On this Tuesday, Dec. 13 transmission of the Alex Jones Show, we cover the establishment's plan to use Russia as an excuse to prevent Trump from being inaugurated. Roger Stone will lay out the Trump team's gameplan as he prepares to take office. Host of YourVoice radio and top election expert Bill Mitchell joins to discuss ongoing efforts to sabotage the incoming Trump administration.
Democratic House Candidates Were Also Targets of Russian Hacking
Annette Taddeo lost a Democratic primary for a House seat in Florida after documents uncovered by Russian hackers were published by reporters and bloggers. Scott McIntyre for The New York Times
Document: The D.C.C.C. Responds to the Hack Letters from Democratic Party leaders responding to the cyberattack on servers of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the subsequent release of personal and professional information of lawmakers and staff members. DEC. 13, 2016 http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/13/us/politics/document-DCCC-Response-to-Hack.html
But there was never anything quite like the 2016 election campaign, when a handful of Democratic House candidates became targets of a Russian influence operation that made thousands of pages of documents stolen by hackers from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Washington available to Florida reporters and bloggers.
“It was like I was standing out there naked,” said Annette Taddeo [ http://annettetaddeo.com/ ], a Democrat who lost her primary race after secret campaign documents were made public. “I just can’t describe it any other way. Our entire internal strategy plan was made public, and suddenly all this material was out there and could be used against me.”
The impact of the information released by the hackers on candidates like Ms. Taddeo in Florida and others in nearly a dozen House races around the country was largely lost in the focus on what was done to the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign [ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-election-dnc.html (in full in the post to which this is a reply)]. But this untold story underscores the effect the Russian operation had on the American electoral system.
“This is not a traditional tit-for-tat on a partisan political campaign, where one side hits the other and then you respond,” said Kelly Ward, executive director of the D.C.C.C. “This is an attack by a foreign actor that had the intent to disrupt our election, and we were the victims of it.”
Why the Russian government might care about these unglamorous House races is a source of bafflement for some of the lawmakers who were targeted. But if the goal of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, was to make American democracy a less attractive model to his own citizens and to Russia’s neighbors, then entangling congressional races in accusations of leaks and subterfuge was a step in the right direction.
The intrusions in House races in states including Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Ohio, Illinois, New Mexico and North Carolina can be traced to tens of thousands of pages of documents taken from the D.C.C.C., which shares a Capitol Hill office building with the Democratic National Committee.
The document dump’s effectiveness was due in part to a de facto alliance that formed between the Russian hackers and political bloggers and newspapers across the United States. The hackers, working under the made-up name of Guccifer 2.0, used social media tools to invite individual reporters to request specific caches of documents, handing them out the way political operatives distribute scoops. It was an arrangement that proved irresistible to many news outlets — and amplified the consequences of the cyberattack.
“It’s time for new revelations now [ https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/13/us/politics/democratic-party-documents-hack.html ],” the Guccifer 2.0 website proclaimed, as it began to pass out the D.C.C.C. documents, trying to entice reporters to look at them on their own. “All of you may have heard about the D.C.C.C. hack. As you see I wasn’t wasting my time! It was even easier than in the case of the D.N.C. breach.”
Cybersecurity consultants believe the hacking of the D.C.C.C. took place around March or April of 2016 after a staffer clicked on a so-called phishing email. The D.C.C.C. shut down its computer system for a week — from the moment it learned of the attack in June. But it was already too late to close the door. The consequences started to become clear in August when the hackers released the home addresses, cellphone numbers and personal email addresses of Democratic House members.
“As you are aware, the D.C.C.C. and other Democratic Party entities have been the target of cybersecurity intrusions — an electronic Watergate break-in,” the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, wrote in an email [ http://static.politico.com/ec/e8/71877db14d5a87b0da33f44f1dfb/pelosi.pdf ] the day after the personal information was released. The email continued, “It has been widely reported that this cybersecurity incident is part of a Russian cyberattack which appears to be an attempt to interfere with our elections. We take this troubling situation very seriously and have notified the appropriate authorities, including the F.B.I. and Sergeant-at-Arms.”
State troopers were sent to the homes of House Democrats across the United States, and they were urged to immediately change their cellphone numbers and personal email addresses, although this took place after many received a series of obscene calls, texts and emails.
The House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, warned colleagues of “obscene” messages, after a hack released their personal contact information.
But it turned out this was just a warning shot.
Guccifer 2.0 followed up on the release of lawmakers’ personal data with large caches of internal party documents, starting with some documents related to House races in Florida [ https://twitter.com/GUCCIFER_2/status/765246466956886020 ], including Ms. Taddeo’s contest.
The seats that Guccifer 2.0 targeted in the document dumps were hardly random: They were some of the most competitive House races in the country. In Ms. Taddeo’s district, the House seat is held by a Republican, even though the district leans Democratic and Mrs. Clinton won it this year by a large majority.
To prepare for the race, the D.C.C.C. had done candid evaluations of the two candidates vying in the primary for the nomination. Those inside documents, bluntly describing each candidate’s weaknesses, are considered routine research inside political campaigns. But suddenly they were being aired in public.
and seemingly eating it, and the video made the rounds on the internet.”
Mr. Garcia was the first to use the material as a tool to attack his opponent, showing up at a televised debate [ http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/election/article95966337.html ] with a printout of the documents and accusing Ms. Taddeo of hiring a private detective to follow him, an allegation she disputed. It was the first of many attacks based on the leaked material.
After Mr. Garcia defeated Ms Taddeo in the primary using the material unearthed in the hacking, the National Republican Campaign Committee and a second Republican group with ties to the House speaker, Paul Ryan, turned to the hacked material to attack him.
In Florida, Guccifer 2.0’s most important partner was an obscure political website run by an anonymous blogger called HelloFLA! [ http://hellofla.com/2016/08/28/fl-26-taddeo-polling-shows-problems/ ], run by a former Florida legislative aide turned Republican lobbyist. The blogger sent direct messages via Twitter to Guccifer 2.0 asking for copies of any additional Florida documents.
“I can send you some docs via email,” Guccifer 2.0 replied on Aug. 22, according to a cellphone screen shot of the message that the blogger, who writes under the pen name Mark Miewurd, provided to The New York Times. “Great! Editor@hellofla.com. I’m just getting my kid from school but I’ll be able to get it up pretty quick after I get it. Thanks!”
A blogger who anonymously runs HelloFLA! contacted hackers working under the made-up name of Guccifer 2.0 using direct messages on Twitter to request documents about Ms. Taddeo.
“Do u have a size limit?” Guccifer 2.0 replied, a question that led the Florida blogger to set up an anonymous Dropbox account so he could take thousands of pages of stolen information from the Russian operative, data that the blogger immediately recognized would have an extremely high strategic value for the Republicans.
“I don’t think you realize what you gave me,” the blogger said, looking at the costly internal D.C.C.C. political research that he had just been provided. “This is probably worth millions of dollars.”
Guccifer 2.0 wrote back: “Hmmm. ok. u owe me a million.”
By September, Guccifer 2.0 had expanded his releases to include documents related to House races in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Ohio, Illinois and North Carolina, working with individual political bloggers like Miscellany Blue [ http://miscellanyblue.com/post/149456130827 ] in New Hampshire.
“Exclusive: Leaked D.C.C.C. documents reveal effort to replace Shea-Porter with ‘fresh face for 2016,’” said one of the first dispatches posted [ http://miscellanyblue.com/post/149456130827 ] in New Hampshire, on Miscellany Blue, referring to Carol Shea-Porter, the Democratic candidate for the House, who ended up narrowly winning the seat [ http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/new-hampshire-house-district-1-guinta-shea-porter ], despite the intense criticism directed at her by Democratic leaders that was revealed by the leaks.
Carol Shea-Porter, a Democrat in New Hampshire, won her House seat despite intense criticism of her candidacy by her own party leaders revealed in the hacks. Thomas Roy/The Union Leader, via Associated Press
In Pennsylvania, the leaked documents showed that Democratic Party officials did not like their own candidate for one House seat — a local businessman named Mike Parrish — and worked aggressively to recruit an alternative. Mr. Parrish, the internal party documents noted [ https://guccifer2.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/michael-parrish-pa-06-backgrounder-12-16-141.doc ], owned a company in Pennsylvania that had been sued eight times, had been delinquent on his taxes and had been named in a 2013 lawsuit “alleging racketeering and corruption,” the D.C.C.C. internal report said.
Guccifer 2.0 even posted a cache of confidential documents focusing on Representative Ben Ray Luján [ https://lujan.house.gov/ ], Democrat of New Mexico, the chairman of the D.C.C.C., who faced no serious challenger this year. Mr. Luján said it was a clear effort to send a message to the party leadership — that the hackers wanted to try to hurt Democrats at all levels of the party, from lesser known races in Florida to the leadership.
After the first political advertisement [ https://vimeo.com/179820630 ] appeared using the hacked material, Mr. Luján wrote a letter to his Republican counterpart at the National Republican Congressional Committee urging him to not use this stolen material in the 2016 campaign.
“The N.R.C.C.’s use of documents stolen by the Russians plays right into the hands of one of the United States’ most dangerous adversaries,” Mr. Luján’s Aug. 29 letter said. “Put simply, if this action continues, the N.R.C.C. will be complicit in aiding the Russian government in its effort to influence American elections.”
Representative Ben Ray Luján, Democrat of New Mexico and chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, was targeted by Guccifer 2.0 even though he faced no serious challenger. Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call, via Associated Press
attacking Mr. Garcia during the general election in Florida.
AshLee Strong, a spokeswoman for Mr. Ryan, said he did not control how the material was used in the ad, although she did not dispute that the material had been stolen as part of an act of Russian espionage. “Speaker Ryan has said for months that foreign intervention in our elections is unacceptable,” she said in a written statement.
At least some Republican players turned down a chance to exploit the material, including Representative Ryan Costello of Pennsylvania, who was running for re-election in a contest where he faced off against Mr. Parrish and was aware of the unflattering material about his opponent that had become public.
“We believed it was neither necessary nor appropriate,” said Vincent Galko, a campaign consultant to Mr. Costello, “to use information from a possible foreign source to influence the election.”
Still, Mr. Parrish, in an interview Tuesday, said he believed that the document dumps hurt his candidacy. But as a former Army cavalry troop commander who served in West Germany in the final years of the Cold War, he said he was not surprised to learn that the Russians were behind the cyberattack.
“I’ve have been fighting Russians my entire life,” he said. “To me this is just a continued punch-counterpunch; the Cold War games are still being played.”
Join President-Elect Donald J. Trump and Vice President-Elect Mike Pence for the USA Thank You Tour 2016 at the Wisconsin State Fair Exposition Center.
Feds’ Damning Report on Russian Election Hack Won’t Convince Skeptics
Andy Greenberg Security Date of Publication: 01.06.17. 01.06.17 Time of Publication: 5:25 pm.
"The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S. "
Getty Images
On Friday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence finally released a declassified report on Russia’s role in influencing the US election. And though it offers the most detailed official analysis yet of Russia’s operations, critics in the cybersecurity community say it lacks the still-secret evidence needed to persuade skeptics that analysis is true.
The ODNI’s 25-page report (embedded below) from US intelligence agencies lays out a vast Russian intelligence operation that extends from hacking both Democratic and Republican targets to propaganda campaigns to troll-fueled social media disinformation. It re-asserts the intelligence community’s findings that the Kremlin is behind breaches of the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and even state election board websites. And the express intention of those operations, the report states, was to not only disrupt the American electoral process, but to elect Donald Trump.
“Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency,” the report reads. “We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments.”
Even so, the report leaves out the much hoped-for technical evidence that informed these conclusions. In its “Scope and Sourcing” section, the report explains that this evidence exists, but can’t be declassified. And that means the report won’t satisfy the majority of the cybersecurity community that believes Russia hacked Democratic targets but has demanded more evidence, let alone the diehard deniers of the Kremlin’s fingerprints. “Seeing more of the context in which this happened does make me a little more trusting that this really was Russia,” says Robert Graham, an analyst for the cybersecurity firm Erratasec who has closely followed the Russian hacking investigation. “But knowing what data they probably have, they could have given us more details. And that really pisses me off.”
-- Knowing what data they probably have, they could have given us more details. And that really pisses me off. Robert Graham --
Over the past weeks, rumors circulated that senior intelligence officials had pushed for far more of the agencies’ evidence pointing to Russia to be declassified and revealed to the public, according to Susan Hennessey, a former NSA attorney. But that cards-on-the-table approach, which likely would have sacrificed intelligence sources and methods in favor of more public transparency, didn’t make it to the final report. “This isn’t a remotely risk-embracing document,” says Hennessey. “There’s alway a tension between those who think it’s worth bringing forward sources and methods and those that don’t. It’s clear that those with very conservative views about protecting sources and methods prevailed.”1
The Most Important Skeptic
One skeptic, at least, has somewhat altered his viewpoint based on the intel agencies’ case: Donald Trump. After the president-elect was briefed Friday by the heads of the NSA, FBI, CIA, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence, he offered an oblique statement that neither confirmed nor denied his belief that Russia hacked Democratic targets. “While Russia, China, other countries, other groups and people are constantly trying to break through the cyber infrastructure of our government institutions, businesses and organizations including the Democratic National Committee,” Trump’s statement reads, “there was no effect on the outcome of the election including the fact that there was no tampering whatsoever with voting machines.”
[ .. "no effect on the outcome" so no big deal is bullshit .. pure trump on so many things .. gotta preserve the 'buddy with Putin' image i've created on twitter at all cost .. the focus has to me on me .. both authoritarian manipulators .. and cheats ..
But even that mealy-mouthed comment—no intelligence officials had claimed Russia hacked American voting machines—contrasts sharply with Trump’s past denials. Until now, the president-elect has remained doggedly skeptical and even willfully ignorant of the evidence tying Russia’s government to the attacks. He’s blamed the intrusions on everyone from China to a 400-pound hacker in New Jersey to the Democratic party itself .. https://www.wired.com/2017/01/timeline-trumps-strange-contradictory-statements-russian-hacking/ . Rather than call for investigations into the hacking, he’s said the country needs to “move on.” At times he has even refused to admit any hacks took place. He continued those assertions even after he began receiving classified briefings on the attacks as the Republican presidential candidate, and then after US intelligence agencies stated that the Kremlin was responsible in early October, and even after he was elected and gained full access to presidential briefings from the intelligence community. As late as Friday morning, ahead of his own personal briefing on the full report, he continued to refer to China as the possible source .. http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/us/politics/donald-trump-wall-hack-russia.html?mtrref=t.co&gwh=28D667708F02C522B5345731EEC325A1&gwt=pay&_r=0 .. of the attack and called the investigation into Russia a “political witch hunt.” (He also wrote on Twitter .. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/817413321058029568 .. that he’s asking Congress to investigate the unauthorized early leak of today’s report to NBC News, showing that he has interest in investigating some leaks, at least.)
The report makes a few new assertions: stating plainly that WikiLeaks received hacked DNC data from Russian intelligence, and outlining a broader history of Russian meddling in US elections. It spends significant ink on Russia’s state-sponsored propaganda efforts, and delves into state-sponsored social media disinformation strategies and widespread Russian media claims that the US is not a functioning democracy. The report points out, for example, that the RT America television channel has been running stories about the US’s weak voting infrastructure and alleged election fraud since November 2012.
RT’s role as a distributor for Russian government propaganda is hardly news, though. And while data leaks and disinformation campaigns were central to last year’s campaign meddling, the report seems to give them disproportionate weight over technical hacking, perhaps because those sections of the report were redacted.
In terms of proving the core claim that Russia hacked American political targets, though, Friday’s report is sure to leave any skeptic not privy to classified briefings briefings unconvinced: It fails to include even the already public evidence visible to the cybersecurity community over the last six months, which drew a thick dotted line from the DNC hack to the Kremlin. A hacker calling himself Guccifer 2.0, for instance, in June claimed to be a lone Romanian hacker responsible for the breach. But the stolen DNC files he published on the web—and also said he’d leaked to WikiLeaks—contained telltale Russian-language error messages. A piece of malware known as X-Agent was used in both the DNC hack and previous attacks long believed to be Russian intelligence operations. And an analysis of the URL shortening service used by the hacker who stole the Gmail password of Clinton staffer John Podesta .. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/06/us/russian-hack-evidence.html .. shows that the same account was used to target more than 5,000 other Gmail accounts, including Russia-focused journalists and authors, and the spouses of American military officials.
Early leaks from a classified version of the report revealed some of the evidence intelligence agencies have to implicate Russia. Unnamed intelligence officials told the Washington Post .. http://tinyurl.com/zsmd7uh .. that US agents had intercepted the communications of senior Russian officials celebrating Trump’s win. In another leak to Reuters .. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-cyber-celebrate-idUSKBN14P2NI , intel officials said that they’d identified the intermediary who had passed files stolen by Russian hackers to WikiLeaks.
The Obama administration, for its part, has for months harbored little doubt about Russia’s involvement in the political attacks. In fact, it’s already responded: In late December, the White House announced new targeted sanctions against Russian intelligence officials and contractors, ejected 35 Russian diplomats from the country, and seized two Russian-owned properties on American soil it said were being used for intelligence gathering. James Lewis, a cybersecurity-focused fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told WIRED at the time that it was the “the biggest retaliatory move against Russian espionage since the Cold War.”
But critics from Trump’s presidential transition team have accused Obama of acting against Russia before proving the sanctions were warranted. And no matter how strong the secret evidence to justify that action may be, Friday’s intelligence report will do little to make Obama’s case to the public.
Additional reporting by Lily Hay Newman.
You can read the full report here:
[...]
1Corrected 1/6/17 6:42 pm EST to clarify the source and nature of rumors that the report would declassify more material.
---
FBI and Homeland Security detail Russian hacking campaign in new report
Experts say report is too little too late and comes after several others from private sector detailing alleged exploits of groups Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
