EPA Hires Thunderclap….Huh?

Armed EPA Agents? The Truth Is Way Out There

The EPA’s armed war on alien polluters.

AmericanSpectator: Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, the FBI agents on Fox’s The X-Files, have been known to draw weapons on aliens, poltergeists, and phantoms. But they have an excuse — they’re fictional characters in a network TV drama, coming back on-the-air soon after a long hiatus. Not so the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPAs) own, real-life agents. They are packing pistols and even heavier firepower to catch the nation’s contributors to global warming and other, mythical phenomena. Truth is stranger than science fiction in today’s Washington, D.C., and the truth is way out there.

According to a report released last week by a watchdog group called Open the Books, the EPA has spent millions of dollars recently on guns, ammo, body armor, camouflage equipment, and even night-vision goggles to arm its agents in the war on polluters.

The Illinois-based investigative group examined thousands of checks totaling more than $93 billion from 2000 to 2014 by the EPA, and its auditors indicate that about $75 million is authorized each year for “criminal enforcement” of America’s clean air and water laws. This includes cash for a cadre of 200 “special agents” that engage in SWAT-style ops.

“We were shocked ourselves to find these kinds of pervasive expenditures at an agency that is supposed to be involved in clean air and clean water,” said Open the Books’ founder, Adam Andrzejewski, a former candidate for governor of Illinois. “Some of these weapons are for full-scale military operations.”

Some of these military operations have been reported in the media. Two years ago, the EPA was involved in an armed raid at a small town in Alaska where miners were accused of polluting local waters, as Fox News reported that EPA “armed agents in full body armor participated.”

The EPA’s own website describes the activities and mission of the criminal enforcement division as “investigating cases, collecting evidence, conducting forensic analyses and providing legal guidance to assist in the prosecution of criminal conduct that threatens people’s health and the environment.”

Don’t blame President Obama for this alone. The EPA was first given police powers in 1988 during the Reagan era. These days, EPA also conducts joint projects with the Department of Homeland Security as it engages in what a media report calls “environmental crime-fighting.”

“For more than 30 years,” according to the EPA website, “there has been broad, bipartisan agreement about the importance of an armed, fully-equipped team of EPA agents working with state and federal partners to uphold the law and protect Americans.”

But that’s not all that the Open the Books investigators found. Backing up these armed environmental crusaders are scores of highly paid lawyers and other professionals.

The report showed that seven of 10 EPA workers earn more than $100,000 a year, and EPA’s $8 billion budget also finances the salaries of 1,000 attorneys, making the agency one of the biggest law firms in the U.S.

The EPA is hardly going solo in this armed adventure against America, however. The agency has collaborated with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and a recent report by the U.S. Department of Justice indicates that more than 40 federal agencies, with 100,000 officers, carry guns and make arrests.

How far will EPA agents go to enforce the law as they interpret it? The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday issued a temporary stay on the Environmental Protection Agency’s new Clean Water Rule that regulates “waters of the U.S.” The court decided the EPA’’s Rule that originally became effective on August 28, 2015 requires “further judicial analysis.” The new Clean Water Rule defined navigable waters to include tributaries and wetlands, and even puddles caused by rainstorms. The rule defines which waterways would be protected by the Clean Water Act of 1972. A total of 18 states are challenging the new rule. Perhaps the new water rules will be enforced at gunpoint by armed agents if President Obama and EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy decide that “environmental justice” requires it.

*** Gina likes Thunderclap, so she hired them for crowd-sourcing positive responses.

Join a Thunderclap for Clean Water 

EPA is planning to use a new social media application called Thunderclap to provide a way for people to show their support for clean water and the agency’s proposal to protect it. Here’s how it works: you agree to let Thunderclap post a one-time message on your social networks (Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr) on Monday, September 29 at 2:00 pm EDT.  The message will be posted on everyone’s walls and feeds at the same time.
Here’s the message: “Clean water is important to me. I want EPA to protect it for my health, my family, and my community. www.epa.gov/USwaters

 

Sign up to join the Thunderclap for Clean Water: http://thndr.it/1rUOiaB

 

Read about the Thunderclap.

EPA Publishes Final 2012 and Preliminary 2014 Effluent Guidelines Program Plans

Under Clean Water Act section 304(m), EPA develops biennial plans for issuing new regulations or revising existing regulations to control industrial wastewater discharges. While EPA’s final 2012 plan and preliminary 2014 plan do not propose any new effluent guidelines for industry, EPA is announcing initiation of detailed studies of the petroleum refining industry and centralized waste treatment facilities, and continuation of its preliminary review of the metal finishing industry. EPA will accept public comments on the preliminary 2014 plan through November 17, 2014. Learn more.

Section 319 Success Story: Ionine Creek, Oklahoma

Ionine Creek in Grady County runs through an area of high cattle, wheat, and hog production. An assessment of the creek’s fish community in 2004 revealed a poor biological condition, prompting Oklahoma to add the creek to the state’s Clean Water Act section 303(d) list of impaired waters for biological impairment. Implementation of best management practices to reduce runoff from grazing land and cropland and to improve wildlife habitat decreased sediment and nutrient contributions to the creek and provided better in-stream habitat. As a result, Oklahoma removed Ionine Creek from Oklahoma’s list for fishes bioassessment. Ionine Creek now fully attains its fish and wildlife propagation designated use. The complete success story can be found here.

 

 

Trey Gowdy Gets Final Word on Benghazi Politics

A big hat-tip to The Right Scoop for capturing this.

A former Benghazi staffer and Air Force intelligence officer has come out claiming that the Benghazi Committee had become partisan as they wanted to go after Hillary to bring her poll numbers down. As you see in this short clip, Gowdy responds to this staffer’s claims, calling it a damn lie in an interview with NBC News last night:

Below is Trey Gowdy’s full and strong statement dismantling this staffer’s claims. I’ve highlighted a couple of interesting parts:

One month ago, this staffer had a chance to bare his soul, and raise his claim this Committee was focused on Secretary Clinton in a legal document, not an interview, and he did not do it. Nor did he mention Secretary Clinton at any time during his counseling for deficient performance, when he was terminated, or via his first lawyer who withdrew from representing him. In fact, throughout the pendency of an ongoing legal mediation, which is set to conclude October 13, this staffer has not mentioned Secretary Clinton. But as this process prepares to wrap, he has demanded money from the Committee, the Committee has refused to pay him, and he has now run to the press with his new salacious allegations about Secretary Clinton.

To wit, until his Friday conversations with media, this staffer has never mentioned Secretary Clinton as a cause of his termination, and he did not cite Clinton’s name in a legally mandated mediation. He also has not produced documentary proof that in the time before his termination he was directed to focus on Clinton. The record makes it clear not only did he mishandle classified information, he himself was focused on Clinton improperly and was instructed to stop, and that issues with his conduct were noted on the record as far back as April.

Because I do not know him, and cannot recall ever speaking to him, I can say for certain he was never instructed by me to focus on Clinton, nor would he be a credible person to speak on my behalf. I am equally confident his supervisor, General Chipman, did not direct him to focus on Clinton.

In fact, when this staffer requested interns do a project that focused on Clinton and the National Security Council, he was informed by the Committee’s deputy staff director his project was ‘not approved.’ This individual was hired as a former intelligence staffer to focus on intelligence, not the politics of White House talking points.

On September 11th, in his mediation filing, this staffer specifically claimed his reserve status as a basis for his termination. I would note first this staffer’s reserve duty was approved both times it was requested.

In all of the interviews conducted since news broke of Secretary Clinton’s email arrangement, exactly half of one interview focused on Clinton’s unusual email arrangement. The Benghazi Committee has now interviewed 44 new witnesses, including 7 eyewitnesses to the attacks never before interviewed, and recovered more than 50,000 pages of new documents. Approximately 5 percent of those are Secretary Clinton’s self-selected email records. I cannot say it any plainer than stating the facts, the Benghazi Committee is not focused on Secretary Clinton, and to the extent we have given any attention to Clinton, it is because she was Secretary of State at all relevant times covered by this Committee’s jurisdiction.

“Had CNN contacted the Committee regarding its interview with this staffer before it rushed to air his sensationalistic and fabulist claims, it could have fully questioned him about his unsubstantiated claims. But that is the difference between journalism as practiced by CNN, and the fact-centric investigation being conducted by this Committee.

This Committee always has been, and will be, focused on the four brave Americans we lost in Benghazi and providing the final, definitive accounting of the Benghazi terrorist attacks for the American people.

Sounds like this staffer himself wanted to target Clinton at a time and was told no by the committee. As Lanchan Markley points out, this claim and the full statement by Gowdy should be easy to verify.

As the NRO points out, CNN claims it did contact Gowdy to have him on but he declined:

“We categorically deny Benghazi Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy’s statement about CNN,” a network spokesperson said. “We reached out to the committee for a response prior to publishing or broadcasting, which the committee provided. That response was included in our reporting. In addition, Chairman Gowdy was invited to discuss this on CNN and declined. Chairman Gowdy is wrong.”

Perhaps I’m parsing, but it sounded like Gowdy was referring to be contacted before the interview, so that CNN could question the staffer about his ‘unsubstantiated claims’. But I could be reaching with that.

Read more: http://therightscoop.com/its-a-damn-lie-trey-gowdy-responds-to-ex-benghazi-staffer-claim-that-benghazi-committee-was-partisan/#ixzz3oP88UEDU

Read more:

 

Another one at Hillary’s State Dept Moonlighted?

Sheesh, the list grows. Seems all kinds of State Department personnel under Hillary’s term had multiple jobs, paychecks and assignments. Maybe we need to question what Hillary actually did…oh wait….

Ethics? Nah…no one talked about ethics…by the way, Cheryl Mills is a lawyer. Oh yeah, one other item, she worked for Oprah in charge of Corporate Policy and Public Planning as a Senior Vice President.

Top Clinton aide worked on Abu Dhabi project while at State

TheHill: Hilary Clinton’s former chief of staff spent some of her time at the State Department working part time to build a campus for New York University (NYU) in Abu Dhabi.

Cheryl Mills disclosed the details of the special arrangement — which are likely to raise additional questions about top government officials who split their time between official and private work — in an interview with The Washington Post published on Monday.

Mills worked “very hard” to stick to State Department rules preventing conflict of interest, she said in the interview.

“I try to understand the rules and follow them. And I try to make sure that I’m disclosing my obligations,” Mills said. “I don’t know if I’m ever perfect. But I was obviously trying very hard to make sure I was following those rules and guidelines.”

Mills served as Clinton’s chief of staff during the Democratic presidential candidate’s time as secretary of State.

During her first four months with the State Department, Mills worked part time with NYU to set up its new campus in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The government during those four months dit not pay her.

As she explained to the Post, the job was primarily to coordinate the construction of a new facility in the Persian Gulf metropolis, and navigate the cultural and administrative barriers that presented themselves.

“The UAE’s culture is very different than ours,” she told the Post.

“We had to have extensive discussions and negotiations to step through how this university could exist consistent with their framework, how we ensured the right protections for faculty and for students as they did their work.”

The revelation comes amid heightened scrutiny on the work arrangements for Clinton’s former top aides.

In addition to Mills, longtime Clinton confidante Huma Abedin also received permission to work for an outside firm while employed at the State Department. Abedin’s decision to split her time between the government and a private consulting firm have led to allegations about a possible conflict of interest.

In her discussion with the Post, Mills said that did not recall the State Department’s ethics office flagging any questions about her unusual work arrangement.

“There was nothing special, if you were, about me,” she said.

Mills continued to work with NYU and to sit on outside boards because she initially intended to leave the government after helping with the transition. Once Clinton convinced her to stay, Mills said she began to “wind down those obligations.”

This summer, Mills sat down before the House Select Committee on Benghazi to answer questions for nine hours behind closed doors. Democrats have said they intend to make the transcript of that testimony public this week, despite the objections of the committee’s GOP leaders.

Concerns about outside obligations on Mills and Abedin have compounded existing criticism against Clinton for her use of a personal email address and private server while serving as secretary of State.

In her Post interview, Mills declined to offer any new information about the server or the ongoing FBI investigation into whether any classified information was improperly handled.

She largely echoed Clinton’s explanation that she had used the server purely out of habit.

“I wish there had been a lot more thought and deliberation around it, but I can’t tell you that I can offer you that insight that there was,” she said.

 

 

Leaks Prove the Vatican is in Turmoil over Pope Francis

Leaked letter adds intrigue, confusion to Vatican bishops meeting

By Philip Pullella

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – A gathering of world Roman Catholic bishops was thrown into confusion on Monday with the leak of a letter from conservative cardinals to Pope Francis bitterly complaining that the meeting was stacked against them.

It was published by the same Italian journalist whose press credentials were stripped by the Holy See last June after he ran a leaked copy of the pope’s major encyclical on the environment.

The gathering, or synod, of more than 300 bishops, delegates and observers, including some married couples, is discussing how the 1.2 billion-member Church can confront challenges facing the modern family.

The bishops are debating ways to defend the traditional family and make life-long marriage more appealing to young people, and at the same time reach out to disaffected Catholics such as homosexuals, co-habiting couples and the divorced.

L’Espresso newsweekly, which published the English-language letter in full, said 13 cardinals signed the letter and one of them hand-delivered it to the pope last week.

It complained that the synod’s working paper needed “reflection and reworking” and was inadequate as the basis for a final position paper the pope may use to write his own document.

The published letter also complained that a change in which small group discussions have greater influence than speeches to the assembly “seems designed to facilitate predetermined results on important disputed questions”.

A Vatican spokesman said letters to the pope were private.

Four of the conservative cardinals cited by the magazine later disassociated themselves from the letter. Several said private letters should remain so and one said he signed a similar but different version.

The leak of the letter added a new layer of intrigue and confusion in the debate between conservatives and liberals on a host of sensitive issues. One topic is how to reach out to Catholics who have divorced and remarried in civil ceremonies.

They are considered by the Church to be still married to their first spouse and living in a state of sin. Some bishops want a change to the rules that bar them from receiving sacraments such as communion.

Conservatives are trying to block change to the current teaching on divorced Catholics. They also oppose resolutions that could be interpreted as a weakening of the Church’s teaching against homosexual acts.

Since his election in 2013, Francis has given hope to progressives who want him to forge ahead with his vision of a more inclusive Church that concentrates on mercy rather than the strict enforcement of rigid rules they see as antiquated.

*** The signatories include: According to Magister, were Cardinals Carlo Caffarra, Thomas Collins, Timothy Dolan, Willem Eijk, Péter Erdo, Gerhard Müller, Wilfrid Napier, George Pell, Mauro Piacenza, Robert Sarah, Angelo Scola, Jorge Urosa Savino, and André Vingt-Trois. However some of those cardinals have denied signing the letter.

The lists of signatories originally provided by Magister was impressive. Cardinal Erdo is the synod’s relator general, while Cardinals Napier and Vingt-Trois are among the synod’s four presidents-delegate. Cardinals Müller, Pell, and Piacenza head curial discasteries. However, four of those cardinals– Erdo, Scola, Piacenza, and Vingt-Trois– have subsequently stated that they did not sign the letter posted in Magister’s report.

It is not clear how Magister obtained the cardinals’ letter, and why he listed the names of cardinals who now say they did not sign it. Informed Vatican sources indicated that a letter had indeed been written, but Magister’s information, regarding the letter and its signatories, was imprecise. Many Vatican-watchers speculated that Pope Francis was responding to this letter when, in an unscheduled address to the Synod, he reportedly cautioned against a “hermeutic of conspiracy” regarding the procedures for the meeting.

Arms Race, Cyber Defenses Fail

By: Damian Paletta, Danny Yadron and Jennifer Valentino-DeVries
Countries toiled for years and spent billions of dollars to build elaborate facilities that would allow them to join the exclusive club of nations that possessed nuclear weapons.
Getting into the cyberweapon club is easier, cheaper and available to almost anyone with cash and a computer.
A series of successful computer attacks carried out by the U.S. and others has kicked off a frantic and destabilizing digital arms race, with dozens of countries amassing stockpiles of malicious code. The programs range from the most elementary, such as typo-ridden emails asking for a password, to software that takes orders from a rotating list of Twitter handles.
The proliferation of these weapons has spread so widely that the U.S. and China-longtime cyber adversaries-brokered a limited agreement last month not to conduct certain types of cyberattacks against each other, such as intrusions that steal corporate information and then pass it along to domestic companies. Cyberattacks that steal government secrets, however, remain fair game.
This comes after other countries have begun to amass cyberweaponry on an unprecedented scale. Pakistan and India, two nuclear-armed rivals, regularly hack each other’s companies and governments, security researchers said. Estonia and Belarus are racing to build defensive shields to counter Russia. Denmark and the Netherlands have begun programs to develop offensive computer weapons, as have Argentina and France.
In total, at least 29 countries have formal military or intelligence units dedicated to offensive hacking efforts, according to a Wall Street Journal compilation of government records and interviews with U.S. and foreign officials. Some 50 countries have bought off-the-shelf hacking software that can be used for domestic and international surveillance. The U.S. has among the most-advanced operations.
In the nuclear arms race, “the acronym was MAD-mutually assured destruction-which kept everything nice and tidy,” said Matthijs Veenendaal, a researcher at the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, a research group in Estonia. “Here you have the same acronym, but it’s ‘mutually assured doubt,’ because you can never be sure what the attack will be.”
Governments have used computer attacks to mine and steal information, erase computers, disable bank networks and-in one extreme case-destroy nuclear centrifuges.
Nation states have also looked into using cyberweapons to knock out electrical grids, disable domestic airline networks, jam Internet connectivity, erase money from bank accounts and confuse radar systems, experts believe.
Large conventional militaries and nuclear forces are ill-suited to this new kind of warfare, which evens the playing field between big and small countries. Cyberattacks are hard to stop and sometimes impossible to trace. The West, as a result, has been forced to start reconfiguring its militaries to better meet the threat.
 
Access to cyberweapons, according to U.S. and foreign officials and security researchers, is far more widespread than access to nuclear weapons was at the height of the nuclear arms race, a result of inexpensive technology and the power of distributed computing.
More than two dozen countries have accumulated advanced cyberweapons in the past decade. Some Defense Department officials compare the current moment to the lull between the World Wars when militaries realized the potential of armed planes.
“It’s not like developing an air force,” in terms of cost and expertise, said Michael Schmitt, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College and part of an international group studying how international law relates to cyberwarfare. “You don’t need to have your own cyberforce to have a very robust and very scary offensive capability.”
For example, hackers aligned with the Syrian government have spied into the computers of rebel militias, stolen tactical information and then used the stolen intelligence in the ongoing and bloody battle, according to several researchers, including FireEye Inc.
Most cyberattacks linked to the U.S. and foreign governments in recent years involve cyberspying-breaking into a computer network and stealing data. More-aggressive covert weapons go further, either erasing computer records or destroying physical property.
“With some countries, we’re comfortable with knowing what their capabilities are, but with other countries we’re still lost,” said Andre McGregor, a former cyber special agent at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and now the director of security at Tanium Inc., a Silicon Valley cybersecurity startup. “We don’t have the visibility into their toolset.”
The Military Balance, a widely read annual assessment of global military powers published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, tallies tanks, battalions and aircraft carriers. When it comes to national cyberforces it says “capabilities are not assessed quantitatively.”
In the U.S., the National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, FBI and others all play roles in combing through intelligence.
U.S. officials say their biggest concerns are the cyberweapons held by the Chinese, Russians, Iranians and North Koreans, countries that have deployed advanced attacks that either dug inside U.S. government networks or targeted top U.S. companies. Even Israel, a U.S. ally, was linked to hacking tools found on the computers of European hotels used for America’s diplomatic talks with Iran, according to the analysis of the spyware by a top cybersecurity firm. Israeli officials have denied spying on the U.S.
Cyberarmies tend to be integrated with a country’s military, its intelligence services, or both, as is the case in China and the U.S.
In China, hackers are famous for the relatively low-tech tactic of “phishing”-sending a flood of disguised emails to trick corporate employees and government bureaucrats to letting them into their networks.
The U.S. suspects that is how they penetrated the Office of Personnel Management, using a phishing email to breach an OPM contractor and then crack the agency’s network. The records of more than 21 million people were exposed in the 2014 and 2015 data breach, disclosed this summer. China has said it wasn’t involved.
China’s army has divisions devoted to cyberattacks, and recent evidence shows links between the country’s military and hackers who appear to be pressing the country’s interests abroad.
“They used to be snap and grab-get in and dump everything they can,” said Tommy Stiansen, co-founder and chief technology officer at Norse Corp., a California cybersecurity firm that tracks nation-state activity. “Now they trickle out the information, stay hidden in the system. We’ve even seen Chinese actors patch and repair networks once they’ve broken in.”
China opposes the militarization of cyberspace or a cyberarms race, said Zhu Haiquan, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, adding China “firmly opposes and combats all forms of cyberattacks in accordance with law.”
Choosy in targets
 
Russian hackers have targeted diplomatic and political data, burrowing inside unclassified networks at the Pentagon, State Department and White House, also using emails laced with malware, according to security researchers and U.S. officials.
They have stolen President Barack Obama‘s daily schedule and diplomatic correspondence sent across the State Department’s unclassified network, according to people briefed on the investigation. A Russian government spokesman in April denied Russia’s involvement.
“Russia has never waged cyberwarfare against anyone,” Andrey Akulchev, a spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Washington, said in a written statement Friday. “Russia believes that the cybersphere should be used exclusively for peaceful purposes.”
Russia’s top hackers tend to be choosier in their targets, tailoring email attacks to those they believe might unwittingly open links or attachments.
“They are sitting there trying to think through ‘how do I really want to compromise this target?’ ” said Laura Galante, director of threat intelligence at FireEye, a Silicon Valley cybersecurity company that works closely with Washington. “The Chinese just want a foothold into the target. Russian theft is very personal.”
U.S. spies and security researchers say Russia is particularly skilled at developing hacking tools. Some malicious software linked to Russia by security researchers has a feature meant to help it target computers on classified government networks usually not connected to the Internet.
The virus does this by jumping onto USB thumb drives connected to targeted computers, in the hopes that the user-such as U.S. military personnel-will then plug that USB drive into a computer on the classified network.
Russian hackers also make efforts to hide stolen data in normal network traffic. In one example, a piece of malware hides its communications in consumer Web services to fool cybersecurity defenses. The code downloads its instructions from a set of Twitter accounts. It then exports data to commercial storage services. This tactic is effective because corporate cybersecurity systems often don’t block traffic to and from these sites.
Government investigators believe Iranian hackers implanted the Shamoon virus on computers at Saudi Arabia’s Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest energy firm, in 2012. The Aramco attack erased 75% of the company’s computers and replaced screen images with burning American flags. The attack didn’t affect oil production, but it rattled the company, and security officials, as it revealed the extent of Iran’s cybercapabilities. A spokesman for Aramco didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The move was at least partly in retaliation for the alleged U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran discovered in 2010 that deployed the Stuxnet computer worm to destroy Iranian nuclear centrifuges-considered to be the most successful and advanced cyberattack ever. The U.S. and Israel haven’t confirmed or denied involvement with Stuxnet.
Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper has said that Iran used malware to destroy computers last year at Las Vegas Sands Corp., a casino company run by Sheldon Adelson, a major critic of the Iranian government. A Sands spokesman declined to comment.
Adm. Michael Rogers, center, director of the National Security Agency and commander of the U.S. Cyber Command, confers with Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work ahead of testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee in September. Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images
Defense officials have also said Iranian hackers have temporarily overwhelmed the websites of numerous U.S. banks, in an annoying but relatively pedestrian technique known as a “denial of service” attack. The attack was allegedly in response to a YouTube video depicting the Prophet Muhammad. Some U.S. officials suspected it was retaliation for sanctions and the Stuxnet attack.
In 2012, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei publicly announced the creation of the Supreme Council of Cyberspace charged to oversee the defense of Iran’s computer networks and develop “new ways of infiltrating or attacking the computer networks of its enemies.”
National Security Agency Director Adm. Michael Rogers said Iranian cyberattacks have slowed since nuclear talks intensified last year, but that Tehran appears “fully committed” to using cyberattacks as part of its national strategy.
A spokesman for the Iranian government didn’t respond to request for comment.
Sony hack
 
U.S. officials accused North Korea of destroying computer files and records at Sony Corp.’s Hollywood film unit in 2014, allegedly in retaliation for “The Interview,” a satirical movie about assassins of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The breach was considered one of the most successful nation-state attacks. North Korea successfully implanted malware on Sony computers, which allowed them to both steal and destroy company records, the FBI alleged.
South Korea has also accused North Korea of trying to hack a nuclear reactor, television networks and at least one bank.
“Cybercapability, especially offensive cybercapability, is a relatively inexpensive method that a country can exploit to ‘hit above its weight class,’ which North Korea is fully aware of and is attempting to leverage,” said Steve Sin, a former U.S. Army counterintelligence officer who now researches unconventional weapons and technology.
Defense contractor Northrop Grumman Corp., meanwhile, has advertised for a “cyber operations planner” to “facilitate” offensive computer attacks with the South Korean and U.S. governments, according to a job posting it listed online.
A Northrop spokesman said the customer determines the scope of work performed.
A spokesman for North Korea couldn’t be reached for comment. The country hasn’t commented publicly on cyberprograms.
Many cybersecurity experts, however, consider the U.S. government to have the most advanced operations. When Kaspersky Lab ZAO, a Russian cybersecurity company, this year released a report on a group it called the Equation Group-which U.S. officials confirmed was a thinly veiled reference to the NSA-it referred to the operatives as the “crown creator of cyberespionage.”
Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents that showed the NSA had implanted malware on tens of thousands of foreign computers. That allowed the U.S. government secret access to data and, potentially, the industrial control systems behind power plants and pipelines. The Pentagon’s U.S. Cyber Command didn’t respond to a request for comment.
In some instances, Kaspersky found, the NSA was able to burrow so deeply into computers that it infected the code that controls how a hard drive spins. So-called firmware isn’t scanned by computer defenses.
“We, too, practice cyberespionage, and, in a public forum, I’m not going to say how successful we are, but we’re not bad,” Mr. Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, told a Senate panel in September.
U.S. Cyber Command now has nine “National Mission Teams” with plans to build four more. These each comprise 60 military personnel that will “conduct full-spectrum cyberspace operations to provide cyber options to senior policy makers in response to attacks against our nation,” a Pentagon spokesperson said.
The Navy, Army, and Air Force will each build four teams, with the Marines building a single unit. Each will have a “separate mission with a specific focus area,” though these have so far remained secret.
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark A. Welsh III told a group of reporters in April that he wanted to see the military develop “blunt force trauma” powers with their cyberweapons. He gave examples of computer codes that could “make an enemy air defense system go completely blank” or have an enemy’s “radar show a thousand false targets that all look real.” He didn’t say the military had finished designing such powers.
Defense Secretary Ash Carter has made the development of new cyberweapons a priority, although the policy seems in flux after questions were raised by the Pentagon’s inspector general.
This activity has prompted other countries to join the digital buildup.
In 2014, the Netherlands announced it would begin training its own Internet troops through a domestic cybersecurity company, called Fox-IT. The head of the Dutch armed forces, Major Gen. Tom Middendorp, said in a symposium the group should be prepared to carry out attacks, not just block them, according to a Dutch media report. The Netherlands’ military strategy, laid out in various documents, refers to hacking as a “force multiplier.” A Dutch military spokesman confirmed the efforts but declined to make Gen. Middendorp available for an interview.
In 2013, Denmark’s Defense Ministry began allocating about $10 million a year for “computer network operations,” which include “defensive and offensive military operations,” according to government budget documents. That amount is just 0.24% of the Danish defense budget, reflecting the tiny barrier of entry.
Countries unable to develop their own weapons can buy off-the-shelf systems from private parties. Earlier this year, an attack and document leak on the Italian firm Hacking Team revealed the company had sold its surveillance tools to dozens of countries, including Sudan, Egypt, Ethiopia and Azerbaijan.
Hacking Team touted its product as “the hacking suite for governmental interception,” and computer security researchers who studied its program said it took advantage of holes in popular software to get onto opponents’ computers and mobile devices. The FBI is among the groups listed as clients of Hacking Team. An FBI spokesman said it didn’t comment on specific tools or techniques.
Most of these countries use surveillance software on domestic enemies or insurgent groups, according to officials with numerous countries and researchers.
States aren’t the only players. About 30 Arabic-fluent hackers in the Palestinian territories, Egypt and Turkey are building their own tools to hit targets in Egypt, Israel and the U.S., according to researchers at Kaspersky Lab.
And in August, the U.S. used a drone to kill Islamic State hacker Junaid Hussain in Raqqa, Syria, showing the extent to which digital warfare has upset the balance of power on the modern battlefield.
The British citizen had used inexpensive tools to hack more than 1,000 U.S. military personnel and published personal and financial details online for others to exploit. He helped sharpen the terror group’s defense against Western surveillance and built hacking tools to penetrate computer systems, according to people familiar with the matter.
National-security and cyberweapon experts are watching the growing digital arms stockpile nervously, worried that one-off attacks could eventually turn messier, particularly given how little is known about what each country is capable of doing.
“What we can do, we can expect done back to us,” said Howard Schmidt, who was the White House’s cybersecurity coordinator until 2012. The U.S. is thinking, “Yeah, I don’t want to pull that trigger because it’s going to be more than a single shot that goes off.”