Category Archives: FBI

Thousand Talents = J Visa = Espionage = Stupid

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It was just this morning that I sent a text to a former CIA operative asking if he was comfortable with the FBI being the lone government agency tracking foreign spies operating in the United States. His reply was NO. Sigh…My gut was telling me that espionage in the United States is out of control and while performing some research for about an hour, it IS out of control. Understand foreign operatives come from several countries into the United States using several visa methods and for the sake of this article, the concentration will be on China. It is a sure bet however, the same techniques are used by other rogue countries that just are for sure either best described as adversaries or enemies of our homeland.

So, back to the question of the FBI being the lone tracking government agency. One of the first Reuters articles had this headline: FBI wishes it had acted quicker as China stole intellectual property

The admission by John Brown, assistant director of the Counterintelligence Division at the FBI, backed up a Senate subcommittee report that found federal agencies had responded too slowly as China recruited the researchers, leaving U.S. taxpayers unwittingly funding the rise of China’s economy and military. Despite China’s announcement in 2008 of the Thousand Talents Plan – for which China had originally hoped to recruit 2,000 people but ended up recruiting more than 7,000 by 2017 – the FBI did not respond strongly until last year, the report released on Monday by the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found. 

Just a few days before that Reuters’ article there was this headline: U.S. charges Chinese national with stealing trade secrets

Haitao Xiang, 42, an employee of Monsanto and its Climate Corp subsidiary from 2008 to 2017, was stopped by federal officials at a U.S. airport before he could board a flight to China carrying proprietary farming software, the department said in a statement.

“The indictment alleges another example of the Chinese government using Talent Plans to encourage employees to steal intellectual property from their U.S. employers,” Assistant Attorney General John Demers said.

Notice 9 years of employment above. Sigh. Read on, there is more.

US prosecutors have accused a tour guide of picking up US security secrets and delivering them cloak-and-dagger-style to Beijing. From October 2015 to July 2018, an FBI double agent conducted “dead drops,” in which, authorities say, Peng fetched information in the San Francisco Bay Area and Columbus, Georgia. Authorities say the double agent, identified only as “the Source,” went to the FBI in 2015, after the State Security Ministry tried to recruit him as a spy by telling him that he could rely on “Ed,” who had family and business dealings in China. As officials grapple with the threat of infiltrators trying to steal information from US companies, prosecutors have opened multiple cases against people suspected of spying for China. Last October, prosecutors charged a spy with attempting to steal trade secrets from several US aviation and aerospace companies.

Just last week in the Senate, the Homeland Security Committee Chairman, Portman held a hearing. Finding a summary from the hearing on the FBI website was the following:

Time and time again, the Communist government of China has proven that it will use any means necessary to advance its interests at the expense of others, including the United States, and pursue its long-term goal of being the world’s superpower by 2049. Among its many ways of collecting information, prioritized in national strategies such as the Five-Year Plan, the Chinese government oversees expert recruitment programs known as talent plans. Through these programs, the Chinese government offers lucrative financial and research benefits to recruit individuals working and studying outside of China who possess access to, or expertise in, high-priority research fields. These talent recruitment programs include not only the well-known Thousand Talents Plan but also more than 200 similar programs, all of which are overseen by the Chinese government and designed to support its goals, sometimes at U.S. taxpayers’ expense. Read on here.

Senate report accuses China of technology theft | NHK ...

200 similar programs? WHAT?

The Thousand Talents program is nothing more than a espionage recruiting operation. This past September, the FBI arrested Zhongsan Liu who was operating a front operation in New Jersey called the China Association for International Exchange of Personnel. According to the criminal complaint, Liu beginning in 2017 used the company to fraudulently procure U.S. visas for for many Chinese officials under J-1 research. Liu has actually led this front group however for 26 years. The program among others were created and directed by the Chinese government’s State Administration of Foreign Expert Affairs. Liu is a senior official of that agency. He also worked at the Chinese embassy in Washington and at the consulate in New York while this recruiting operation was going on.

“Chinese government sources claim over 44,000 highly skilled Chinese personnel have returned to China since 2009 through talent plans,” the report said. “As noted by China Daily, which is owned by the Chinese Communist Party: ‘China has more than 300 entrepreneurial parks for students returned from overseas. More than 24,500 enterprises have been set up in the parks by over 67,000 overseas returnees.'”

According to the Pentagon’s latest annual report on the Chinese military, the Thousand Talents Plan is used to bolster the People’s Liberation Army military buildup.

“China uses various incentive strategies to attract foreign personnel to work on and manage strategic programs and fill technical knowledge gaps, including the ‘Thousand Talents Program,’ which prioritizes recruiting people of Chinese descent or recent Chinese emigrants whose recruitment the Chinese government views as necessary to Chinese scientific and technical modernization, especially with regard to defense technology,” the report said.

The program of China’s Thousand Talents is really an unadvertised method to facilitate the legal and illicit transfer of U.S. technology, intellectual property and know-how as summarized by the National Intelligence Council.The NIC is a midterm and long term strategic thinking center formed in 1979. That report is found here. It is dated 2018 and titled: How China’s Economic Aggression Threatens the Technologies and Intellectual Property of the United States and the World

Do we really want a trade deal after all this with China? It can be argued that the trade has already taken place by China’s theft. This all complicates the bi-lateral signing of a trade deal between the United States and China or does it in the end?

Basic qualifications for the Thousand Talents program include the following:

1. Basic Qualifications for Candidates

The Recruitment Program for Innovative Talents (Long Term) targets people under 55 years of age who are willing to work in China on a full-time basis, with full professorships or the equivalent in prestigious foreign universities and R&D institutes, or with senior titles from well-known international companies or financial institutions.

2. Preferential Policies and Treatments

Awardees will be conferred the title of “National Distinguished Experts” and be provided with enabling working and living conditions.

(1) Enabling working conditions

Awardees are entitled to assume some leadership, professional or technical positions in universities, R&D institutes, central SOEs as well as state-owned commercial and financial institutions; to serve as project principals of the National Key Scientific and Technological Projects, “863 Program”(or the National High-tech R&D Program), “973 Program”(or the National Program on Key Basic Research Project), the National Nature Science Fund Projects; to apply for S&T funds and industrial development funds from government to support scientific research as well as production and operating activities in China; to participate in the consultation and demonstration of China’s major projects, the formulation of key scientific research plans and national standards, the construction of major projects, etc; to determine the expenditure and employment within the prescribed scope of responsibilities as project principals; to be engaged in various domestic academic organizations and the election of academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering(foreign academicians) and become the candidates of a wide range of government rewards.

(2) Special living benefits

Awardees as well as their spouses and minor children with alien nationality may apply for “Permanent Residence for Aliens” and/or multiple entry visas, the validity of which lasts 2-5 years. Awardees with Chinese citizenship will be free to settle down in any city of their choice and will not be restricted by his or her original residence registry. Each awardee shall receive a one-off, start-up package of RMB 1 million yuan from the nation’s central budget; be entitled to medical care, social insurance including pensions, medical insurance and work-related injury insurance; and may purchase one residential apartment for personal use. The housing and meal allowance, removing indemnity, home-leave-subsidy, and children-education-allowance in the wage income in Chinese territory within 5 years shall be deducted before taxes in accordance with relevant laws and regulations. Employers have to offer job opportunities to spouses, and children will have guaranteed admission to schools. The income level should be decided on their previous jobs overseas through negotiation with due living allowances.

(3) Key points of the Recruitment Program of Global Experts in the Field of Liberal Arts and Social Science

By the end of 2010, overseas high-level scholars in fields of liberal arts and social sciences, particularly urgently needed professionals specialized in Intellectual Property Law, Environment and Resources Protection Law, International Law, Diplomacy, Psychology etc. are eligible to apply for the Key National Innovative Projects. People who are introduced by this program shall support the Communist Party of China and the socialist system, maintaining compliance with the Constitution, laws, regulations and policies of the People’s Republic of China, with full professorships or the equivalent in prestigious foreign universities, R&D institutes and other institutions of art and culture, enjoying a high global reputation and being influential in their academic fields which are urgently needed in China; they shall be within 60 years of age, andd willing to work in China on a full-time basis.

With regard to application procedures, the “Liberal Arts and Social Sciences” plan is a subdivision of “The Recruitment Program for Key Disciplines”. Overseas talents are required to sign an employment contract or a letter of intention for talent recruitment with employers before applying for the Program. Please refer to the application procedures of “The Recruitment Program for Innovative Talents (Long Term)”.

 

 

 

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Appeal Brings Details of 2011 Murders

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Image result for tamerlan and dzhokhar tsarnaev

The man who implicated Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev in a 2011 triple murder in Waltham said he and Tsarnaev took thousands of dollars from the victims and spent more than an hour trying to clean up the crime scene, law enforcement officials said.

The details were contained in a search warrant affidavit partially unsealed Wednesday in federal court in Boston in connection with the pending appeal of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, now 26, the younger brother of Tamerlan and his coconspirator in the bombings.

Who's Who in the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev trial. (Photo composite Zeninjor Enwemeka/WBUR) Who are these people, click here.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is challenging his conviction and death sentence in the Marathon case. He is claiming that he acted under the sway of a violent, domineering older brother. Tamerlan Tsarnaev died days after the Marathon attack during a confrontation with police in Watertown.

While Tamerlan Tsarnaev and a friend, Ibragim Todashev, were suspected in the Waltham killings previously, this week’s filing offers new details into the actions of the elder Tsarnaev in the years leading up to the 2013 Marathon bombings.

The search warrant affidavit, filed in the bombing case, recounted statements that Todashev made to investigators in a May 2013 interview. Shortly after making the statements, officials say, Todashev was fatally shot by a Boston FBI agent when he allegedly lunged at the agent with a metal broomstick.

Officials also alleged Todashev hurled a coffee table at the agent, striking him in the head. Authorities ruled that the FBI agent who shot Todashev had acted in self-defense.

“Todashev confessed that he and Tamerlan participated in the Waltham murders” on Sept. 11, 2011, of Brendan Mess, 25, Erik H. Weissman, 31, and Raphael M. Teken, 37, the affidavit said. The victims were killed in Mess’s apartment on Harding Avenue in Waltham.

The Middlesex district attorney’s office said Friday the investigation into the Waltham triple slaying was still open.

One of the Waltham victims, Mess, had formerly been a close friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev. But Tsarnaev did not attend Mess’s funeral, a friend of Mess’s told the Globe in 2013, saying it raised suspicions.

The affidavit said Todashev indicated “he and Tamerlan had agreed initially just to rob the victims, whom they knew to be drug dealers who sold marijuana. Todashev said that he and Tamerlan took several thousand dollars from the residence and split the money. Todashev said that Tamerlan had a gun, which he brandished to enter the residence.”

Todashev indicated that Tamerlan Tsarnaev chose to escalate the crime from robbery to murder.

“Tamerlan decided that they should eliminate any witnesses to the crime, and then Todashev and Tamerlan bound the victims, who were ultimately murdered,” the affidavit said. “Todashev said that they spent over an hour cleaning the scene.”

According to this week’s filing, Todashev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev wanted to remove “traces of their fingerprints and other identifying details” from the scene.

The two traveled to the scene of the murders together in a gray, 1999 Honda CR-V and left the scene together in that same vehicle, according to the filing.

The victims were discovered in Mess’s apartment with their throats slit and their bodies sprinkled with marijuana.

The search warrant was for Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s Honda CR-V. Investigators were seeking “blood, DNA, trace evidence, and other items” in the vehicle that may have linked him and Todashev to the Waltham slaying, according to the affidavit.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether any physical evidence was recovered.

The Tsarnaev siblings carried out the April 15, 2013, bombings, which killed three people, including an 8-year-old Dorchester boy, and wounded more than 260 others. The brothers also killed an MIT police officer while they were on the run.

State and federal investigators first contacted Todashev, who was a gym buddy of Tamerlan Tsarnaev before he moved to Florida, six days after the Marathon bombings.

Todashev spoke to investigators several times in the weeks after the bombings. But, after Todashev booked a ticket home to Russia in May, an FBI agent and two state troopers traveled to Orlando to interview him.

At his apartment in May 2013, the three law enforcement officers interviewed Todashev starting around 7:30 p.m. and stretching past midnight. Another officer stood guard outside.

At first Todashev denied involvement in the Waltham murders: “Like I said, I didn’t kill nobody and I need your help.” But eventually, he confessed that he was involved in it, officials said.

Shortly after midnight, the apartment erupted in violence. A coffee table was hurled in the air, opening a gash on the FBI agent’s head that would require nine staples. Todashev then brandished a metal broomstick and charged. The bleeding agent shouted at Todashev to stop, then fired his gun three or four times. Todashev fell, but sprang up and lunged again, and the agent shot him several more times. Todashev fell again, face down, and was pronounced dead at the scene.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was convicted and sentenced to death in 2015 for his admitted role in the Marathon bombings.

The heavily redacted warrant was unsealed Wednesday at the request of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s lawyers.

The attorneys maintain the trial judge erred when he barred the defense from telling jurors about Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s suspected involvement in the Waltham case.

Federal prosecutors have responded that the Waltham evidence doesn’t “show that Tamerlan ‘influenced’ or ‘intimidated’ him into committing the crimes in this case or that [Dzhokhar] Tsarnaev played a lesser role in the bombing.”

Oral arguments in Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s appeal are slated for Dec. 12 before the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. He’s currently incarcerated at a federal supermax facility in Colorado.

It is Bigger than Burisma and the Bidens, Trump Knows

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Speaker Pelosi held a press conference after the first day of the open impeachment inquiry hearing declaring that she is the smartest when it comes to intelligence and she will defend and protect the whistle-blower with all her might. HPSCI Chairman Adam Schiff said at least twice that he does not know nor has he spoken to the whistle-blower. Sheesh really? REALLY?

Pelosi and Schiff are for sure covering for something much larger and it is in Ukraine and likely at least a few other countries. There was a historic theft from PrivatBank a few years ago that was in excess of $5 BILLION. Then Ukraine was forced to nationalize the bank until such time the monies were tracked, found or recovered, which still has not happened. The country was financially suffering and the reputation of corruption in Ukraine continued to fester.

Seems our own U.S. State Department was enlisted to step up operations in Ukraine using several government agencies and non-government agencies known as NGO’s.

The matter of the whistle-blower is but one piece of all things Ukraine even while 2 State Department officials, George Kent and William Taylor provide testimony in the first round of the public hearing. (BTW, Kent’s wife is of Crimean-Tatar ancestry) Kent and Taylor are in the thick of all things Ukraine and beyond even while responding in open testimony they were unaware of key political events stateside.

Our not so favorite nefarious operator George Soros is very much at the center of much of the chaos in Ukraine, the Hillary Clinton/John Kerry State Department and some of those NGO’s.

List below are some bullet items for reference. It is difficult to piece together the whole mess but the facts below may help the reader with the long game plot against President Trump because his handful of phone calls with Ukraine President Zelensky regarding investigations into corruption(s) has struck a nerve that the power-brokers in DC are driven to stop and protect.

  • To boost legitimacy of Ukraine and Burisma, the Obama administration partnered Burisma with USAID.
  • USAID was enlisted to prepare for a new generation of Ukrainian politicians.
  • From the U.S. Ukraine Business Council: Briefing by Vadym Pozharskyi, Advisor to the Board of Directors, Burisma Holdings Ukraine’s largest independent gas producer, 30% market share by gas output volume in 2015

    Vadym Pozharskyi currently serves as an Advisor to the Board of Directors at the Burisma Holdings. He is also in charge of the Holding’s overseas expansion, GR & PR block. Prior to that, he worked for 4 years in the public sector, inter alia, on positions of the Head of the International Relations Department at the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources of Ukraine and the Deputy Head of the State Environmental Investment Agency of Ukraine.

    During these engagements he extensively cooperated with international organizations, led the negotiations group to UNFCCC on the restoration of Ukraine’s status in Kyoto protocol. From 2010 until 2014, Mr. Pozharskyi was the Global Environment Facility (GEF) Focal point in Ukraine.

    Burisma Holdings, www.BURISMA.com, since its launch in 2002, has rapidly become the largest gas producer in Ukraine.  Burisma Holdings consists of 4 operating companies, engaged in exploration and production of hydrocarbons (dealing with hydrocarbon production).  Burisma Holdings has expanded its operations beyond Ukraine and now operates in Germany, Mexico, Italy, and Kazakhstan.

    Burisma Geothermal is a new branch of Burisma Holdings.  It is a 100% owned subsidiary which specializes in geothermal energy development and electricity production from renewable and environmentally friendly energy sources in Europe.  Burisma Holdings has purchased equipment and technologies from such USA companies as Halliburton and Caterpillar.

  • Several U.S. government agencies were tapped to provide financial assistance to Ukraine and President Trump is right to ask harder questions as there is no Inspector General assigned to Ukraine to track that spending for legitimacy. Remember the legacy of corruption in Ukraine and Trump has a duty to see if he can trust a brand new leader in Zelensky who was never a politician.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  • William B. Taylor is the executive vice president at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Earlier, he was the special coordinator for Middle East Transitions in the U.S. State Department. He oversaw assistance and support to Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria. He served as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009. Ambassador Taylor became chargé d’affaires ad interim for Ukraine in June 2019. In picking through some of the other names in the membership of The American Academy of Diplomacy  (NGO) which includes Taylor, they are: Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, Jon Huntsman Jr., John Kerry, Victoria Nuland, Thomas Pickering, Susan Rice, Wendy Sherman, Strobe Talbott and Kent Volker.
  • Willam Taylor as part of the U.S. Institute of Peace, not only was USAID a deeper partner in Ukraine but Google is also. USAID was/is a sponsor of RADA. RADA and the USAID program that launched in November of 2013 collectively took to the streets in Ukraine for what is known as the Revolution of Dignity coordinating with Members of Parliament and civil society organizations and other international experts.
  • President Trump mentioned Crowdstrike in the phone call. Crowdstrike was hired by Perkins Coie to investigate the hacking of he DNC server. Perkins Coie was the law firm of record for the DNC and hired Fusion GPS. Trump has the notion that Crowdstrike also may have operated out of Ukraine that clues point to Crowdstrike was part of foreign interference into our 2016 elections. It should be noted that a independent group of journalists based in Britain are seeking a UK report of Russian/Ukraine interference their Britain’s election. As a matter of fact, Crowdstrike has an office in London.

 

  • With all this political power and international resumes, how was it that Russia was allowed to annex Crimea and invade Ukraine in the first place? Where was Taylor, Nuland, Kerry, Rice or Obama? Too busy with the Iran nuclear deal it seems. The United States needed Russia’s cooperation with the Iran JCPOA so Obama did not grant the request of Ukraine for military aide other than to ship MRE’s and blankets. Congress (read Democrats) never complained until President Trump was in a phone call and approved the eventual shipment of real military aide.

So, back to the beginning, where does this whistle-blower fit in? Seems he was/is the Ukraine expert assigned to VP Biden who was assigned by Obama to be the leader of the envoy for all things Ukraine. At least 6 emails obtained from a FOIA list the Ciaramella in the email chain. Others include Victoria Nuland, George Kent and Kathleen Kavalec. There are other names in the email discussion(s) dated June 2016.

This is a larger operation that has a genesis in Ukraine. There are known quantities of moving parts but it is clear that Pelosi, Schiff and perhaps many others at NGO’s, the State Department, the previous members of the Obama White House are in fact just a little nervous that Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani are treading in waters made dark by operatives they are working to hide, defend and protect.

 

Trump’s Reelection Operation Targeted by Cyber Attacks

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Hey Hillary it is not Russia, but they are out there for sure. This time most notable attributions are pointing to Iran.

When the Pentagon recently awarded Microsoft a $10 billion contract to transform and host the US military’s cloud computing systems, the mountain of money came with an implicit challenge: Can Microsoft keep the Pentagon’s systems secure against some of the most well-resourced, persistent, and sophisticated hackers on earth?

“They’re under assault every hour of the day,” says James Lewis, vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

Microsoft’s latest win over cloud rival Amazon for the ultra-lucrative military contact means that an intelligence-gathering apparatus among the most important in the world is based in the woods outside Seattle. These kinds of national security responsibilities once sat almost exclusively in Washington, DC. Now in this corner of Washington state, dozens of engineers and intelligence analysts are dedicated to watching and stopping the government-sponsored hackers proliferating around the world.

Members of the so-called MSTIC (Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center) team are threat-focused: one group is responsible for Russian hackers code-named Strontium, another watches North Korean hackers code-named Zinc, and yet another tracks Iranian hackers code-named Holmium. MSTIC tracks over 70 code-named government-sponsored threat groups and many more that are unnamed.

El acuerdo del Pentágono con Microsoft conlleva un centro ...

What are the superpowers of Microsoft?

“Microsoft sees stuff that just nobody else does,” says Williams, who founded the cybersecurity firm Rendition Infosec. “We routinely find stuff, for instance, like flags for malicious IPs in Office 365 that Microsoft flags, but we don’t see it anywhere else for months.”

Connect the dots

Cyber threat intelligence is the discipline of tracking adversaries, following bread crumbs, and producing intelligence you can use to help your team and make the other side’s life harder. To achieve that, the five-year-old MSTIC team includes former spies and government intelligence operators whose experience at places like Fort Meade, home to the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command, translates immediately to their roles at Microsoft. 

MSTIC names dozens of threats, but the geopolitics are complicated: China and the United States, two of the most significant players in cyberspace and the two biggest economies on earth, are virtually never called out the way countries like Iran, Russia, and North Korea frequently are. 

“Our team uses the data, connects the dots, tells the story, tracks the actor and their behaviors,” says Jeremy Dallman, a director of strategic programs and partnerships at MSTIC. “They’re hunting the actors—where they’re moving, what they’re planning next, who they are targeting—and getting ahead of that.”

Microsoft, like other tech giants including Google and Facebook, regularly notifies people targeted by government hackers, which gives the targets the chance to defend themselves. In the last year, MSTIC has notified around 10,000 Microsoft customers that they’re being targeted by government hackers. 

New targets

Beginning in August, MSTIC spotted what’s known as a password spraying campaign. Hackers took around 2,700 educated guesses at passwords for accounts associated with an American presidential campaign, government officials, journalists, and high-profile Iranians living outside Iran. Four accounts were compromised in this attack.

“Once we understand their infrastructure—we have an IP address we know is theirs that they use for malicious purposes—we can start looking at DNS records, domains created, platform traffic,” Dallman says. “When they turn around and start using that infrastructure in this kind of attack, we see it because we’re already tracking that as a known indicator of that actor’s behavior.” 

After doing considerable reconnaissance work, Phosphorus tried to exploit the account recovery process by using targets’ real phone numbers. MSTIC has spotted Phosphorus and other government-sponsored hackers, including Russia’s Fancy Bear, repeatedly using that tactic to try to phish two-factor authentication codes for high-value targets.

What raised Microsoft’s alarm above normal on this occasion was that Phosphorus varied its standard operating procedure of going after NGOs and sanctions organizations. The cross-hairs shifted, the tactics changed, and the scope grew.

Microsoft’s sleuthing ultimately pointed the finger at Iranian hackers for targeting presidential campaigns including, Reuters reported, Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection operation.

One consequence of the 2016 US election is a rise in the sheer number of players fighting to hack political parties, campaigns, and think tanks, not to mention government itself. Election-related hacking has typically been the province of the “big four”—Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. But it’s spreading to other countries, although the Microsoft researchers declined to specify what they’ve seen.

“What is different is that you’re getting additional countries joining the fray that weren’t necessarily there before,” says Jason Norton, a principal project manager on MSTIC. “The big two [Russia and China]—now, we can say they’ve been historically going after this since well before the 2016 election. But now you’re getting to see additional countries do that—poking and prodding the soft underbelly in order to know the right pieces to have an influence or impact in the future.” 

“The field is getting crowded,” Dallman agrees. “Actors are learning from each other. As they learn tactics from the more prominent names, they turn that around and use them.” 

The upcoming election is different, too, in that no one is surprised to see this malicious activity. Leading into 2016, Russian cyber activity was greeted with a collective dumbfounded naïveté, contributing to paralysis and an unsure response. Not this time.

You saw them in 2016, you saw what they did in Germany, you saw them in the French elections—all following the same MO. The 2018 midterms, too—to a lesser degree, but we still saw some of the same MO, the same actors, the same timing, the same techniques. Now we know, going into 2020, that this is the MO we’re looking for. And now we’ve started to see other countries come out and start doing other tactics.”

In 2016, it was CrowdStrike that first investigated and pointed the finger at Russian activity aiming to interfere with the American election. The US law enforcement and intelligence community later confirmed the company’s findings and eventually, after Robert Mueller’s investigation, indicted Russian hackers and detailed Moscow’s campaign.

MIT Technology Review visited Microsoft, the full summary is here.

Self Described Socialist Now the DA in San Francisco

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Senator Dianne Feinstein lives in Pacific Heights, a suburb of San Francisco. Speaker Nancy Pelosi lives there too. In fact 56 billionaires live in the Bay Area of which at least 20 live in Pacific Heights. Did they all vote for the Marxist Boudin or know his history much less objectives as a District Attorney?

Primer, a leading voice from CNN for Black Lives Matter:

Was going to write a piece on Boudin but I found this perfect summary below.

Nation's Most Toxic DA Candidate - Patriot Gun News

On Saturday, public defender Chesa Boudin won the race to become district attorney of San Francisco. His victory, although celebrated as part of the larger national movement to elect more criminal justice reformers to offices of power, may not be such a gift to San Francisco, whose crime woes seem to be at least partly the result of too little criminal enforcement.

Boudin’s political leanings are fairly unsurprising. San Francisco’s newest DA and self-proclaimed socialist is the son of former members of the violent revolutionary far-left group Weather Underground, an organization that rose to infamy in the 1970s and carried out as many as two dozen bombings of government properties. Both of Boudin’s parents were imprisoned for murders related to a robbery they conducted as Weathermen, and Boudin’s father David Gilbert is still serving time.

In his parents’ stead, two other militant Weathermen, known as leaders within the organization, raised Boudin. Indeed, in an interview with Jacobin (yes, that Jacobin), Boudin spoke positively of how his four parents’ “activism” has inspired his own work, despite the “mistakes” they all made—a supposedly “charming” detail that is fundamentally grotesque.

As a Yale-trained lawyer, Boudin eventually left the United States to work as a translator for Venzuela’s now-deceased socialist dictator Hugo Chavez, an outrageous resume data point that ought to get someone laughed out of political office (for those unfamiliar, Chavez’s socialism eventually transformed Venezuela into a failed state). But predictably not so in San Francisco, where behemoth, yet ineffective government is fetishized to the point of allowing piles of human feces in the streets.

Starting January 1, 2020, Boudin will hold the office of the city’s top law enforcement official, but his staggeringly leftist vision—regarded by some as exceptionally to the left, even by San Francisco standards—may be at sharp odds for what the city needs.

True, Boudin isn’t entering the easiest of roles. Among the United States’ 20 largest cities, San Francisco currently ranks number one in property crime, a status that has been driven by a cottage industry of organized gangs reselling stolen goods, often in broad daylight. Boudin’s stated approach to crimes like this is to stop punishing them.

Boudin’s platform is nominally predicated upon reducing mass incarceration and racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Among Boudin’s declared initiatives is to no longer charge for gang enhancement, which significantly increases the penalties if an offender is found to have participated in a street gang.

Boudin has called this penalty “racially motivated” since recent studies have found that only 8 percent of documented gang members are white. However, San Francisco, whether its latest DA is willing to admit it or not, has a serious problem with gang activity. For instance, 70 to 80 percent of the city’s car break-ins are carried out by organized gangs, and a car is broken into in San Francisco 80 times per day. If these numbers suggest anything, there isn’t enough deterrence for joining a street gang.

Decriminalizing gang membership should not be used as a political cudgel to advance the left’s identity politics drivel, and doing so may have disastrous consequences. San Francisco has previously relaxed certain policies, reducing penalties for some facially non-violent charges, to reduce incarceration levels and allow police supposedly to focus on violent crime. While this method can be applied with some measured success, it requires a highly tailored approach that San Francisco has shown itself ill-equipped to carry out.

For instance, when San Francisco passed Proposition 47 five years ago, it met loud applause from criminal justice reform groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). But it was an abysmal failure. As I wrote last week when reflecting on Prop 47, “Prop 47 was allegedly designed to keep non-violent offenders out of the state’s already packed prisons by reducing certain non-violent felonies to mere misdemeanors. For instance, a thief can now steal twice as much as he or she formerly could before facing a felony charge. But thieves have begun to capitalize on this loophole. In cities like Vacaville, CA, just outside of the state’s capital, theft has more than doubled, and police believe Prop 47 is to blame.”

Boudin’s platform, in all its emphasis on reducing incarceration (as opposed to reducing crime), likely promises more failed policies similar to Prop 47. Some have voiced their discontent with Boudin’s election, which they fear will only exacerbate San Francisco’s current crime woes, ones that remained largely unaddressed by San Francisco’s former DA George Gascon. On Saturday, police union president Tony Montoya declared in an official statement, “Unfortunately, the election results mean that San Francisco residents will have to suffer through another four years of George Gascón style policies that have plagued our city and decimated public safety.”

Two Marches ago, I reflected in the tone of a sad desperado how San Francisco had begun to resemble a failed state. As a former San Franciscan, I have little hope that Boudin’s policies will do anything but exacerbate what is, by all metrics, an urban crisis fomented and sustained by excessive liberalism. Hat tip Federalist