The case is presented in the other DoJ memo on Comey posted below. Just remember the Deputy Director of the FBI is Andrew McCabe, whose wife Jill, took up to $700,000 for campaign funds in her run for a political seat from Hillary Clinton’s friend Terry McAuliffe.
French presidential candidate Marcon was hacked on Friday before the Sunday voting. Per the NSA Chief, U.S. Tipped Off France on the Russia hacks. The U.S. tipped off France when it saw that Russians were carrying out cyberattacks targeting French President-elect Emmanuel Macron, NSA chief Adm. Mike Rogers told a Senate panel on Tuesday. Macron’s campaign revealed it was hacked just hours before a campaigning blackout in the country ahead of the presidential election on Sunday. Macron ended up handily defeating his rival, Putin-backed Marine Le Pen. “We had become aware of Russian activity. We had talked to our French counterparts and gave them a heads-up—‘Look, we’re watching the Russians. We’re seeing them penetrate some of your infrastructure. Here’s what we’ve seen. What can we do to try to assist?’” Rogers told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
*** Meanwhile….there is no strategy or policy position on U.S. cyber warfare. However…
Next Steps for U.S. Cybersecurity in the Trump Administration: Active Cyber Defense
The failure of the government to provide adequate protection has led many cybersecurity analysts, scholars, and policymakers to suggest that there is a need for private-sector self-help. If the government is unable or unwilling to take or threaten credible offensive actions to deter cyberattacks or to punish those who engage in them, it may be incumbent upon private-sector actors to take up an active defense. In other words, the private sector may wish to take actions that go beyond protective software, firewalls, and other passive screening methods—and instead actively deceive, identify, or retaliate against hackers to raise their costs for conducting cyberattacks. Taking into consideration U.S., foreign, and international law, the U.S. should expressly allow active defenses that annoy adversaries while allowing only certified actors to engage in attribution-level active defenses. More aggressive active defenses that could be considered counterattacks should be taken only by law enforcement or in close collaboration with them.
Key Takeaways
If the government is unable or unwilling to deter cyberattacks, it may be incumbent upon private-sector actors to take up an active defense.
Before the U.S. authorizes private hack back, it must consider not only U.S. laws, but also foreign and international laws governing cyberspace.
Congress should establish a new active cyber defense system that enables the private sector to identify and respond to hackers more effectively.
***
Heritage: Americans want their cyber data to be safe from prying eyes. They also want the government to be able to catch criminals. Can they have both?
It’s an especially pertinent question to ask at a time when concerns over Russian hacking are prevalent. Can we expose lawbreakers without also putting law-abiders at greater risk? After all, the same iPhone that makes life easier for ordinary Americans also makes life easier for criminals.
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. has described the operating system of the iPhone as “warrant-proof,” saying criminals are using the devices – encrypted by default – to their advantage. In one instance, he quoted an inmate who, ironically, called the iPhone a “gift from God.”
Divine involvement is a matter of debate, but there’s no question that when it comes to the choice of breaking the cybersecurity of criminals without also endangering the personal data of ordinary Americans, well, the devil is in the details.
This is especially true given the evolving nature of the threat. Even if we wanted to give the government access to all the metadata it wants (when, where, and who called), technology is moving away from phone calls to text messages and other non-telephony applications. Traditional metadata will be of limited use to law enforcement in pursuit of the savvy criminal of the future. Law enforcement needs to develop new strategies and investigative techniques without making us all prey.
It’s nearly impossible to assess the total monetary value for all successfully prosecuted cybercrimes in the U.S., let alone estimate the number of criminal cases that would have fallen apart without access to a smartphone’s data. The Department of Justice doesn’t publish such data. But, according to the 2014 Center for Strategic and International Studies report “Net Losses: Estimating the Global Cost of Cybercrime,” global cybercriminal activity is valued at $400 billion a year. Cybercrime damages trade, reduces competitiveness, and limits innovation and global growth.
The fundamental problem is that no one in the government is responsible for securing the internet for all of us. The Department of Homeland Security is responsible for safeguarding our nation’s critical infrastructure, yet the insecure internet presents cyberthreats to non-enterprise users affect individual security, safety and economic prosperity. Who is responsible for their security?
Some elements of the federal government are so focused on hunting down information against a few horrendous criminals that they don’t seem to realize they’re doing it at the expense of our right to privacy and online protection. We can appreciate their dedication in these noble causes, but the fact remains that the internet has become a host to more and more personal information ever since Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone.
Since then, the smartphone has evolved to have much more control over our lives, homes and vehicles. There is no sign of less data being held in the cyberspace.
In attempting to square this cyber-circle, the government would be wise to take a cue from the medical profession, which uses the Hippocratic oath to dictate an underlying requirement to refrain from causing harm to patients.
There is no such oath for members of the Department of Justice. They simply affirm that they will faithfully execute their duties without affirming that they will do so without harming the citizenry as a whole.
DOJ lawyers focus on individual prosecutions. That is too narrow of a definition of success. It forces them to use all means they can muster to make their prosecutions successful with little or no consideration of the larger harm their efforts may cause to the population in general.
That is a problem today and will only be magnified in the coming years as technology advances and the gap between those advances and the DOJ’s understanding of them widens. Within this environment, where insecurity breed’s criminality and stopping individual high-value criminals can motivate the DOJ to undermine security, one can only wonder, who is responsible for our security?
The world has changed. A new paradigm is needed to ensure the safety and security of all American’s data predicated on applying airtight security to our data. There is no return to the past. Perhaps the Trump administration will make this need for security a priority in a manner the previous administration did not.
Reuters: The Mexican army says its fight against surging opium production that feeds U.S demand is increasingly complicated by the rise of smaller gangs disputing wild, ungoverned lands planted with ever-stronger poppy strains.
The gangs have engulfed the state of Guerrero in a war to control poppy fields, turning inaccessible mountain valleys of endemic poverty and famous beach resorts into Mexico’s bloodiest spots.
Colonel Isaac Aaron Jesus Garcia, who runs a base in one of the state’s most unruly cities, Ciudad Altamirano, told Reuters on an operation to chop down poppies high in the Guerrero mountains that violence increased two years ago when a third gang, Los Viagra, began a grab for territory.
Bodies are discovered almost daily across the state, tossed by roads, some buried in mass graves. In Ciudad Altamirano, the mayor was killed last year and a journalist gunned down in March at a car wash.
“These fractures (in the gangs) started two years ago, and that caused this violence that is all about monopolizing the production of the drug,” Jesus Garcia said.
From this frontline of the fight against heroin, Jesus Garcia sees a direct link between a record U.S. heroin epidemic that killed nearly 13,000 people in 2015 and violence on his patch.
“The increase of consumers for this type of drug in the United States has been exponential and the collateral effect is seen here,” Jesus Garcia said.
Heroin use in the United States has risen five-fold in the past decade and addiction has more than tripled, with the biggest jumps among whites and men with low incomes.
Jesus Garcia said the task of seeking out poppy fields in one of Mexico’s poorest and least accessible regions, rising above the beach resorts of Acapulco and Ixtapa, was practically endless.
His 34th Battalion and others send platoons of troops on foot for month-long expeditions every season. They set up camps and fan through treacherous terrain, part of a campaign that destroys tens of thousands of fields a year.
One such field visited by Reuters was deep in a lawless region six hours from Ciudad Altamirano through winding dirt roads thick with dust that rose into the mountains.
It was irrigated by a lawn sprinkler mounted on a pole that spritzed water over less than a hectare of poppies and fertilizer bags were piled nearby, basic farming techniques the soldiers nevertheless said were a sign of growers’ new sophistication.
A dozen troops fanned out, chopping down the flowers with machetes.
HIGHER YIELDS
Army officials said gangs use poppy varieties that produce higher yields and more potent opium from smaller plots, and that its higher value is driving violent competition between gangs.
“Now we see more production of poppy in less terrain, and it has to do with the quantity of bulbs each plant has,” said Lieutenant Colonel Jose Urzua as he showed bulbs oozing valuable gum from slits. He explained opium is often harvested by families.
In these tiny mountain hamlets opium has grown for decades, officials said, but a coffee plague and the U.S. opiate epidemic has led farmers to plant much more.
The harvest has become central to Guerrero’s economy, also dependent on cash sent home by immigrants.
One army official said the field seen by Reuters could produce around 3 kilos (6.6 lb) of opium, fetching up to $950 per kilo from traffickers who sell it for up to $8,000.
“There aren’t many alternatives here,” said a woman selling soft drinks and snacks from a pine shack by a dirt road. Her husband grows poppies, and she said anyone who runs a business faces extortion by gangs.
*** 
CNN
(CNN)It was the second deadliest conflict in the world last year, but it hardly registered in the international headlines.
As Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan dominated the news agenda, Mexico’s drug wars claimed 23,000 lives during 2016 — second only to Syria, where 50,000 people died as a result of the civil war.“This is all the more surprising, considering that the conflict deaths [in Mexico] are nearly all attributable to small arms,” said John Chipman, chief executive and director-general of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), which issued its annual survey of armed conflict on Tuesday.“The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan claimed 17,000 and 16,000 lives respectively in 2016, although in lethality they were surpassed by conflicts in Mexico and Central America, which have received much less attention from the media and the international community,” said Anastasia Voronkova, the editor of the survey.In comparison, there were 17,000 conflict deaths in Mexico in 2015 and 15,000 in 2014 according to the IISS.Rising death toll
Voronkova said the number of homicides rose in 22 of Mexico’s 32 states during 2016 and the rivalries between cartels increased in violence.“It is noteworthy that the largest rises in fatalities were registered in states that were key battlegrounds for control between competing, increasingly fragmented cartels,” she said.“The violence grew worse as the cartels expanded the territorial reach of their campaigns, seeking to ‘cleanse’ areas of rivals in their efforts to secure a monopoly on drug-trafficking routes and other criminal assets.”Mexican drug cartels take in between $19 billion and $29 billion annually from US drug sales, according to the Department of Homeland Security.Rivalries between the cartels wreak havoc on the lives of civilians who have nothing to do with narcotics. Bystanders, people who refused to join cartels, migrants, journalists and government officials have all been killed.Not on news agenda
Jacob Parakilas, assistant head of the US and the Americas Programme at London-based think tank Chatham House, said part of the reason for the relative lack of attention paid to Mexico in the international media is “it’s not a war in the political sense of the word. The participants largely don’t have a political objective. They’re not trying to create a breakaway state. It doesn’t come with the same visuals. There are no air strikes.“Also this has been going on since the beginning of the modern drug trade in the Americas. It’s not news in that sense. And Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a journalist. They are intentionally targeted in Mexico, which puts a dampener on the ability to report on this.”
Drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman is facing trial in New York.There have, however, been significant arrests in relation to the Mexican drug trade in recent times.Damaso Lopez Nunez, a high-ranking leader of Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel, was arrested on May 2 in Mexico City and could face charges in the US, authorities said.His arrest follows January’s extradition of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who is accused of running the Sinaloa cartel — one of the world’s largest drug-trafficking organizations.He awaits trial in New York on 17 counts accusing him of running a criminal enterprise responsible for importing and distributing massive amounts of narcotics and conspiring to murder rivals.World conflict deaths fall
The number of conflict fatalities globally edged down last year, from 167,000 to 157,000, according to the IISS.This was the second successive annual drop — 180,000 people were killed in 2014.The number of deaths in Syria fell from 55,000 in 2015. But there were 1,000 more deaths in Afghanistan last year than 2015 and 4,000 more in Iraq.Voronkova from the IISS said: “Civilians caught amid conflict arguably suffered more than in the preceding years. Between January and August, 900,000 people were internally displaced in Syria alone.”The internal displacement figures were 234,000 for Iraq and 260,000 for Afghanistan.
DING DING DING and it seems there are still 2 missing boxes…
FNC: The Obama administration’s White House counsel was directly involved in deliberations over the release of Hillary Clinton emails as early as spring 2015, according to handwritten FBI agent notes released by the bureau late Friday.
The notes read: “Pat Kennedy (early May ’15) calls interagency MTG (meeting) re: scheduled release by JAN ’16, asking quick turnarounds – WH Counsel, CIA, etc…OSD, DNI, NSC and (redacted)”
The notes offer a raw account of the case from the perspective of FBI agents. Much of the content already had been documented in previously released FBI interview summaries, called 302s. The reference to “Counsel,” however, appears to be the earliest confirmation of White House involvement.
From the outset, the White House tried to put distance between itself and the former secretary of state’s personal email controversy. The records were also released to Judicial Watch which sued in federal court.
On March 7, 2015, then-President Barack Obama told CBS News that he learned about Clinton’s private server for government business from the media. “The same time everybody else learned it, through news reports,” he said. But an email sent from Clinton aide Cheryl Mills later that day, and published by WikiLeaks, shows she told Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta otherwise: “We need to clean this up. He has emails from her — they do not say state.gov.”
The newly released notes, from an interview with a State Department employee, also show how the department’s No. 3 at the time, Patrick Kennedy, tried to convince an FBI agent to change the classification of the Clinton emails, arguing they did not contain sensitive information. This was first reported by Fox News in September 2015, and later described in an FBI summary released last year as a “quid pro quo.”
At the time, Kennedy and the State Department denied the charge, which was credible.
The notes also cover how FBI agents were expecting 14 bankers boxes of Clinton emails from her lawyer’s firm Williams & Connolly, but only received 12, as Fox News reported in October. The two boxes have never been accounted for.
The RegisterUK
Wired: Ten days after US intelligence agencies pinned the breach of the Democratic National Committee last October on the Russian government, Vice President Joe Biden promised government would “send a message” to the Kremlin. Two months later, the White House announced new sanctions against a handful of Russian officials and companies, and kicked 35 Russian diplomats out of the country. Six months later, it appears that the message has been thoroughly ignored.
The Russian hackers who gleefully spilled the emails of the DNC, Colin Powell, and the Clinton campaign remain as busy as ever, this time targeting the elections of France and Germany. And that failure to stop Russia’s online adventurism, cybersecurity analysts say, points to a rare sort of failure in digital diplomacy: Even after clearly identifying the hackers behind one the most brazen nation-state attacks against US targets in modern history, America still hasn’t figured out how to stop them.
In a recent report tracking the Kremlin-affiliated activity of the hacker group known as Pawn Storm, a.k.a. APT 28 or Fancy Bear, the security firm Trend Micro identified phishing sites that they say were used to target the political campaigns of left-leaning politicians Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel in upcoming French and German elections. The analysts also found that the phishing domains had been registered in March and April of 2017, leaving no doubt the attacks started well after the US government’s attempt at deterrence last year.
“It seems like the opposite effect is happening. There’s definitely not even a slowing down” of the Pawn Storm attacks, says Trend Micro researcher Ed Cabrera. “It’s an emboldening.”
Speaking in a Senate hearing yesterday, FBI director James Comey had no illusions that the Obama administration’s response measures would keep Russian hackers away from future American elections, either. “I think one of the lessons that the Russians may have drawn from this is that this works,” Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee. “I expect to see them to come back in 2018, and especially in 2020,” for the next US presidential election.
That failure to effectively deter Russia from its attempts at so-called “influence operations” of stealing and leaking documents doesn’t mean deterrence won’t work to stop state-sponsored hacking, says Peter Singer, a strategist at the New America Foundation. It means that the US just hasn’t gone far enough. “Never speak to me of cyber-deterrence if this is how we respond to the most important cyberattack so far in history,” Singer says. “We’ve put out the message not just to APT28 or Russia but any state or non-state attacker that this is going to be low cost, high gain.”
The Obama White House’s move to sanction Russian companies and hackers, eject diplomats and seize two Russian-owned compounds on US soil were “too little, too late,” Singer wrote in testimony to the House Armed Services Committee last month. That reaction, he pointed out, took more than six months to materialize, after even the private-sector cybersecurity community had come to the consensus that Russia was behind the attack. And even those sanctions didn’t cut deep enough for Russia’s highest-level leaders, Singer argues.
Instead, Singer says, the US should have retaliated in a way that Putin would have felt personally: exposing his hidden personal wealth. “You have to go after the leverage points against the Russian oligarchy,” Singer says. He points to Putin’s fury at the Panama Papers leak from the tax haven law firm of Mossack Fonseca, which revealed portions of the Russian president’s secret wealth. “Reveal where things are hidden,” says Singer. “Make their lives more difficult.”
More broadly, Russian officials fear evidence of their corruption being exposed, says Jim Lewis, a cybersecurity and foreign policy analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. That sort of counter-leak, he says, could be a significant card for the US to play. “We need to think if we want to be more aggressive in our responses,” says Lewis. “We need to think about how to make it more painful for them to continue to do this.”
Last December, in the wake of the sanctions, Lewis told WIRED he felt they were in fact strong enough to rile the Kremlin—he called them the “the biggest retaliatory move against Russian espionage since the Cold War.” However much they may have helped the US though, Lewis says, their deterrent effect doesn’t seem to have extended to US allies like France and Germany. Hence the Pawn Storm hackers’ targeting of the Macron campaign—a hacking attempt Macron’s staff has said failed—as well as German targets including a think tank associated with Germany president Angel Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party and the German parliament. The latter hack resulted in actual theft of documents that could still be leaked ahead of the country’s September election, in another Russian attempt to destabilize the European Union.
“The Russians appear to have interpreted the sanctions as only applying to actions against the US,” Lewis says. “On a collective level, we need to think about where NATO and the EU can take action.”
Which raises the third problem with America’s digital diplomatic strategy: President Trump. The Trump administrations weak commitment to European allies, and his softening of Obama’s stance, can only have emboldened Russia further, rather than helping curtail their efforts. Trump has even continued to doubt publicly that the attacks on Democratic targets in the 2016 campaign originated in Russia in the first place, despite his own intelligence officials repeatedly pointing to the Kremlin’s involvement. More than three months after he momentarily conceded Russia’s involvement, Trump earlier this week again floated the unsubstantiated notion it “could’ve been China.”
That lack of commitment to even naming Russia—not to mention deterring its next attack—has left the US on its back foot, says Peter Singer. Even Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, who criticized Obama’s sanctions for being too light or too late, Singer points out, are now fighting instead just to maintain sanctions against Russia rather than lift them. “The response to something being too little is to do more, not to do nothing,” says Singer. “And that’s what we’ve done since.”
All of which means the notion of deterring Russian attacks on elections or civil society is, for the moment, defunct. Expect the Kremlin’s habit of electoral-meddling will get worse before it gets better—until someone gives them a reason not to.
*** 
FireEye
Meanwhile, Germany looks to take a more aggressive posture against Russian intrusion.
The head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency accused Russian rivals of gathering large amounts of political data in cyber attacks and said it was up to the Kremlin to decide whether it wanted to put it to use ahead of Germany’s September elections….
Hans-Georg Maassen, president of the BfV agency, said “large amounts of data” were seized during a May 2015 cyber attack on the Bundestag, or lower house of parliament, which has previously been blamed on APT28, a Russian hacking group….
Germany’s top cyber official last week confirmed attacks on two foundations affiliated with Germany’s ruling coalition parties that were first identified by security firm Trend Micro.
“We recognize this as a campaign being directed from Russia. Our counterpart is trying to generate information that can be used for disinformation or for influencing operations,” he said. “Whether they do it or not is a political decision … that I assume will be made in the Kremlin.”
Maassen said it appeared that Moscow had acted in a similar manner in the United States, making a “political decision” to use information gathered through cyber attacks to try to influence the U.S. presidential election.
Berlin was studying what legal changes were needed to allow authorities to purge stolen data from third-party servers, and to potentially destroy servers used to carry out cyber attacks.
“We believe it is necessary that we are in a position to be able to wipe out these servers if the providers and the owners of the servers are not ready to ensure that they are not used to carry out attacks,” Maassen said….
He said intelligence agencies knew which servers were used by various hacker groups, including APT10, APT28 and APT29.