U.S. President Donald Trump has signaled he is keen on pursuing allegations that Ukraine tried to hamper his presidential bid in 2016. - Trump drags Ukraine into his conspiracy allegations | KyivPost Saturday April 27th, 2019 at 7:48 PM
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Trump drags Ukraine into his conspiracy allegations | KyivPost – Ukraine’s Global Voice Kyiv Post
WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. President Donald Trump has signaled he is keen on pursuing allegations that Ukraine tried to hamper his presidential bid in 2016.
“Manafort” – Google News
WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. President Donald Trump has signaled he is keen on pursuing allegations that Ukraine tried to hamper his presidential bid in 2016.
Speaking on his favorite Fox News Channel, which provides uncritical, partisan support for Trump, the president said “big” and “incredible” new allegations have emerged that Ukraine tried to influence the outcome of the 2016 election in favor of his rival, Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton.
America has been an invaluable ally to Ukraine on the international stage since Russia invaded in 2014, providing much financial and military support. But while the U.S. Congress, State, Defense and other government departments have worked closely with Kyiv, relations between Ukrainian authorities and the Trump White House have been cool.
Trump’s words could throw a pall on relations with Ukraine’s president-elect, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, before the country’s new leader even takes office.
Ukrainians became wary of Trump during the election campaign because he often praised Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and seemed to suggest that Moscow’s annexation of Crimea was justified.
Trump was forced to fire his campaign manager Paul Manafort when it merged, in the summer of 2016, that he had worked for many years in a key role for Ukraine’s ousted Kremlin-backed President Viktor Yanukovych.
Prominent Ukrainian journalist and member of parliament, Sergii Leshchenko, made public that Manafort had received millions of dollars in payments from the Yanukovych camp, which the American political operative stashed in offshore accounts and failed to declare to U.S. tax authorities.
Trump and some of his supporters called the revelations about Manafort a conspiracy by Ukrainian authorities to influence the election. They have sought to portray equivalency between Russia’s widespread and well-documented by U.S. intelligence agencies interference in the election with the Ukrainian information shedding light on Manafort’s connections to pro-Kremlin politicians and oligarchs.
A two-year investigation by U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller into possible collusion between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign ended last month without enough evidence to indict anyone of criminal actions with Moscow.
However, the 448-page report detailed much murky behavior, lying and plentiful contacts between Russian officials and Trump associates which have laid the ground for months more of investigations by Congressional committees and that in turn has triggered presidential fury with demands that those who initiated the investigation and provided information from Ukraine, should themselves be investigated.
Trump’s opponents say talk of a “Ukrainian conspiracy” is designed to deflect attention from the damning Mueller report.
Lutsenko fuels Trump’s ‘Ukrainian conspiracy’ case
The contentions by the Trump side that Ukrainian officials played an improper part in 2016 have been strengthened by statements from Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko that his office has opened investigations into such allegations. He and Barr apparently met in in the U.S. in February.
Speaking on Fox News on April 25, Trump said he wants the American public to be aware of the Ukrainian Prosecutor Generals’ office investigation. He said that U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr would decide on how to handle any probe into “Clinton-Ukraine” connections.
He said: “I would imagine (Barr} would want to see this..…. I would certainly defer to the attorney general, and we’ll see what he says about it. It sounds like big stuff, very interesting with Ukraine. I just spoke with the new president| a while ago, and congratulated him. … But that (Ukrainian revelations) sounds like big, big stuff, and I’m not surprised.”
The previous day Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani tweeted: “Keep your eye on Ukraine.”
As described in a Kyiv Post article last week, some of the allegations of “Ukrainian interference” home in on Ukrainian-American Alexandra Chalupa’s work with the Democratic Party’s national body.
She publicized Manafort’s unsavory background, which made him a prime focus of the Mueller investigation and earned him a seven and a half year prison sentence for financial crimes. Neither did she hide that she had open contacts with Kyiv’s embassy in Washington as part of her role as Ukrainian expert for the Democratic Party committee reaching out to the many ethnic groups that compose American society.
Trump allies wove those facts into a “Ukrainian conspiracy” theory which has resurfaced with a vengeance since the publication of Mueller’s report. Chalupa has been the target of hostile statements and tweets by Trump supporters and is mentioned in a pro-Trump book called “Spygate.”
It is unclear why Lutsenko and other Ukrainian law enforcement officials became so enthusiastic, shortly before Ukraine’s own recent presidential elections, about investigating possible illegal Ukrainian interference into America’s 2016 election.
Any “illegal interference” implicitly points the finger at some connected to the administration of the president at that time, Petro Poroshenko, who last weekend lost his bid for another term.
Poroshenko appointed, against much opposition, his close ally Lutsenko, as Ukraine’s top lawyer. Some believe Lutsenko launched the investigation as part of a misconceived attempt to repair relations with Trump and curry his support ahead of the Ukrainian elections for Poroshenko.
The announcement by former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden that he will seek to become the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate against Trump in 2020 elections offers more opportunities for Ukraine to be sucked into what promises to be America’s next nasty electoral saga.
There have been allegations in the past that Biden’s son, Hunter, gained improper financial benefit while serving on the board of Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings, a job he got while his father was vice president and heading then U.S. President Barack Obama’s relations with Kyiv.
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WASHINGTON — Russia keeps reverberating even with special counsel Robert Mueller’s report now part of history.
As much as President Donald Trump says he wants the United States to move on, he’s found it hard to turn away himself, as seen in a torrent of tweets and remarks railing against Democrats, trashing Mueller and painting his own actions in a saintly light.
There is little truth to be found in these statements.
A review of a week of Russia-heavy rhetoric from Trump and his team, also touching on the census and the economy:
RUSSIA
TRUMP: “No Collusion, No Obstruction – there has NEVER been a President who has been more transparent. Millions of pages of documents were given to the Mueller Angry Dems, plus I allowed everyone to testify, including W.H. counsel.” — tweet Wednesday.
ATTORNEY GENERAL WILLIAM BARR: “The White House fully cooperated with the special counsel’s investigation, providing unfettered access to campaign and White House documents, directing senior aides to testify freely, and asserting no privilege claims.” — remarks at the Justice Department on April 18.
U.S. Attorney General William Barr testifies before a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearing on the proposed budget estimates for the Department of Justice in Washington, U.S. April 10, 2019. Photo by Erin Scott/ Reuters
THE FACTS: It’s a huge stretch for them to cast the White House as being “fully” cooperative and open in the investigation into Moscow’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election and the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russian figures.
Trump declined to sit for an interview with Mueller’s team, gave written answers that investigators described as “inadequate” and “incomplete,” said more than 30 times that he could not remember something he was asked about in writing, and — according to the report — tried to get aides to fire Mueller or otherwise shut or limit the inquiry.
In the end, the Mueller report found no criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia but left open the question of whether Trump obstructed justice.
Also on the matter of transparency, Trump is an outlier among presidents in refusing to release his tax returns . Providing tax information as a candidate in 2016 and as president is something party nominees have traditionally done for half a century.
TRUMP: “In the ‘old days’ if you were President and you had a good economy, you were basically immune from criticism. Remember, ‘It’s the economy stupid.’ Today I have, as President, perhaps the greatest economy in history.” — tweet Tuesday.
THE FACTS: You can assume many previous presidents would beg to disagree that a good economy shielded them from criticism.
Under President Bill Clinton, whose top campaign staffer James Carville coined the phrase “the economy, stupid” to underscore what the campaign should be about, the unemployment rate fell to 3.8% and the nation’s economy grew 4% or more for four straight years.
Workers assemble sneakers at the New Balance Inc. manufacturing facility in Lawrence, Massachusetts, U.S., on Tuesday, July 31, 2018. The economy added 157,000 jobs last month. Photo by Scott Eisen/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Yet Clinton was under independent counsel investigation for all but one year of his presidency, 1993. The House impeached him in December 1998, at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, though the Senate acquitted him in February 1999. In January 1998, Hillary Clinton alleged a “vast right-wing conspiracy” to take down her husband, a widely mocked complaint about the relentless criticism the Clintons faced from the right (which extended to ridicule over the title of Hillary Clinton’s 1996 book, “It Takes a Village.”)
Under President Ronald Reagan, the economy expanded 3.5% or more for six years in a row, with growth rocketing to 7.2% in 1984. Yet Reagan was dogged in his second term by the Iran-Contra investigation, which focused on covert arm sales to Iran that financed aid to Nicaraguan rebels.
Both presidents saw much faster growth than Trump has presided over, despite Trump’s faulty claim to have “perhaps the greatest economy in history.” Growth reached 2.9% last year, the best in four years, but far below the levels achieved under Clinton or Reagan. The unemployment rate touched 3.7% last September and November, the lowest in five decades, but just one-tenth of a percentage point below the 3.8% in April 2000 under Clinton.
TRUMP: “Mueller was NOT fired and was respectfully allowed to finish his work on what I, and many others, say was an illegal investigation (there was no crime), headed by a Trump hater who was highly conflicted.” — tweet Thursday.
THE FACTS: Trump is wrong to suggest that the FBI acted illegally by investigating him. The FBI does not need to know if or have evidence that a crime occurred before it begins an investigation.
Many investigations that are properly conducted ultimately don’t find evidence of any crime. The FBI is empowered to open an investigation if there’s information it has received or uncovered that leads the bureau to think it might encounter a crime. Apart from that, the investigation into the Trump campaign was initially a counterintelligence investigation rather than a strictly criminal one, as agents sought to understand whether and why Russia was meddling in the 2016 election.
Trump also makes a baseless charge that Mueller was “highly conflicted.” Mueller, a longtime Republican, was cleared by the Justice Department’s ethics experts to lead the Russia investigation. Nothing in the public record makes him a “Trump hater.”
According to the special counsel’s report, when Trump previously complained privately to aides that Mueller would not be objective, the advisers, including then-White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, then-White House counsel Don McGahn and Reince Priebus, chief of staff at the time, rejected those complaints as not representing “true conflicts.” Bannon also called the claims “ridiculous.”
TRUMP: “I DID NOTHING WRONG. If the partisan Dems ever tried to Impeach, I would first head to the U.S. Supreme Court.” — tweet Wednesday.
THE FACTS: He’d have a tough hearing at the Supreme Court. Justices ruled 9-0 in 1993 that the Constitution grants sole power of impeachment to the House and Senate, not the judiciary.
Under the principle of separation of powers, Congress is a co-equal branch of government to the executive branch and judiciary. The House is afforded power to impeach a president by bringing formal charges and the Senate convenes the trial, with two-thirds of senators needed to convict and remove a president from office. The Constitution does not provide a role for the judiciary in the impeachment process, other than the chief justice of the United States presiding over the Senate trial.
In its 1993 ruling, the Supreme Court said framers of the Constitution didn’t intend for the court to have the power to review impeachment proceedings because they involve political questions that shouldn’t be resolved in the courts.
Advisors to President-elect Donald Trump, Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon depart from services at St. John’s Church during the Presidential Inauguration in Washington, U.S., January 20, 2017. Photo by Joshua Roberts/ Reuters
KELLYANNE CONWAY, White House counselor, saying there’s no need for Congress to continue investigating with the Mueller probe concluded: “We all know if Director Mueller and his investigators wanted to or felt that it was right to indict they would have done that. He had every opportunity to indict and declined to indict. Investigators investigate and they decide to indict, they refer indictment or they decline indictment. That’s the way the process works.” — remarks Wednesday to reporters.
THE FACTS: That’s not how Mueller’s process worked. According to the report, Mueller’s team declined to “make a traditional prosecutorial judgment” on whether to indict — that is, do what prosecutors typically do, as Conway describes it — because of a Justice Department legal opinion that said sitting presidents shouldn’t be indicted. “Fairness concerns counseled against potentially reaching that judgment when no charges can be brought,” the report states.
As a result, the report factually laid out instances in which Trump might have obstructed justice, leaving it open for Congress to take up the matter or for prosecutors to do so once Trump leaves office. Mueller’s team wrote that its investigation was conducted “in order to preserve the evidence when memories were fresh” and documentary material available.
“Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him,” the report states.
WASHINGTON, DC – JUNE 8 : President Donald J. Trump stops to speak to reporters and members of the media as he departs for the G7 Summit in Canada, from the South Lawn of the White House on Friday, June 08, 2018 in Washington, DC. Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
HOGAN GIDLEY, White House deputy press secretary: “He’s already denounced, multiple times, Russian involvement.” — remarks Tuesday to reporters.
THE FACTS: Trump has had it both ways, at times criticizing that involvement but more often equivocating, and long after U.S. intelligence agencies and other parts of his administration became convinced of Russian meddling. “Every time he sees me, he says, ‘I didn’t do that,‘” Trump said of Putin in November 2017. “I really believe that when he tells me that, he means it.” In February 2018, he tweeted: “I never said Russia did not meddle in the election, I said ‘it may be Russia, or China or another country or group, or it may be a 400 pound genius sitting in bed and playing with his computer.’”
Now he’s assailed the report by Mueller, whose investigation fleshed out the audacious Russian effort to shape the election in favor of Trump and resulted in indictments against 25 Russians accused either of hacking Democratic email accounts or sowing discord in America through social media, as well as Trump associates.
Michael Cohen, the former personal attorney of U.S. President Donald Trump, is sworn in to testify before a House Committee on Oversight and Reform hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., February 27, 2019. Photo by Jonathan Ernst/ Reuters
TRUMP: “Isn’t it amazing that the people who were closest to me, by far, and knew the Campaign better than anyone, were never even called to testify before Mueller. The reason is that the 18 Angry Democrats knew they would all say ‘NO COLLUSION’ and only very good things!” — tweet Monday.
THE FACTS: Trump’s wrong to suggest that the people “closest” to him weren’t called to testify before Mueller’s team.
Plenty of people close to him, including in his own family, interviewed with the special counsel’s investigators or were at least asked to appear. And of those who did, some said not very good things about their interactions with the president.
Among the advisers and aides who spoke with Mueller was McGahn, who extensively detailed Trump’s outrage at the investigation and his efforts to curtail it. McGahn told Mueller’s team how Trump called him at home and urged him to press the Justice Department to fire the special counsel, then told him to deny that the entire episode had taken place once it became public.
Mueller also interviewed Priebus, Bannon, former White House chief of staff John Kelly, former White House communications director Hope Hicks and White House press secretary Sarah Sanders.
Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer who once said he was so close to the president that he’d “take a bullet” for him, also cooperated with Mueller and delivered unflattering details.
Mueller certainly wanted to hear from Trump’s family too, even if not all relatives were eager to cooperate. His eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., declined to be voluntarily interviewed by investigators, according to Mueller’s report. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, spoke multiple times to Mueller’s team. One of the president’s daughters, Ivanka Trump, provided information through an attorney.
GIDLEY: “It was Barack Obama who leaned over to Dmitry Medvedev in the Oval Office and said, ‘Listen, we’ll have more flexibility when the election’s over.’” — remarks Tuesday.
THE FACTS: First, the conversation was in South Korea, not the Oval Office. Gidley accurately recounted the gist of what Obama was heard telling the Russian president on a microphone they didn’t know was on. But Gidley did not explain the context of the remark.
Obama was suggesting he would have more flexibility postelection to address Russia’s concerns about a NATO missile defense system in Europe. The conversation with Medvedev, who was soon succeeded by Vladimir Putin, had nothing to do with Russian meddling that would be exposed in the U.S. election four years away.
Photo via The U.S. Census Bureau
CENSUS
TRUMP: “The American people deserve to know who is in this Country. Yesterday, the Supreme Court took up the Census Citizenship question, a really big deal.” — tweet Wednesday.
GIDLEY, when asked whether Trump believes an accurate census count isn’t necessary: “He wants to know who’s in this country. I think as a sovereign nation we have that right. It’s been a question that’s been on the census for decades.” — remarks Tuesday.
THE FACTS: Not since 1950 has the census collected citizenship data from the whole population.
Moreover, Trump’s position that asking a citizenship question in the census is needed to “know who is in this country” ignores the judgment of the Census Bureau’s own researchers, who say that it would not result in the most accurate possible count of the U.S. population. The question is already asked in other government surveys.
According to January 2018 calculations by the Census Bureau, adding the question to the once-a-decade survey form would cause lower response rates among Hispanics and noncitizens. The government would have to spend at least $27.5 million for additional phone calls, home visits and other follow-up efforts to reach them.
Federal judges in California, Maryland and New York have blocked the administration from going forward with a citizenship question after crediting the analysis of agency experts. The experts said millions would go uncounted because Hispanics and immigrants might be reluctant to say if they or others in their households are not citizens.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has argued that a citizenship question is needed to help the government better comply with the Voting Rights Act. But the Justice Department has been enforcing the 1965 law, which was passed to help protect minority groups’ political rights, with citizenship data already available from other government surveys.
The count goes to the heart of the U.S. political system, determining the number of seats each state has in the U.S. House and how the electoral votes that decide presidential elections are distributed. It also shapes how 300 federal programs distribute more than $800 billion a year to local communities.
General Motors production workers work on the 10-speed transmission assembly at the General Motors Powertrain Transmission plant in Toledo, Ohio, March 6, 2019. The manufacturing sector lost 6,000 jobs in March after gaining only 1,000 in February. Photo by Rebecca Cook/Reuters
ECONOMY
TRUMP retweet of RONNA MCDANIEL, Republican National Committee chairwoman: “If Joe Biden wants to keep score: In 8 years, Biden & Obama had a net loss of 193,000 manufacturing jobs. In just over 2 years, @realDonaldTrump has created 453,000 manufacturing jobs.” — tweet Thursday.
THE FACTS: McDaniel is right but presents a misleading portrait of economic growth during Barack Obama’s presidency, with Biden serving as vice president.
Obama’s eight years in office began with the final five months of the 17-month Great Recession, which began under his predecessor and included some of the worst stretches of job loss since World War II.
Manufacturing jobs bottomed out in February 2010, then grew steadily for the next six years before declining during Obama’s last year in office. Still, during that stretch the economy added 915,000 manufacturing jobs.
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Amid Brexit uncertainty and allegations, UK lawmakers consider Mueller-like inquiry KGO-TV
"organized crime and Russian intelligence" - Google News
It's been three years since the Brexit referendum, and serious questions remain.
The world of espionage is facing tremendous technological, political, legal, social, and commercial changes. The winners will be those who break the old rules of the spy game and work out new ones. They will need to be nimble and collaborative and—paradoxically—to shed much of the secrecy that has cloaked their trade since its inception.
The balance of power in the spy world is shifting; closed societies now have the edge over open ones. It has become harder for Western countries to spy on places such as China, Iran, and Russia and easier for those countries’ intelligence services to spy on the rest of the world. Technical prowess is also shifting. Much like manned spaceflight, human-based intelligence is starting to look costly and anachronistic. Meanwhile, a gulf is growing between the cryptographic superpowers—the United States, United Kingdom, France, Israel, China, and Russia—and everyone else. Technical expertise, rather than human sleuthing, will hold the key to future success.
The balance of power in the spy world is shifting; closed societies now have the edge over open ones.
In another major change, the boundaries between public and private sector intelligence work are becoming increasingly blurred. Private contractors have become an essential part of the spy world. Today, intelligence officers regularly move into the private sector once they leave government. The old rule that you are “either in or out” has become passé. That shift has allowed some ex-spies to get extremely rich, but it is also eroding the mystique—and the integrity—of the dark arts practiced in the service of the state.
Finally, intelligence agencies in democratic countries no longer enjoy the legitimacy bequeathed on them in the past or the glamor that rubbed off from Hollywood and spy fiction. Public skepticism about the means and aims of a potentially money-grubbing, thuggish, and self-interested caste of spooks has grown. Spymasters increasingly have to justify what they do and accept unprecedented levels of legislative and judicial scrutiny.
The biggest disruptive force is technological. Traditional spycraft has always relied on deception based on identity. Spotting, developing, recruiting, running, and servicing intelligence sources involves concealing what you are doing. If you fail, your adversary may find out what you’re up to, endangering your source and totally undermining your efforts. Once an adversary learns that an intelligence operation is underway, he or she can use it to discover more clues or feed you false or tainted information.
Traditionally, spies depended on cover identities. Until a few years ago, a visiting Canadian in Moscow who claimed to be a graduate student in architecture could present a cover that would be difficult for Russian counterintelligence officers to crack. They could check her documents, grill her about her background, search her possessions, or follow her. They could even use a gifted individual with a photographic memory for faces to scour books full of pictures of known or suspected intelligence officers. But if none of those avenues produced any clues, all they could do was watch, wait, and see if the suspect made a mistake.
Not anymore. A cover identity that would have been almost bulletproof only 20 years ago can now be unraveled in a few minutes. For a start, facial recognition software—mostly developed by Israeli companies and widely deployed in China and elsewhere—allows governments and law enforcement agencies to store and search vast numbers of faces. They can then cross-check such data with the slew of personal information that most people voluntarily and habitually upload online.
Counterintelligence officers start with the internet. Has their target appeared in any photo anywhere? If so, was the context of that photo compatible with the target’s cover story? Then they use CCTV, gathered at home and from systems run by allies. If the Canadian architecture student does not appear in any social media linked to the Canadian university where she claims to have studied, her story starts to look shaky. It looks even worse if she can be seen on holiday in Hong Kong three years ago, socializing with U.S. officials based at the consulate there.
A cover identity that would have been almost bulletproof only 20 years ago can now be unraveled in a few minutes.
The most crucial element of the technological storm engulfing intelligence agencies is the mobile phone. This device not only records your communications once hacked—phone calls and messages received and sent—it also acts as a tracking beacon. It can easily be attacked to become even more intrusive. Given a minute of hands-on access, an adversary can make sure that the microphone is turned permanently on and that the phone continues transmitting even when the owner believes it to be switched off. The same malware can be installed by sending a text message.
One obvious solution would be to not carry a mobile phone or to use a “burner” device—a phone bought with cash and replaced frequently. But doing so creates an even bigger danger. In the case of the Canadian graduate student, having searched for her likeness online, a Russian counterintelligence investigator would then look at her phone data. If the investigator finds that she doesn’t have one, that’s highly suspicious. Only the very poor, the very young, and the very old don’t carry some kind of mobile device these days.
Of course, if the student does have a phone, but the number is new, that’s also suspicious. Most people seek to keep whatever phone number they first acquired even as they change devices. If the Russians then obtain her phone records (by hacking into her home provider’s database or bribing someone there to look them up), they can discover where she has been, who has called her, and whom she has called. Tracking her movements may reveal only a fleeting interest in Moscow’s architectural marvels—as well as other, more sinister interests. These might include stops on park benches, trips to obscure suburbs, or disappearances into the Moscow Metro during which the subject switched off her phone for hours.
Investigators can also combine these two tactics with a third: financial information. What is the student’s credit rating? What plastic cards does she carry? Does her purchasing history and behavior match her cover story? Every one of these questions is revealing if answered and devastating if not. There are, after all, very few people who travel abroad without a bank account or credit rating, with no social media history, and a prepaid burner phone—and those who do tend to have something to hide.
Intelligence agencies have several ways of addressing these technological problems. One is to throw money at them, spending time and effort creating a bank of impeccable “legends” (cover identities) for their intelligence officers. This technique starts with false names, documents, and addresses—the traditional stock in trade of the spy world—but with a digital twist. Today, spies can rely on a LinkedIn entry, a plain vanilla credit rating, or a dormant Facebook account, all with enough detail to be plausible but with too little distinctive material to make a serious check possible.
A second strategy is to use “cleanskins”—freshly recruited intelligence officers whose history reveals only their previous civilian lives. A third option is to treat identities as disposable—sending intelligence officers on one-off missions, knowing that afterward they will be burned forever. A fourth is to conduct espionage only in neutral or friendly environments: You still spy on the Russians or the Chinese but from London or Paris rather than Moscow or Beijing. None of these approaches is ideal. Either the risks and costs are high or the benefits are low—or both.
The most crucial element of the technological storm engulfing intelligence agencies is the mobile phone.
Meanwhile old staples of spycraft no longer work due to technological advances. Until recently, the dead-letter box was regarded as all but foolproof, an ideal location that both a source and a collection officer could plausibly visit—a bench in a cemetery for example. One party would leave behind some intelligence material, perhaps stored on a tiny memory card enclosed in chewing gum. The other party would then collect it. Even a team of experienced observers would struggle to see what was really going on.
Today such tactics rarely work. It is easy for Russian counterintelligence to track the movements of every mobile phone in Moscow, so if the Canadian is carrying her device, observers can match her movements with any location that looks like a potential site for a dead drop. They could then look at any other phone signal that pings in the same location in the same time window. If the visitor turns out to be a Russian government official, he or she will have some explaining to do.
Electronic communications have grown equally vulnerable. The more that intelligence agencies know about what normal behavior looks like, the more that anomalies and coincidences stand out: Why is the suspect using an internet cafe or a virtual private network? What websites is she visiting from her home computer and from her phone? Does she use encrypted messaging services? Has she developed a sudden interest in computer games (an easy way of sending messages to a source masquerading as another player)? What about her online shopping habits?
The same algorithmic techniques that digital security experts use to spot malware on networks and computers can easily be tweaked to highlight other unusual behavior—sometimes much more effectively than human analysts could. Together, these techniques have severely constrained the ability of intelligence officers and their sources to operate safely and secretly. The cloak of anonymity is steadily shrinking.
As Western spymasters seek to manage the challenges presented by new technology, they are facing far greater political and legal constraints than their adversaries. Indeed, authoritarian states have an advantage over liberal democracies.
Many Western societies are fiercely debating the issue of intelligence oversight—and that debate is healthy. But for all their flaws, there is a categorical difference between the way big Western agencies operate—under judicial, legislative, executive, and other constraints—and the means and methods of their counterparts in places such Russia or China. Getting access to mobile phone records in the West takes more than a mouse click. It typically requires a warrant, which must be sought through a bureaucratic process. In Moscow and Beijing, it’s easy. Indeed, China’s national security law expressly requires every individual and corporation, state-run or not, to aid the intelligence services.
The shift toward electronic intelligence collection also creates new risks and political difficulties for all parties because it blurs the distinction between espionage work and warfare. In the world of human intelligence, the difference between the intelligence services and armed forces was in theory clear-cut. An intelligence officer’s job was always to find things out, not to make things happen. Military personnel wear uniforms, and the laws of armed conflict govern their activities; when captured, they are meant to be taken prisoner. Spies and plainclothes saboteurs get shot.
In the online world, attributing motive is far harder. An intrusion into another country’s sensitive computers and networks for the so-called innocent purpose of reconnaissance can easily be mistaken as an act of sabotage or at least preparation for it. The potential for misunderstanding intent pushes cyberespionage practitioners into unfamiliar political and legal territory. Human intelligence agencies have developed norms, which to some extent substitute for the lack of legal regulation in what can never be a law-governed space. For example, toward the end of the Cold War, both sides refrained from physical attacks on each other’s intelligence officers or their families. There are, to date, no similar arrangements in cyberspace.
The same algorithmic techniques that digital security experts use to spot malware on networks and computers can easily be tweaked to highlight other unusual behavior—sometimes much more effectively than human analysts could.
As political scrutiny intensifies, Western intelligence agencies are operating in an unfamiliar and increasingly hostile environment. Public concerns about privacy have mushroomed because of the intrusive and careless behavior of tech giants. Trust in governments has fallen. Spies—in most democratic countries—cannot take public acceptance of their activities for granted. They must also assume that public opinion will continue to shift against them.
Spies today increasingly need to work with lawyers, both to counter adversaries’ reliance on lawfare—the use of the legal system to delegitimize an enemy or win a public relations victory—and to test the legality of their own operations. Even if national security exemptions apply to the details of sources, methods, and intelligence material provided to decision-makers, the legal environment is intrusive and constraining. A Western intelligence officer can no longer go on so-called fishing expeditions, trawling through emails and other private material in the hope of finding clues that will help steal secrets or catch spies. Instead, the breach of privacy has to be justified in advance and is also subject to retrospective review.
Privacy and human rights laws are placing more and more constraints on intelligence agencies’ activities, especially as they seek to gain new powers, such as compelling tech companies to help break into encrypted devices and communications. A 2016 ruling by the European Court of Justice, for example, risked making illegal all the bulk data collection conducted by Britain’s signals intelligence agency, GCHQ, on behalf of the U.S. National Security Agency. Intelligence agencies in the United States, Britain, and other Western countries now employ lawyers and public affairs specialists to monitor data protection and other laws.
As political scrutiny intensifies, Western intelligence agencies are operating in an unfamiliar and increasingly hostile environment.
Intelligence officials must also reckon with the fact that sanctioned illegality today may get them into trouble tomorrow. Extraordinary rendition of suspected terrorists, for example, has been the subject of intense legislative scrutiny in the United States. In 2012, Abdelhakim Belhaj, a Libyan émigré opposition figure, sued the British government for his kidnapping in Thailand in 2004 and forcible return to Libya, where he and his pregnant wife were tortured. In 2018, the British authorities paid the family compensation and apologized.
Such legal worries would have been unheard of during the Cold War, when no explicit legal framework governed spy activities. Now, due to freedom of information legislation in many countries, intelligence officers must reckon with the possibility that in 30 years’ time—when documents are declassified—they may be held accountable for decisions that seem entirely justifiable today but will be highly questionable by the standards of the future.
Indeed, what may seem trivial today will be shocking tomorrow because it clashes with accepted social norms. Take, for example, the use of dead babies’ birth certificates—a common way of creating a cover identity, first made public by Frederick Forsyth in his thriller The Day of the Jackal. When, between 2011 and 2013, it emerged that British undercover police officers were using this technique in order to infiltrate radical political groups, the public erupted in outrage, leading to a series of high-profile government inquiries and expensive legal settlements.
The technique in question had involved a secretive unit called the Special Demonstration Squad, which trawled birth and death records to find details of children who had died in infancy, secured their birth certificates, and then obtained driving licenses and other documents so that they could masquerade as protesters and sympathizers, gaining the trust of the groups—sometimes by having intimate relationships with members for years. But such tactics were only useful when dealing with targets with no serious counterintelligence capabilities. The danger of finding a death certificate matching the supposedly “live” individual has increased as a result of digitized public records. Instead, intelligence agencies today do something even more offensive to modern social mores: They look for people who are never going to apply for passports or create any digital traces of their own.
A favorite category is people born with profound disabilities, who spend their lives in the care of others. A disabled man who has no bank account or mobile phone and requires round-the-clock care for his most basic and intimate physical needs is going to be invisible to the outside world. But he has a birth certificate, which can be used to build an identity for someone else’s undercover life. This practice raises profound ethical questions in an era when most people feel that those with disabilities have inalienable human rights. What may have been acceptable 20 years ago may seem outrageous and career-killing in 20 years’ time.
The booming world of private intelligence companies is watching these techniques and their practitioners with a greedy eye. Indeed, the intelligence profession is increasingly overlapping with the corporate world. The world of spies used to be cloistered. People who joined it never spoke about it and often served until retirement. Penalties for disclosure could include the loss of a pension or even prosecution.
That has changed. A stint at the CIA or MI6 has become a paragraph on a resume, not a career. Britain and the United States have caught up with Israel, where the private sector has long prized a spell in a senior position in intelligence or defense. In London and Washington, such Work is increasingly a launchpad for an interesting career in corporate intelligence or other advisory work.
Government intelligence agencies have stopped battling the commercialization of espionage; instead, they embrace it—a practice exemplified by the Israeli company NSO Group, which, according to a New York Times investigation in March, is one of several firms that broker the sale of former government hackers’ expertise to countries such as Saudi Arabia. Security clearances in the United States and United Kingdom used to lapse on retirement. Now, retired intelligence officers are, in many countries, encouraged to maintain them. Retirees may be hired as contractors, or they can make job offers to people still inside the service.
Intelligence officials must also reckon with the fact that sanctioned illegality today may get them into trouble tomorrow.
And when the tricks of the trade—bugging, impersonation, hacking—are illegal, they can simply be outsourced to a suitably unscrupulous subcontractor. The food chain in the private spy world is highly respectable at the top, with former spymasters offering exquisitely priced and presented inside information about the way the world works.
Further down the ladder, things are different; if you want to find out where your rival’s corporate jet has been flying, someone with access to the air traffic control database will provide the answer in exchange for a fat envelope. The theft of electronic data is effectively untraceable: There is no need to download the data; you can just photograph the computer screen with a mobile phone. Or the data can be obtained by impersonation—infiltrating the target organization undercover as a temporary secretary, security guard, or cleaner.
Meanwhile, public tolerance is waning as knowledge, trade-craft, and contacts gained at taxpayer expense are used for self-enrichment in retirement. The conflicts of interest and other pitfalls are obvious. Many of the techniques used by government spy agencies are intrinsically illegal (including bribery, burglary, bullying, and blackmail). Such lawbreaking raises the question of what happens if a client hires a private company that is also the target of a government investigation. Must the private company sacrifice its profits? Who makes it do so?
As the cost of conducting espionage operations—in money, time, and effort—has shrunk, spying has become less esoteric. These days it is an integral part of business, finance, sports, and family litigation over divorce and child custody. Indeed, modern life encourages people and institutions of all kinds to adopt the thinking and practices of the spy world. Are you worried about your date? Then you will find open-source information establishing whether he or she has a criminal record, bad credit, unfortunate habits involving drug use, or unusual sexual preferences. The same goes for prospective hires.
Anyone responsible for a company’s cybersecurity now has to think like a counterintelligence officer.
Anyone responsible for a company’s cybersecurity now has to think like a counterintelligence officer. To protect a firm’s sensitive information, he or she must identify the most gullible and careless members of the organization and fire them or give them better training. The long-standing practice of opposition research became an everyday phrase during the U.S. presidential election in 2016. Republicans determined to undermine Donald Trump hired a firm founded by Christopher Steele, a former top MI6 Russia hand, to dig for dirt. When Trump won the Republican nomination, the research project continued—but with the firm allegedly being paid by Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Steele’s research involved contacts with the FBI, which some critics say crossed the public-private and serving-retirement boundaries.
The rise of commercially available spying technology has led to some savings for governments in money, risk, and time. Investigative outfits such as Bellingcat, using open-source information, commercial databases, and material hacked or leaked by sympathetic allies, have produced startling scoops and exposes, including identifying the three would-be assassins of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military intelligence officer who had retired to the quiet English town of Salisbury.
Competition raises standards, in spycraft as in other fields. Intelligence agencies need to work with other actors outside the spy world, both in order to find out what is going on and in order to influence it. Spies and intelligence chiefs need to be media-savvy, countering and mounting information operations. In the old days, spymasters told spies that any contact whatsoever with a journalist was a sackable offense.
That dividing line is now thin and full of holes. Intelligence officers find plenty to talk about with journalists. They can discuss the credibility of open sources and the difficulties of operating in hostile environments. Intelligence officers involved in “active measures”—making things happen rather than just finding out about them—can find it useful to brief journalists, either highlighting solid facts and logic that help their case or on occasion inventing or twisting source material in order to produce new coverage with the requisite slant or spin.
Given this changing landscape, spies also need to be at home in the worlds of business and finance. Unraveling the webs of offshore companies that lie behind Iran’s evasion of sanctions, Russian oligarchs’ influence operations, or China’s exploitation of its ethnic diaspora has become a formidable task.
A few years ago, I coordinated the defense in a libel suit brought by a Russian tycoon against the Economist, for which I had worked as the Moscow bureau chief. An article by a colleague had implied that this man’s riches were due to his personal and political connections with Vladimir Putin. We were able to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a detailed, forensic investigation of a segment of the energy market that we believed our target was manipulating. After the case was over, a spy chief from another Western country told me that finding a few hundred thousand dollars in cash to bribe a North Korean would be no problem. Spending the same amount on statisticians and lawyers would be deemed unacceptable, however. Intelligence budgets are for spying, not finding things out through legitimate means.
That’s because spy agencies will not be able to maintain the levels of operational secrecy that they have come to regard as routine if they enlist the help of lawyers, journalists, accountants, business executives, and academics. If you hire a law firm, what happens if its computers are hacked or its staff suborned? The wider you spread the zone of secrecy, the more fragile it becomes.
Yet the biggest impediment to successful spying today is not leaks but excessive classification. The security clearance industry, particularly in the United States, operates with agonizing slowness, hampering the recruitment of useful people (such as the multilingual children of immigrants) and letting through liabilities (such as Edward Snowden).
If you hire a law firm, what happens if its computers are hacked or its staff suborned? The wider you spread the zone of secrecy, the more fragile it becomes.
Information in most countries is also ludicrously overclassified, at too high a level and for too long a period of time. Overclassification and excessive secrecy do not protect countries from their adversaries. Such methods only protect bureaucrats from scrutiny. Intelligence agencies use the supposed need to protect sensitive sources and methods to justify their concealment of blunders or activities that deserve public scrutiny. This excessive secrecy makes spy services timid, introverted, risk-averse, and calcified by procedure. Taxpayers end up paying ever greater bills for ever less impressive results. Meanwhile, the enemies of Western democracies, untroubled by such procedures, steal secrets and meddle in U.S. and European politics with abandon.
In the coming years, the bigger danger could be the opposite one: The intelligence services of democratic countries may become too flexible and too deeply involved in the institutions and procedures of a free society. The temptation to do so will be particularly strong in countries facing the full blast of hostile influence operations, such as Australia (which faces a Chinese threat) or Ukraine (which faces a Russian one). Intelligence-led criminal justice sanctions and regulatory sanctions—arrests, asset freezes, deportations, banning media outlets, and so forth—that should be the exception could become the rule.
Most of us don’t want to live in a country where the leadership spends all its time reading intelligence briefs, where the intelligence and security agencies are at the heart of public life and political decision-making. I once lived in a country like that: Putin’s Russia. Western democracies need the intelligence services to defend open societies against Putinism—but not at the price of self-Putinization.
This article appears in the Spring 2019 issue of Foreign Policy.
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FBI Warns Of Russian Plans To Interfere In 2020 Elections Outside The Beltway - Mobile Edition
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Counter-Intelligence officials are warning that Russia is preparing another election interference campaign for the 2020 election.
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Stopping Disinformation Requires Measuring And Understanding It Not Just Monitoring And Debunking It Forbes
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Social media companies and governments across the world have struck upon the perfect solution to everything from fake news to foreign influence to toxic ...
When the millions of the mentally ill, some of whom are the victims of the FBI COINTELPRO illegal hostile activities, attacks, and wars; and their "Hostile Surveillance", bring the class action law suit against the FBI for the deliberately and maliciously inducing the mental illness, and for the mental pain and suffering they went through as the result of these "programs", and this Nazi-Mobsters criminal gang, I mean the FBI, will go out of business within several months. - M.N. - 11:16 AM 4/27/2019
The Spycraft Revolution Foreign Policy
"Russian Intelligence services and organized crime" - Google News
The world of espionage is facing tremendous technological, political, legal, social, and commercial changes. The winners will be those who break the old rules ...
Links - On The Road To Dictatorship: Trump, FBI, and the New Abwehr - Web Review - By Michael Novakhov - Last Update: 3:52 AM 4/27/2019
Photo: Reinhard Gehlen
The Road To Dictatorship: FBI + Facebook. "Like? No Like!" - By Michael Novakhov
The New Abwehr Hypothesis of The Operation Trump - Outline and Links
The Operation Trump and The New Abwehr
The Operation Trump and The New Abwehr | Recent Tweets | Shared Links - Twitter - Facebook
The Road To Dictatorship - Web Review - By Michael Novakhov - Last Update: 6:05 AM 4/24/2019
The Manifesto Of The American Socialism
Political Criminology - The Outline
- _____________________________________________
Jesters rule the world, and life is a tragic comedy. What elzee' iz nu? Eh? - M.N.: Ukraine shows unrest, elects comedian as president
On The Road To Dictatorship - By Michael Novakhov - Last Update: 3:22 AM 4/27/2019 - Post
Panopticon Observation Prison
Facebook and FBI are paving the royal Road to Dictatorship! Wake up, America!
Is the FBI capable of handling the Counterintelligence matters?
The Facebook, and their controller the FBI, are paving the royal road to the present and future dictatorships. Wake up, America! Investigate the investigators! Save the American Democracy! Reform the FBI now!
The Facebook CENSORSHIP does exactly what the New Abwehr and their asset Putin want: to restrict the freedom of information on the Internet, and despite his hypocritical assurances to the contrary.
The FBI terrorized their vassal the Facebook into the construction of the virtual Panopticon Observation Prison, presided over by the archetypes of the Jewish Mother (and not the best version of this phenomenon), Sheryl Sandberg, and the glassy-eyed Jewish Accountant pretending to be the Face Of The World and Mr. Very Sociable himself, Mark Zuckerberg. "Sheryl Sandberg’s Russia talk was an insult to our intelligence", noted the press.
The question is, my dear America: why do you allow these entities and these people to decide how and with whom you should communicate, what news you should consume, and what kind of friends you should make? Isn't it much too much? Isn't it one of the roots of our current troubles?
Here is the latest press review on this subject:
Facebook Calls For Censorship: "In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg called on governments to increase regulation of internet speech".
"Social media’s censors are too illiterate to distinguish between Charles Manson and Charles Murray", observed the Wall Street Journal wryly.
"Sri Lanka social media shutdown reveals Facebook's Achilles' heel", mentions The Washington Post: "Facebook’s mission statement is to “bring the world closer together.” But its failure to rein in rampant misinformation and violent content could be the Achilles’ heel of its global ambitions."
"Facebook Could Face New Penalties In Addition To $3 Billion FTC Fine In Attorney General Probe", reports Forbes.
It is not the exaggeration to say that the modern politics are transformed by the Facebook, and this fact has the enormous significance. It appears that Facebook in fact, had prostituted itself for political purposes. Some of us say that they betrayed America and her values, just likeManafort, and his operating arm, the Cambridge Analytica.
Replace Facebook with the not for profit business model, make it better, truly social, and maybe even "socialist", and "free", in all senses. It would fit it to the "T".
The profit motives and drivers in the Information field, just like in Medicine, are inappropriate, dysfunctional, and counterproductive. The State should carry the expenses, which are minimal, if not just symbolic, for the maintenance of the Social Media Platforms. If the traditional media justified their charges by the expenses on ink and paper (with expenditures on good thinking and ideas in the very distant from those costs numbers), the digital costs simply cannot be justified at all at this stage and age. The Social Media users build their castles in the air, and the owners of the Social Media platforms and companies collect the rent; in the very nice and tangible real life pennies. The relative value of the good thinking and ideas went up, and the state should protect, defend, and nurture them, for it is them that drive the economic and social progress. The current "free for all" - "Free Enterprise" system breeds crooks, swindlers, liars, and psychopaths, and the current troubles demonstrate this vividly. We as the humans are better than that.
The FBI is the second part of this explosive equation.
The FBI and the Facebook together, almost imminently, make the perfect recipe for the potential disaster of dictatorship. Investigate the investigators! Save America! Reform the FBI now! This is my mantra for the last several years, and I am not tired of repeating it. FBI is a very sick, Mafia and Nazi style type of the organisation staffed with shrewd but brainless and soulless psychopaths. It has to be studied and researched in depth.
The FBI was thoroughly penetrated by the Nazis, the Canaris' Abwehr, and the Mobsters; and these are just the two parts of the same phenomenon connected to and by Abwehr, a long time ago, even before the WW2, and much more so after it, according to my impressions. Former Nazis were hired by the FBI en masse, and the true extent of this problem might exceed anyone's imagination.
The German espionage in America was rampant, especially before and after the WW2, and the FBI under Hoover was not able to deal with it and to contain it, not the industrial one, and much less the political one. The FBI became infected with the slow but persistent virus of the GermanMilitary Intelligence, the Abwehr; and it was turned into the deceptive and invisible weapon which destroys America from within.
From the Canaris Directive: "We have at our command in the United States efficient contacts, which have been carefully kept up even during the war."
(Quoted from: The Nazi Hydra In Fascist America - Glen Yeadon and John Hawkins -http://members.tranquility.net/~rwinkel/janel/Hydra.pdf - Pages 289 - 290).
The New Abwehr Hypothesis of the Operation Trump puts this and the other historical calamities after the WW2 into a neat and convincing perspective. This is the largely under-researched area, and very likely due to the Abwehr's deliberate disinformation and the sophisticated use of covers.
"Are there continuing counterintelligence investigations against Trump and his associates? There are many redactions in the Mueller report, so at this juncture we simply don’t know."
The FBI's sick, unlawful, low, cynical, gypsy mentality type "secrets" and "mysteries" have to be exposed and revealed. This stupid, brainless, ever hungry, dysfunctional, ugly Beast feeds on America and her people. They are worse than KGB and Gestapo, and they are stupider too.
For example, their "hair analysts" gave the wrong testimonies and sent the innocent people to prison simply because they wanted to "make the grade", to please their superiors, and to move up the ladder.
And in addition to all that, they are simply incompetent and are not able to carry out their duties properly.
I also think that the FBI is the major threat to the sanity and the mental health of the American people. In a society where one half informs on the other half, there cannot be trust and the healthy interpersonal relationships. FBI, with its crude and outdated Nazi-KGB tactics, and inefficient security wise at that, undermines the very structure and the texture of the modern American society. They function as the "vice squad" - the moral police, and as the political police, despite all their half-hearted protestations. These two areas are easy for them to understand (or so they think), especially "sex", and the little nincompoops impose and enforce their norms (primitive, police and "law and order" oriented, largely Catholic, and the product of the lower to middle class mentality) on the rest of society.
This is the road to social degeneration. The FBI and the similar structures and agencies should understand their proper and complex role in our society. They feel that they should prove their worth to society while they have very little of it, and if anything, are detrimental to the healthy functioning of the society.
As strange as it might sound (or not "strange" at all), the sophisticated, civil and civilized, proper electronic surveillance should replace the obviously sick, pathological by its nature, the institute and practice of informants, which comes from the old historical European traditions and was perfected by Abwehr.
The FBI "COINTELPRO specialists" literally and deliberately drive America crazy, and those very talanted artistic nincompoops sincerely believe, in accordance with their limited intellectual capacities, that this is exactly their job to do. They became the inspiring model for the many monstrous "secret security services" around the world, and lately for the Israeli private spying firms who developed and expanded ad criminal absurdum the COINTELPRO tactics and techniques. Read about those firms activities and interference in 2016 Elections.
In the cartoon, a barber tells his client, “I know precisely how to cut your hair…I see it right here in your carpeta.”
The FBI practiced their infamous COINTELPRO in Puerto Rico for years, extensively and intensively, with the special vindictive gusto, after the 1954 attack on Congress by the Puerto Rican nationalists, and they, along with the Puerto Rico Police Department, still continue practicing this stinking craft, on the level of the village idiots. The Island's historical legacy as the old Spanish penal colony created the friendly ground for this total and quasi-totalitarian surveillance, informing, and the intimidation society. This circumstance stilted the Island's progress, its economic, cultural, and political growth, according to some opinions.
The Russian interference in Elections 2016 was convincingly demonstrated by the MuellerInvestigation. But in fact, there were many different and various attempts at interference, which is nothing new historically and conceptually: the interference of Germans who spy on Americahabitually, extensively, and almost openly; the Russians who always follow in the German footsteps, and now the cohorts of the others: Chinese, Ukrainians, Israelis, Oligarchs, Arabs, etc., etc. But ultimately the players are the Global Russian Jewish Israeli Mafia, and they in turn are ruled by the New Abwehr.
Undoubtedly, it was also the interference, largely invisible, by the FBI, and there were, also to be exact, many various attempts at interference by the FBI various factions and players. It is a big question if this aspect was addressed in Mueller Investigation, and how adequately it was addressed.
Many have the strong suspicions that a certain, pro-Trump faction of the FBI‘s upper echelons, possibly represented by Kallstrom (reportedly, Trump’s old childhood friend), and the Giuliani circles, (reportedly very close to the New York branch of the FBI), might have been a prominent part of this conspiracy against the U.S., or the so called FBI NY branch cabal, or according to Sidney Blumenthal: “Cabal Of Right-Wing FBI Agents” who “Took Down Hillary In A “Coup D’Etat”. Both of them, Kallstrom and Giuliani, apparently, and again, reportedly, and assumingly, aspired to lead the FBI after Trump’s win.
It is also my suspicion that the FBI engineered the Abedin – Weiner email affair as their sexual-political “sting operation”, which is an old, familiar and the favorite trick in both their own and Mr. Putin’s political toolboxes. In these circumstances, the question that logically and inevitably arises, is: What was the degree of cooperation between them and the Russians? This is the big and the important question, and it has to be addressed and answered. This affair led to the October 28, 2016 Letter, which in the opinion of the pollsters, now broadly accepted, did decide the outcome of the elections, along with other factors.
The question about how the hundreds of thousands of emails (650,000) ended up on Abedin – Weiner laptop, remain essentially unanswered. Who planted them there and with whose help?
The FBI's structure and mentality are of the same hired thugs of the Pinkerton Agency, their amoral but practical mommy. The problem is that the FBI acquired or accumulated the monopoly on Police Powers which can be quite formidable in any culture.
The today society appears to outgrow the need for these types of the ugly and perverse monopolies on Power; on both the Communications Powers of the Facebook and the Police Powers of the FBI, to be specific. These monopolies have to be broken.
The Multilayered Model of the Intelligence Services, with the overlapping responsibilities, appears to be the best, historically formed alternative. Do not trust any of them entirely, and let them all spy on each other; the accuracy of intelligence assessments and the efficiency of response and prevention will benefit. None of them should have a monopoly on Intelligence Work. The Intelligence Analysis should strive to approach the accuracy standards of the Medical Diagnosis. The Intelligence Analysis (and the same of course for the Counterintelligence Analysis) should be based on the principles of the Medical Diagnosis and it should be guided by the motto "The Truth, the only Truth, and nothing but the Truth". This way the poison of the politicization could hopefully be avoided.
And we better research and investigate all of the above, my dear America!
We should not forget that in Nazi Germany the road to dictatorship was through the elections.
Speak the Truth to Power, not the sanitized versions of it.
FBI HAS TO BE ABOLISHED, AND THE CRIMINALS IN THEIR MIDST HAVE TO BE PROSECUTED RELENTLESSLY!
The FBI and some Police Departments still practice the COINTELPRO. And this is the crime. And they should and will be punished for it. Please, pay attention to this issue, our Congressional Democrats!
We do not need the monopolies on Power and Information. These monopolies, the Facebook and the FBI, are paving the royal road to Dictatorship!
The FBI's roles and the possible interference in Elections 2016 are multifaceted and complex, and they have to be investigated and to be understood properly.
We need to understand what happened, starting from 1990-s, and encompassing both the 9/11 and The Elections 2016. The Operations Trump and 9/11, these two epochal events do seem to be closely related, they appear to be the connecting links of the same mysterious chain, as it was noted by many other observers.
The FBI has to be investigated, and very, very thoroughly.
I support Mr. Barr's plan to investigate the FBI; with the proviso that this investigation has to be non-partisan, non-political, objective, comprehensive, in-depth, and practical, namely, the reform oriented.
4.25.19
Links
Panopticon Observation Prison
The Road To Dictatorship: The Facebook Censors and the FBI's Disorientation. Like? No Like! FBI + Facebook = Dictatorship
By Michael Novakhov
Facebook and FBI are paving the royal Road to Dictatorship! Wake up, America!
Is the FBI capable of handling the Counterintelligence matters?
The Facebook, and their controller the FBI, are paving the royal road to the present and future dictatorships. Wake up, America! Investigate the investigators! Save the American Democracy! Reform the FBI now!
The Facebook CENSORSHIP does exactly what the New Abwehr and their asset Putin want: to restrict the freedom of information on the Internet, and despite his hypocritical assurances to the contrary.
The FBI terrorized their vassal the Facebook into the construction of the virtual Panopticon Observation Prison, presided over by the archetypes of the Jewish Mother (and not the best version of this phenomenon), Sheryl Sandberg, and the glassy-eyed Jewish Accountant pretending to be the Face Of The World and Mr. Very Sociable himself, Mark Zuckerberg. "Sheryl Sandberg’s Russia talk was an insult to our intelligence", noted the press.
The question is, my dear America: why do you allow these entities and these people to decide how and with whom you should communicate, what news you should consume, and what kind of friends you should make? Isn't it much too much? Isn't it one of the roots of our current troubles?
Here is the latest press review on this subject:
Facebook Calls For Censorship: "In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg called on governments to increase regulation of internet speech".
"Social media’s censors are too illiterate to distinguish between Charles Manson and Charles Murray", observed the Wall Street Journal wryly.
"Sri Lanka social media shutdown reveals Facebook's Achilles' heel", mentions The Washington Post: "Facebook’s mission statement is to “bring the world closer together.” But its failure to rein in rampant misinformation and violent content could be the Achilles’ heel of its global ambitions."
"Facebook Could Face New Penalties In Addition To $3 Billion FTC Fine In Attorney General Probe", reports Forbes.
It is not the exaggeration to say that the modern politics are transformed by the Facebook, and this fact has the enormous significance. It appears that Facebook in fact, had prostituted itself for political purposes. Some of us say that they betrayed America and her values, just likeManafort, and his operating arm, the Cambridge Analytica.
Replace Facebook with the not for profit business model, make it better, truly social, and maybe even "socialist", and "free", in all senses. It would fit it to the "T".
The profit motives and drivers in the Information field, just like in Medicine, are inappropriate, dysfunctional, and counterproductive. The State should carry the expenses, which are minimal, if not just symbolic, for the maintenance of the Social Media Platforms. If the traditional media justified their charges by the expenses on ink and paper (with expenditures on good thinking and ideas in the very distant from those costs numbers), the digital costs simply cannot be justified at all at this stage and age. The Social Media users build their castles in the air, and the owners of the Social Media platforms and companies collect the rent; in the very nice and tangible real life pennies. The relative value of the good thinking and ideas went up, and the state should protect, defend, and nurture them, for it is them that drive the economic and social progress. The current "free for all" - "Free Enterprise" system breeds crooks, swindlers, liars, and psychopaths, and the current troubles demonstrate this vividly. We as the humans are better than that.
The FBI is the second part of this explosive equation.
The FBI and the Facebook together, almost imminently, make the perfect recipe for the potential disaster of dictatorship. Investigate the investigators! Save America! Reform the FBI now! This is my mantra for the last several years, and I am not tired of repeating it. FBI is a very sick, Mafia and Nazi style type of the organisation staffed with shrewd but brainless and soulless psychopaths. It has to be studied and researched in depth.
The FBI was thoroughly penetrated by the Nazis, the Canaris' Abwehr, and the Mobsters; and these are just the two parts of the same phenomenon connected to and by Abwehr, a long time ago, even before the WW2, and much more so after it, according to my impressions. Former Nazis were hired by the FBI en masse, and the true extent of this problem might exceed anyone's imagination.
The German espionage in America was rampant, especially before and after the WW2, and the FBI under Hoover was not able to deal with it and to contain it, not the industrial one, and much less the political one. The FBI became infected with the slow but persistent virus of the GermanMilitary Intelligence, the Abwehr; and it was turned into the deceptive and invisible weapon which destroys America from within.
From the Canaris Directive: "We have at our command in the United States efficient contacts, which have been carefully kept up even during the war."
(Quoted from: The Nazi Hydra In Fascist America - Glen Yeadon and John Hawkins -http://members.tranquility.net/~rwinkel/janel/Hydra.pdf - Pages 289 - 290).
The New Abwehr Hypothesis of the Operation Trump puts this and the other historical calamities after the WW2 into a neat and convincing perspective. This is the largely under-researched area, and very likely due to the Abwehr's deliberate disinformation and the sophisticated use of covers.
"Are there continuing counterintelligence investigations against Trump and his associates? There are many redactions in the Mueller report, so at this juncture we simply don’t know."
The FBI's sick, unlawful, low, cynical, gypsy mentality type "secrets" and "mysteries" have to be exposed and revealed. This stupid, brainless, ever hungry, dysfunctional, ugly Beast feeds on America and her people. They are worse than KGB and Gestapo, and they are stupider too.
For example, their "hair analysts" gave the wrong testimonies and sent the innocent people to prison simply because they wanted to "make the grade", to please their superiors, and to move up the ladder.
And in addition to all that, they are simply incompetent and are not able to carry out their duties properly.
I also think that the FBI is the major threat to the sanity and the mental health of the American people. In a society where one half informs on the other half, there cannot be trust and the healthy interpersonal relationships. FBI, with its crude and outdated Nazi-KGB tactics, and inefficient security wise at that, undermines the very structure and the texture of the modern American society. They function as the "vice squad" - the moral police, and as the political police, despite all their half-hearted protestations. These two areas are easy for them to understand (or so they think), especially "sex", and the little nincompoops impose and enforce their norms (primitive, police and "law and order" oriented, largely Catholic, and the product of the lower to middle class mentality) on the rest of society.
This is the road to social degeneration. The FBI and the similar structures and agencies should understand their proper and complex role in our society. They feel that they should prove their worth to society while they have very little of it, and if anything, are detrimental to the healthy functioning of the society.
As strange as it might sound (or not "strange" at all), the sophisticated, civil and civilized, proper electronic surveillance should replace the obviously sick, pathological by its nature, the institute and practice of informants, which comes from the old historical European traditions and was perfected by Abwehr.
The FBI "COINTELPRO specialists" literally and deliberately drive America crazy, and those very talanted artistic nincompoops sincerely believe, in accordance with their limited intellectual capacities, that this is exactly their job to do. They became the inspiring model for the many monstrous "secret security services" around the world, and lately for the Israeli private spying firms who developed and expanded ad criminal absurdum the COINTELPRO tactics and techniques. Read about those firms activities and interference in 2016 Elections.
In the cartoon, a barber tells his client, “I know precisely how to cut your hair…I see it right here in your carpeta.”
The FBI practiced their infamous COINTELPRO in Puerto Rico for years, extensively and intensively, with the special vindictive gusto, after the 1954 attack on Congress by the Puerto Rican nationalists, and they, along with the Puerto Rico Police Department, still continue practicing this stinking craft, on the level of the village idiots. The Island's historical legacy as the old Spanish penal colony created the friendly ground for this total and quasi-totalitarian surveillance, informing, and the intimidation society. This circumstance stilted the Island's progress, its economic, cultural, and political growth, according to some opinions.
The Russian interference in Elections 2016 was convincingly demonstrated by the MuellerInvestigation. But in fact, there were many different and various attempts at interference, which is nothing new historically and conceptually: the interference of Germans who spy on Americahabitually, extensively, and almost openly; the Russians who always follow in the German footsteps, and now the cohorts of the others: Chinese, Ukrainians, Israelis, Oligarchs, Arabs, etc., etc. But ultimately the players are the Global Russian Jewish Israeli Mafia, and they in turn are ruled by the New Abwehr.
Undoubtedly, it was also the interference, largely invisible, by the FBI, and there were, also to be exact, many various attempts at interference by the FBI various factions and players. It is a big question if this aspect was addressed in Mueller Investigation, and how adequately it was addressed.
Many have the strong suspicions that a certain, pro-Trump faction of the FBI‘s upper echelons, possibly represented by Kallstrom (reportedly, Trump’s old childhood friend), and the Giuliani circles, (reportedly very close to the New York branch of the FBI), might have been a prominent part of this conspiracy against the U.S., or the so called FBI NY branch cabal, or according to Sidney Blumenthal: “Cabal Of Right-Wing FBI Agents” who “Took Down Hillary In A “Coup D’Etat”. Both of them, Kallstrom and Giuliani, apparently, and again, reportedly, and assumingly, aspired to lead the FBI after Trump’s win.
It is also my suspicion that the FBI engineered the Abedin – Weiner email affair as their sexual-political “sting operation”, which is an old, familiar and the favorite trick in both their own and Mr. Putin’s political toolboxes. In these circumstances, the question that logically and inevitably arises, is: What was the degree of cooperation between them and the Russians? This is the big and the important question, and it has to be addressed and answered. This affair led to the October 28, 2016 Letter, which in the opinion of the pollsters, now broadly accepted, did decide the outcome of the elections, along with other factors.
The question about how the hundreds of thousands of emails (650,000) ended up on Abedin – Weiner laptop, remain essentially unanswered. Who planted them there and with whose help?
The FBI's structure and mentality are of the same hired thugs of the Pinkerton Agency, their amoral but practical mommy. The problem is that the FBI acquired or accumulated the monopoly on Police Powers which can be quite formidable in any culture.
The today society appears to outgrow the need for these types of the ugly and perverse monopolies on Power; on both the Communications Powers of the Facebook and the Police Powers of the FBI, to be specific. These monopolies have to be broken.
The Multilayered Model of the Intelligence Services, with the overlapping responsibilities, appears to be the best, historically formed alternative. Do not trust any of them entirely, and let them all spy on each other; the accuracy of intelligence assessments and the efficiency of response and prevention will benefit. None of them should have a monopoly on Intelligence Work. The Intelligence Analysis should strive to approach the accuracy standards of the Medical Diagnosis. The Intelligence Analysis (and the same of course for the Counterintelligence Analysis) should be based on the principles of the Medical Diagnosis and it should be guided by the motto "The Truth, the only Truth, and nothing but the Truth". This way the poison of the politicization could hopefully be avoided.
And we better research and investigate all of the above, my dear America!
We should not forget that in Nazi Germany the road to dictatorship was through the elections.
Speak the Truth to Power, not the sanitized versions of it.
FBI HAS TO BE ABOLISHED, AND THE CRIMINALS IN THEIR MIDST HAVE TO BE PROSECUTED RELENTLESSLY!
The FBI and some Police Departments still practice the COINTELPRO. And this is the crime. And they should and will be punished for it. Please, pay attention to this issue, our Congressional Democrats!
We do not need the monopolies on Power and Information. These monopolies, the Facebook and the FBI, are paving the royal road to Dictatorship!
The FBI's roles and the possible interference in Elections 2016 are multifaceted and complex, and they have to be investigated and to be understood properly.
We need to understand what happened, starting from 1990-s, and encompassing both the 9/11 and The Elections 2016. The Operations Trump and 9/11, these two epochal events do seem to be closely related, they appear to be the connecting links of the same mysterious chain, as it was noted by many other observers.
The FBI has to be investigated, and very, very thoroughly.
I support Mr. Barr's plan to investigate the FBI; with the proviso that this investigation has to be non-partisan, non-political, objective, comprehensive, in-depth, and practical, namely, the reform oriented.
4.25.19
Links
On The Road To Dictatorship: Trump, FBI, and the New Abwehr - Web Review - By Michael Novakhov
- Links to Content - The Road To Dictatorship: The New Abwehr Hypothesis of The Operation Trump - Web Review - By Michael Novakhov
- The Road To Dictatorship: FBI + Facebook. "Like? No Like!" - By Michael Novakhov
- The New Abwehr Hypothesis of The Operation Trump - Outline and Links
- The Operation Trump and The New Abwehr
- The Operation Trump and The New Abwehr | Recent Tweets | Shared Links - Twitter - Facebook
- The Road To Dictatorship - Web Review - By Michael Novakhov - Last Update: 6:05 AM 4/24/2019
- The Manifesto Of The American Socialism
- Political Criminology - The Outline
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On The Road To Dictatorship - By Michael Novakhov - Last Update: 3:22 AM 4/27/2019 - Post
Panopticon Observation Prison
Facebook and FBI are paving the royal Road to Dictatorship! Wake up, America!
Is the FBI capable of handling the Counterintelligence matters?
The Facebook, and their controller the FBI, are paving the royal road to the present and future dictatorships. Wake up, America! Investigate the investigators! Save the American Democracy! Reform the FBI now!
Panopticon Observation Prison
The Road To Dictatorship: The Facebook Censors and the FBI's Disorientation. Like? No Like! FBI + Facebook = Dictatorship
By Michael Novakhov
Facebook and FBI are paving the royal Road to Dictatorship! Wake up, America!
Is the FBI capable of handling the Counterintelligence matters?
The Facebook, and their controller the FBI, are paving the royal road to the present and future dictatorships. Wake up, America! Investigate the investigators! Save the American Democracy! Reform the FBI now!
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