to 11…

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Verified, but limited!

I swear, each month of 2020 will have its own history degree.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

I thought we were promised Infrastructure Week.

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

Nevertheless, she persisted.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Shocking, but not surprising

Almost as fun as hiking the Appalachian Trail

Deploy the moving finger of emphasisity!

… makes me wish i had hoarded more linguine

We still have time to mess this up!

Fuck if i know. i just get yelled at when i try it.

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Lighten up, Francis.

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Information Warfare

That NYTimes Facebook Bombshell: “Delay, Deny, Deflect..”

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Much as I hate to endorse any opinion of Franklin Foer’s, I have to admit I’m glad I never joined Facebook. (Not being on Facebook has sometimes felt like a minor luxury, because I don’t have an employer who demands it, or social networks that I can’t access via alternate routes. And, yes, I realize they’ve probably mined all my personal information anyways.) Props to the NYTimes reporters:

… In just over a decade, Facebook has connected more than 2.2 billion people, a global nation unto itself that reshaped political campaigns, the advertising business and daily life around the world. Along the way, Facebook accumulated one of the largest-ever repositories of personal data, a treasure trove of photos, messages and likes that propelled the company into the Fortune 500.

But as evidence accumulated that Facebook’s power could also be exploited to disrupt elections, broadcast viral propaganda and inspire deadly campaigns of hate around the globe, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg stumbled. Bent on growth, the pair ignored warning signs and then sought to conceal them from public view. At critical moments over the last three years, they were distracted by personal projects, and passed off security and policy decisions to subordinates, according to current and former executives.

When Facebook users learned last spring that the company had compromised their privacy in its rush to expand, allowing access to the personal information of tens of millions of people to a political data firm linked to President Trump, Facebook sought to deflect blame and mask the extent of the problem.

And when that failed — as the company’s stock price plummeted and it faced a consumer backlash — Facebook went on the attack.

While Mr. Zuckerberg has conducted a public apology tour in the last year, Ms. Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation. Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.…

…[T]rust in the social network has sunk, while its pell-mell growth has slowed. Regulators and law enforcement officials in the United States and Europe are investigating Facebook’s conduct with Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm that worked with Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, opening up the company to fines and other liability. Both the Trump administration and lawmakers have begun crafting proposals for a national privacy law, setting up a yearslong struggle over the future of Facebook’s data-hungry business model…

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Surefire Intelligence!

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Tom has given us one of today’s gems of humor, and I want to share the other one. There are far, far more tweets than I can possibly include here, but I will try to indicate the range and depth of incompetence, which is truly monumental.

First, a narrative account for those of you who prefer such things.

At the center of the scheme is publicity-hungry Republican lobbyist Jack Burkman, who has repeatedly dabbled in internet conspiracy theories in the past, including promoting the idea that murdered Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was killed by deep-state government operatives.

….

Burkman has not any offered any evidence at all of his accusations and his previous “bombshell” press conferences on other stories have become notorious flops in Washington media circles.

….

Burkman’s latest gambit has far higher stakes than his previous ones; but it too seems similarly bound for self-destruction. Allegations that he was offering to pay women to accuse Mueller come from an uncorroborated email sent to a number of media outlets, including The Daily Beast, by a person who identified herself as Florida resident “Lorraine Parsons.”

In her emails, Parsons claimed that Burkman and his associates were pressuring her to “make accusations of sexual misconduct and workplace harassment against Robert Mueller” and to “sign a sworn affidavit to that effect.” In exchange, she said, they were offering tens of thousands of dollars. Parsons repeatedly declined to talk to The Daily Beast on the phone, and internet searches have failed to provide any background on her. Parsons didn’t respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.

….

Jacob Wohl, a right wing Twitter personality and a self-described friend of Burkman, said Burkman had told him he had hired Matthew Cohen, who is a managing partner at the private investigations company Surefire Intelligence, to assist with the investigation.

Surefire is a bit of a mystery. Since-deleted Craigslist advertisements for the company said it “was founded by two members of Israel’s elite intelligence community.” The ads billed services including “counter intelligence,” “private spies,” and “ethical hackers.”

More amusing details at the link. And yet more on Twitter. Stuff is being deleted (although I’m sure copies exist), which Popehat earlier pointed out could be destroying evidence in an FBI investigation.

https://twitter.com/EdKrassen/status/1057384188213637120

Bellingcat is ON IT! (disclosure: I have worked with Bellingcat and occasionally write articles for them.)

Popehat and other lawyers are yukking it up.

https://twitter.com/kim/status/1057363567693852672

A friend said this has been the best day he’s seen on Twitter for a while.

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This Morning’s Big Hacking Stories

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The stories actually go beyond hacking, but that’s an adequate title for a placeholder post until Adam or Major Major Major Major can weigh in.

There are two stories, one about China and one about Russia’s GRU, their military intelligence agency.

Bloomberg has, for reasons I can’t imagine, gone with a white typeface on black background, which I find painful to read, so I’ll work from the Washington Post’s summary.

Bloomberg has just published an explosive article claiming that a secret unit in the Chinese military has compromised the motherboards (the systems of chips and electronics that allow computers to work) of servers used by Apple, a bank and various government contractors.

China’s exploit was discovered when Amazon did due diligence on a company that it was acquiring, which used servers with the compromised motherboards. Both Apple and Amazon have issued statements denying the Bloomberg claims, but Bloomberg seems confident that it’s correct, saying it has multiple sources inside Amazon and the intelligence community. (Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

We have long depended on China for essential electronic components. That’s seemed dangerous to me, but nobody listens to me on such things.

Also this morning, Vice President Mike Pence gave a speech at the rightwing Hudson Institute and said that China was the biggest threat to the United States. It’s hard not to see these events as being coordinated. Pence claimed, as did President Donald Trump at the United Nations, that China was trying to hack the US elections. Which probably means that they will call any Democratic wins a Chinese plot. Also, too, when you are making googly eyes at Vladimir Putin, you have to have an enemy to gin up support at home.

Also this morning, the United States, UK, and the Netherlands announced indictments against Russian members of the GRU for hacking a great many agencies, including the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and anti-doping organizations. Russia, of course, denies everything. I am also seeing bits and pieces coming across my Twitter feed from open-source investigators pointing to obvious tells from Russian agents, like using consecutively numbered passports and US $100 bills.

It looks like the GRU has gotten sloppy in their spycraft, or that Russia would like the world to know it operates with impunity.

It is the US that is bringing the indictments. It looks like parts of our government have not signed on to the googly eyes strategy and are continuing to prosecute conspiracies against our country. That’s an interesting development. Its implications for Trump are not clear, although one might think that this investigation has shared information with Robert Mueller’s staff.

Both these stories are developing.

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The Lajes’ Protocol IV: The President, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and the Politicization of the DOJ

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The President has ordered a selective declassification of a very limited amount of information related to one of the FISA warrant applications pertaining to Carter Page, as well as text messages intended to make Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Page, and Ohr look bad.

My professional take on this is that this declassification order is part of a preplanned strategic communication strategy to try to get the news media off of reporting that is not positive for the President, his administration, the GOP majority in both chambers of Congress, the Kavanaugh nomination, and the upcoming midterms. Apparently the Man from Lajes, also known as Congressman Devin Nunes, agrees.

Here’s Congressman Schiff’s, the ranking member on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, statement on what the President ordered:

What’s interesting is that the DOJ and FBI doesn’t seem to have any idea how to proceed.

David Kris, the former Assistant Attorney General for National Security, had this to say:

Also, from Joyce Vance, a former US Attorney, and Julie Zebrak, formerly of both the Department of Justice and the Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Office.

Here’s what I think is going to happen: the selectively unclassified and unredacted material will be released. Like every previous one of these attempts by either the President and/or his allies like Congressman Nunes, it will quickly be picked apart and make them look silly. Even more important, as was the case a couple of weeks ago regarding what Bruce Ohr’s actual work for the DOJ was about, the US intelligence community will selectively leak in order to knock this selective declassification back. And at the end of the day all that will have happened is the President and his allies in Congress like Congressman Nunes will have simply further damaged and weakened the Department of Justice, the FBI, and other parts of the intelligence community in order to protect their own political and/or legal fortunes.

This is a blatant and obvious attempt to try to change the news reporting, but I just don’t think it is going to work. Especially given the track records of the people involved. The Fox News and MAGA on social media crowd will embrace it, Russian bots and trolls will try to amplify it, but there is too much legitimate news breaking right now for this to really break through. The news for the rest of this week is going to be the Kavanaugh nomination meshugas, the trade war, including new competing tariffs, with China, violent, serial criminal activity by Customs and Border Patrol and ICE officers, and the ongoing news regarding the coming mid-term elections.

Stay focused!

If this is what the senior Florida Republicans think is coming, then no amount of chaff is going to distract the news media from the actual targets!

Open thread.

 

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Info Ops – Staying Alert

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I said in a post last week that I’m going to try to keep you all current on what we know about information operations, as we approach November’s elections and the 2020 presidential election. I’ll post short summaries or longer commentaries if they are warranted. We’ve all got to stay alert for malign influencers.

The FBI has launched two websites, Protected Voices and Combating Foreign Influence.  Protected Voices offers advice on cyberhygiene – they have a set of short videos on things like passwords, browser safety, wi-fi, and router hardening. Looks like they might be useful for internal corporation training or just anyone who has questions about the various topics. Combating Foreign Influence is newer and intends “to educate the public about the threats faced from disinformation campaigns, cyber attacks, and the overall impact of foreign influence on society.”

I’m a little dubious about government initiatives of this sort, but it was the FBI and others who went to President Obama in summer 2016 to tell him that the Russians were doing damage. So I’ll keep an eye on these sites. I also hope that the jackal computer nerds will chime in too.

BuzzFeed has a big article on Russian propaganda operations in the Baltic states. Three news outlets set up in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to spread the Russian point of view without saying that’s what they were doing.

The websites presented themselves as independent news outlets, but in fact, editorial lines were dictated directly by Moscow.

The purpose was to turn Russian speakers in those three countries toward Russia and away from the countries they live in. The article is very detailed, working from Skype calls among the managers of the news outlets. I kept thinking about Fox News as something of an analogy in the United States.

 

 

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Midday Open Thread

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One of the things I intend to post more about as we approach the election (or anytime, actually) is the disinformation that’s being distributed on social media. I’ve hesitated with some of the recent allegations because they are loaded against liberals. Not about where all the Nazis and harassers of women are coming from on Twitter, no, but an Iranian scheme to make people think more favorably about Iran. I’m not gonna post links because I don’t think it’s in the top 300 major information operations on social media. Why did Microsoft (or was it Facebook?) choose to focus on this one? My tentative answer is that the Silicon Valley bros still don’t see the right wing as a problem. They have been meeting with conservatives, who have been whining, along with the whiner-in-chief, that Important Voices Are Being Silenced.

But yes, we should know that Iran has been doing that. Today’s news brings another operation that also seems small but appeals more to me politically. Bots, probably Russian, have been pushing the vaccine truther line. You don’t need to be vaccinated, we’d love to see a measles epidemic in the US to damage your children. There is a measles epidemic in Europe right now, due to low vaccination rates.

And here’s Zooey relaxing. We all need to do more of that.

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