Clinton campaign demands intel briefings for Electoral College members
ALEX SEITZ-WALD
Dec 12th 2016 3:52PM
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Hillary Clinton‘s campaign has thrown its support behind an effort to provide members of the Electoral College with intelligence briefings on Russian breaches of U.S. political organizations before the College formally votes to elect Donald Trump president next week.
“The bipartisan electors’ letter raises very grave issues involving our national security. Electors have a solemn responsibility under the Constitution and we support their efforts to have their questions addressed,” Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta said Monday, responding to a request for briefings by a group of electors.
Podesta’s strongly worded statement signals a clear shift in strategy from Clinton and her team, who have until now shown no interest in questioning the legitimacy of last month’s election. And it could crack the door to further challenges or give succor to some Democrats’ long-shot hope that Trump’s election could be upended when the Electoral College convenes December 19.
A large trove of Podesta’s emails were released by WikiLeaks late in the campaign, and intelligence officials believe the emails were provided to the organization by the Russians.40 PHOTOS
Trump defeated Clinton in the general election by an electoral vote margin of 306-232.
Experts say electors’ ability to reverse the November 8 results remains virtually impossible, but mainstream Democrats have tried to create doubts about the outcome following news this weekend that the CIA formally concluded the Russian government worked covertly not just to disrupt the election, but to help Trump win. Four powerful senators — two Democrats, two Republicans — released a statement calling for a joint probe into Russia’s actions.
In Part 2 of this 6 part series, Bill Whittle flips Hillary’s claim that the 2008 financial crisis was caused by tax cuts for the wealthy, and explains who the REAL villains are
During the debate, Mrs. Clinton returned to the same line we’ve been fed for eight years: there’s an economic boom waiting in the Green Economy. No, there isn’t. In Part 3 of this 6 part series, Bill takes apart Hillary’s energy plans and examines the consequences to the planet.
Surely there was no greater missed opportunity in the first debate than listening to HILLARY CLINTON talk about how “concerned” she is about the security of classified government information.Bill Whittle rushes in where CNN fears to tread.
Hillary Clinton says she has a “plan” to “really squeeze ISIS in Syria.” It seems like Syria might be squeezed enough already. In Part 5 of this 6 part series, Bill Whittle lays out the historical facts that show that Clinton and Obama CREATED ISIS.
Tom Kean And Lee Hamilton Messrs. Kean and Hamilton served as chairman and vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission, respectively. They are co-chairmen of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Homeland Security Project.
Sept. 11, 2014
Ten years ago, the 9/11 Commission Report triggered the most significant reorganization of the U.S. intelligence community since 1947. Two months ago, the former members of the commission—we are among them—issued a new report assessing where national security stands, 13 years after the most devastating attacks on America’s homeland.
Most of the new report’s observations focused on counterterrorism, the central focus of the 9/11 Commission. But in speaking with many of the nation’s most senior national-security leaders, we were struck that every one of these experts expressed concern about another issue: daily cyberattacks against the country’s most sensitive public and private computer networks.
A growing chorus of national-security experts describes the cyber realm as the battlefield of the future. American life is becoming evermore dependent on the Internet. At the same time, government and private computer networks in the U.S. are under relentless cyberattack. This is more than an academic concern—attacks in the digital world can inflict serious damage in the physical world. Hackers can threaten the control systems of critical facilities like dams, water-treatment plants and the power grid. A hacker able to remotely control a dam, pumping station or oil pipeline could unleash large-scale devastation. As terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State grow and become more sophisticated, the threat of cyberattack increases as well.
Getty Images
On a smaller scale, but equally unsettling, ordinary building systems like electronic door locks, elevators and video-surveillance cameras (today, present in many homes) are also vulnerable to penetration by hackers. Even life-sustaining medical devices, many of which contain embedded computer systems connected to the Internet, could be disabled by cyberattacks. (more…)
Jihadists in the Middle East are ramping up efforts to mount a massive cyber attack on the U.S., with leaders from both Islamic State and Al Qaeda – including a hacker who once broke into former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Gmail account – recruiting web savvy radicals, FoxNews.com has learned.
Islamic militants brag online that it is only a matter of time before they manage to pull off a highly disruptive attack on America’s infrastructure or financial system. In addition, Islamic State, the terror group that claims to have established a caliphate across Syria and Iraq, boast openly of plans to establish a “cyber caliphate,” protected by jihadist developed encryption software from behind which they hope to mount catastrophic hacking and virus attacks on America and the West.
“The jihadists are investing a lot in encryption technologies and they have developed their own software to protect their communications and when western agencies work out how to crack them they adapt quickly,” said Steve Stalinsky, executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute, a Washington-DC-based non-profit that tracks jihadist Internet activity. “They are forward-thinking and are experimenting with hacking. In the future, the jihadist cyber army’s activities will become a daily reality.”
The terror groups are trying to add to their numbers to boost their capabilities, using social media to reach a larger pool of potential recruits and calling on militant-minded specialists to join them. The targets are the websites of U.S. government agencies, banks, energy companies and transport systems. (more…)
The preparations began before he took the job that landed him at the NSA.
By Edward Jay Epstein
Mr. Epstein’s most recent book is “The Annals of Unsolved Crime” published in March by Melville House.
In March 2013, when Edward Snowden sought a job with Booz Allen Hamilton at a National Security Agency facility in Hawaii, he signed the requisite classified-information agreements and would have been made well aware of the law regarding communications intelligence.
Section 798 of the United States Code makes it a federal crime if a person “knowingly and willfully communicates, furnishes, transmits, or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes, or uses in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States” any classified information concerning communication intelligence.
Mr. Snowden took that position so he could arrange to have published classified communications intelligence, as he told the South China Morning Post earlier this month. The point of Mr. Snowden’s penetration was to get classified data from the NSA. He subsequently stated: “My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked, that is why I accepted that position.”
My question would be, then: Was he alone in this enterprise to misappropriate communications intelligence?
Before taking the job in Hawaii, Mr. Snowden was in contact with people who would later help arrange the publication of the material he purloined. Two of these individuals, filmmaker Laura Poitras and Guardian blogger Glenn Greenwald, were on the Board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation that, among other things, funds WikiLeaks. (more…)
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: A 1999 book by two Chinese colonels put it more aggressively (albeit in a sentence as verbose as it is apocalyptic): “If the attacking side secretly musters large amounts of capital without the enemy nations being aware of this at all and launches a sneak attack against its financial markets,” wrote Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, “then, after causing a financial crisis, buries a computer virus and hacker detachment in the opponent’s computer system in advance, while at the same time carrying out a network attack against the enemy so that the civilian electricity network, traffic dispatching network, financial transaction network, telephone communications network, and mass media network are completely paralyzed, this will cause the enemy nation to fall into social panic, street riots, and a political crisis.”
For several years, Washington has treated China as the Lord Voldemort of geopolitics—the foe who must not be named, lest all economic and diplomatic hell break loose. That policy seemed to be ending in recent weeks, and Timothy Thomas thinks it’s about time.
The clearest sign of change came in a March 11 speech by Tom Donilon, President Obama’s national security adviser, who condemned “cyber intrusions emanating from China on an unprecedented scale” and declared that “the international community cannot tolerate such activity from any country.” Chinese cyber aggression poses risks “to international trade, to the reputation of Chinese industry and to our overall relations,” Mr. Donilon said, and Beijing must stop it.
“Why did we wait so long?” wonders Mr. Thomas as we sit in the U.S. Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office, where the 64-year-old retired lieutenant colonel has studied Chinese cyber strategy for two decades. More than enough evidence accumulated long ago, he says, for the U.S. to say to Beijing and its denials of responsibility, “Folks, you don’t have a leg to stand on, sorry.”
U.S. targets of suspected Chinese cyber attacks include news organizations (this newspaper, the New York Times, Bloomberg), tech firms (Google, GOOG -0.84%Adobe, ADBE -0.33%YahooYHOO -1.68%), multinationals (Coca-Cola, KO -1.35%Dow ChemicalDOW +0.16%), defense contractors (Lockheed Martin, LMT +0.08%Northrop GrummanNOC +1.12%), federal departments (Homeland Security, State, Energy, Commerce), senior officials (Hillary Clinton, Adm. Mike Mullen), nuclear-weapons labs (Los Alamos, Oak Ridge) and just about every other node of American commerce, infrastructure or authority. Identities of confidential sources, hide-outs of human-rights dissidents, negotiation strategies of major corporations, classified avionics of the F-35 fighter jet, the ins and outs of America’s power grid: Hackers probe for all this, extracting secrets and possibly laying groundwork for acts of sabotage.
China’s aggression has so far persisted, Mr. Thomas says, because “it makes perfect sense to them.” The U.S. has difficulty defending its cyber systems, the relatively new realm of cyber isn’t subject to international norms, and years of intrusions have provoked little American response. “I think they’re willing to take the risk right now because they believe that we can’t do anything to them,” he says. “You have to change the playing field for them, and if you don’t, they’re not going to change. They’re going to continue to rip off every bit of information they can.” (more…)
House Intel Chair Mike Rogers Calls Chinese Cyber Attacks
‘Unprecedented’
By George Stephanopoulos | ABC OTUS News – 9 hrs ago
ABC OTUS News – House Intel Chair Mike Rogers Calls Chinese Cyber Attacks ‘Unprecedented’ (ABC News)
House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Rogers, R-Mich., said it was “beyond a shadow of a doubt” that the Chinese government and military is behind growing cyber attacks against the United States, saying “we are losing” the war to prevent the attacks.
“They use their military and intelligence structure to steal intellectual property from American businesses, and European businesses, and Asian businesses, re-purpose it and then compete in the international market against the United States,” Rogers said this morning on “This Week.”
“It is unprecedented,” Rogers added. “This has never happened in the history of the world, where one nation steals the intellectual property to re-purpose it – to illegally compete against the country…and I’ll tell you, It is as bad as I’ve ever seen it and exponentially getting worse. Why? There’s no consequence for it.”
American businesses have been hesitant to complain about Chinese cyber espionage due to fears of losing opportunities in the growing economic power, according to ABC News’ George Will.
“They’re dealing with a very difficult, frankly a gangster regime in China right now,” Will said. “And no one wants to make them unhappy.” (more…)
The White House’s looming power grab to regulate the Internet.
President Obama and Congress have checked out of Washington until after Election Day. But caveat, citizen. Their absence isn’t preventing harmful policy from spawning along the Potomac.
A case in point is a back door move to regulate the Internet. Any day now, the White House will issue an executive order on cybersecurity, according to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who said last week that the measure “is close to completion.”
The executive moved on its own after Congressional efforts stalled this summer amid Administration opposition. Ms. Napolitano shed crocodile tears over the Senate’s failure to adopt comprehensive cybersecurity legislation, even as the White House goes ahead with its order in the face of vociferous opposition on Capitol Hill.
What Ms. Napolitano didn’t say might help readers understand the cynical politics involved. The Administration worked to scuttle a compromise on the Hill. The Senate split over mandating IT security standards for private companies, and the Administration’s order resuscitates this contentious idea. It will also undercut efforts to fashion a bipartisan bill in a lame duck Congress. (more…)
The U.S. military is accelerating its cyberwarfare training programs in an aggressive expansion of its preparations for conflict on an emerging battlefield.
The U.S. military is accelerating its cyberwarfare training programs to better defend military networks and enable troops to wield cyberweapons. Julian Barnes has details on The News Hub. Photo: U.S. Air Force.
The renewed emphasis on building up cyberwarfare capabilities comes even as other defense programs have been trimmed. Along with unmanned aircraft and special operations, cyberwarfare is among the newer, more high-tech and often more secretive capabilities favored by the Pentagon’s current leadership.
In June, the U.S. Air Force’s elite Weapons School—the Air Force version of the Navy’s famed “Top Gun” program—graduated its first class of six airmen trained to fight in cyberspace. The new course, at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, trains airmen working at computer terminals how to hunt down electronic intruders, defend networks and launch cyberattacks.
“While cyber may not look or smell exactly like a fighter aircraft or a bomber aircraft, the relevancy in any potential conflict in 2012 is the same,” said Air Force Col. Robert Garland, commandant of the Weapons School. “We have to be able to succeed against an enemy that wants to attack us in any way.”
U.S. Air ForceThe Air Force’s Weapons School at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev., pictured, long known for advanced pilot training, now has a cyberwarfare program..
The training effort comes amid a push by the Obama administration to rapidly deploy offensive and defensive techniques across the government, including at the Central Intelligence Agency, other intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security. (more…)
