Spy vs Spy

In my wasted youth I loved Mad Magazine. One of my favorite cartoons were the Spy vs. Spy series. Although the way these two characters plotted against each other is funny in a comic strip, it definitely is not humorous in practice.

It is imperative that our intelligence operatives do not pick sides. They're all supposed to be on our side.

The U.S. intelligence community is in the midst of a severe crisis. It has been used, or perhaps allowed itself to be used, as a tool of political destruction, against some of the same U.S. citizens it was created to protect.

What I am talking about is the continuing “Wiretapgate” debacle. We are seeing the widespread abuse of intelligence by an incumbent administration to target political opposition. Long a technique in the developing world — a tactic I often witnessed as a CIA station chief working abroad — the Third World has come to roost in the United States. It is a tragedy of the first order.

The danger of politicization is widely accepted throughout the intelligence community as the greatest hazard, in theory, to the intelligence profession. If an intel service cannot be accepted as an unbiased arbiter, it loses the trust of its people, and risks becoming irrelevant and unheeded. History is littered with intel failures; one need only look to the invasion of Iraq to see how politicization can lead to costly failure and a “trust gap” that can take years to bridge and resolve.

More here.

Settle This Once And For All

How much more of this "they did, they didn't," do we have to put up with? Is this some kind of political strategery to make all of America sick to death of fake news?

It's like slowly pulling a scab from a half-healed wound.
Come on, give it a good yank, take it off and let the blood indictments flow..

Republican congressional investigators expect a potential “smoking gun” establishing that the Obama administration spied on the Trump transition team, and possibly the president-elect himself, will be produced to the House Intelligence Committee this week, a source told Fox News.

Classified intelligence showing incidental collection of Trump team communications, purportedly seen by committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., and described by him in vague terms at a bombshell Wednesday afternoon news conference, came from multiple sources, Capitol Hill sources told Fox News. The intelligence corroborated information about surveillance of the Trump team that was known to Nunes, sources said, even before President Trump accused his predecessor of having wiretappedhim in a series of now-infamous tweets posted on March 4.

The intelligence is said to leave no doubt the Obama administration, in its closing days, was using the cover of legitimate surveillance on foreign targets to spy on President-elect Trump, according to sources.

More scab pulling here.

With Allies Like This...

I assume the Brits, like everyone else, thought Hillary Clinton was a shoo in so they went along with a request from US intelligence sources. Their mission, should they accept it, is to lift the skirts of Trump's electronic communications and have a looksee at The Donald's goodies.

"This'll put us in good with the Yanks", says they, "and after the election Winnie's bust will soon be back where it belongs, in the White House, glaring at that dreadful, horse-faced lesbian. Cheerio!"

Fox News Judicial Analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano claimed “three intelligence sources” say President Obama looked to British spy agency GCHQ to obtain transcripts of conversations involving President Donald Trump on “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday.

[..]He used GCHQ. What the heck is GCHQ? That’s the initials for the British spying agency. They have 24/7 access to the NSA database. So by simply having two people go to them saying, ‘President Obama needs transcripts of conversations involving candidate Trump, conversations involving president-elect Trump,’ he’s able to get it, and there’s no American fingerprints on this.”

No one is sure what Trump will do in the best of circumstances. Lord only knows how he will take the Brits to task for this.

Story here.

And of course the Brits enter the frey, they say, "Nay, no way Jose":

A spokesperson for the British government is speaking out several hours after Fox News senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano claimed that “three intelligence sources” informed him that former President Barack Obama employed the British intel service to spy on then-candidate Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election.

“No part of this story is true,” the spokesperson told The Blaze Tuesday afternoon.

Their response here.

Alexa Takes The Fifth

Does the iPhone Bluetooth Blab?

I was talking to my daughter this morning and she brought up a troubling subject. She stated that she was puzzled by something that her iPhone Bluetooth app may be doing. Recently she was talking with her roommates about a subject, overweight males, and a little bit later she starting receiving ads in her favorite apps for swim suits (a product named Chubbies?). She had her iPhone Bluetooth adapter on as she uses it to send music to her Bluetooth speakers.

Same thing happened when she was talking about switching her cell phone provider, she started getting ads about different cell phone service plans. Then one of her roommates got ads about Brooklyn hair salons ... this a few hours after  she was talking about looking for a different salon, in Brooklyn. They both use ATT cellular service on their iPhones.

My daughter used AirDrop to send images, etc., to her work phone or her computer. She kept it on all the time. Once she stopped the Bluetooth adapter until she needed it, the ads stopped. Coinky-dink?

Does any one have any information on this?
Are cellular service companies doing something illegal or is this part of the tiny, tiny script that you don't read in your service agreement?

This is why I refuse to have an Amazon Echo or anything like it in the house. It is just another way for someone to listen in on your life.

CIA Imitates Russian Hackers

And now we go a little bit further down the rabbit hole. I need to lose some weight so I'm looking for the pill that makes me smaller. If only the government could find the pill that makes them honest.

Wikileaks now uncovers more of the CIA's possible culpability in the 2016 elections mess.  

The CIA's Remote Devices Branch's UMBRAGE group collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques 'stolen' from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation.

With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the "fingerprints" of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from.

So the so-called evidence that the Russians hacked the election could have been the CIA hacking our own elections. This is a Rooskie source but what the hell, more here and WikiLeaks here.

Zero Hedge also has something to say about the WikiLeaks leaks and the CIA's use of Russian malware to imitate cyber attacks:

WikiLeaks said that ‘Year Zero’ revealed details of the CIA’s “global covert hacking program,” including “weaponized exploits” used against company products including “Apple's iPhone, Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.”

WikiLeaks tweeted the leak, which it claims came from a network inside the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virginia.

Among the more notable disclosures which, if confirmed, "would rock the technology world", the CIA had managed to bypass encryption on popular phone and messaging services such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram. According to the statement from WikiLeaks, government hackers can penetrate Android phones and collect “audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.”

Another profound revelation is that the CIA can engage in "false flag" cyberattacks which portray Russia as the assailant. Discussing the CIA's Remote Devices Branch's UMBRAGE group, Wikileaks' source notes that it "collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques 'stolen' from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation.

Well, apparently everyone in the US intelligence community got into the act. The DHS tried to hack the State of Georgia's election servers last year. The only difference between them and the CIA is that they suck at it.

The Georgia Secretary of State's Office now confirms 10 separate cyberattacks on its network were all traced back to U.S. Department of Homeland Security addresses.

In an exclusive interview, a visibly frustrated Secretary of State Brian Kemp confirmed the attacks of different levels on his agency's network over the last 10 months. He says they all traced back to DHS internet provider addresses.

"We're being told something that they think they have it figured out, yet nobody's really showed us how this happened,” Kemp said. "We need to know."

This isn't a swamp, it's a lake. Drain the damn thing.

Plugging The Leaks

For an interesting discussion on how President Trump and General Flynn identified the persons who were the leaks in national security, go here. 

President Trump has defeated Democrats in the intelligence community (IC) who were leaking classified information to the press. Such leaks have been a problem for many presidents, but Trump is the first who took a proactive approach and set up a sting operation that identified the leakers. It’s highly illegal to leak classified information. It’s also illegal to PUBLISH this information, but Trump is too smart to try and prosecute reporters. 

I thought that Trump would fire members of the IC until the leaks stopped, but the president solved the problem with a much more imaginative and deadly approach: He fed the IC false information. When this information was published, Trump was able to identify individual leakers. 

How? 

Each group or individual who leaked was given a different version of events. This is CLASSIC spycraft. If nine individuals are told nine different stories, and then each of those stories is published, you know the identity of each person who talked to the press.

President Trump in no fool, he does not tolerate fools nor does he hire them. Did he plug all the leaks, maybe not. Is this article fake news? maybe so, 'cause there are still leaks.