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The Deep State vs. WikiLeaks

April 21, 2019

The Deep State vs. WikiLeaks

The Deep State vs. WikiLeaks

The Made by FBI indictment of Julian Assange does look like a dead man walking. No evidence. No documents. No surefire testimony. Just a crossfire of conditionals.

But never underestimate the legalese contortionism of US government (USG) functionaries. As much as Assange may not be characterized as a journalist and publisher, the thrust of the affidavit is to accuse him of conspiring to commit espionage.

In fact the charge is not even that Assange hacked a USG computer and obtained classified information; it’s that he may have discussed it with Chelsea Manning and may have had the intention to go for a hack. Orwellian-style thought crime charges don’t get any better than that. Now the only thing missing is an AI software to detect them.

Assange legal adviser Geoffrey Robertson – who also happens to represent another stellar political prisoner, Brazil’s Lula – cut straight to the chase (at 19:22 minutes); “The justice he is facing is justice, or injustice, in America… I would hope the British judges would have enough belief in freedom of information to throw out the extradition request.”

That’s far from a done deal. Thus the inevitable consequence; Assange’s legal team is getting ready to prove, no holds barred, in a British court, that this USG indictment for conspiracy to commit computer hacking is just an hors d’oeuvre for subsequent espionage charges, in case Assange is extradited to US soil.

All about Vault 7

John Pilger, among few others, has already stressed how a plan to destroy WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was laid out as far back as 2008 – at the tail end of the Cheney regime – concocted by the Pentagon’s shady Cyber Counter-Intelligence Assessments Branch.

It was all about criminalizing WikiLeaks and personally smearing Assange, using “shock troops…enlisted in the media — those who are meant to keep the record straight and tell us the truth.”

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

MI6’s Spymaster Revealed How The UK Is Conducting “Fourth Generation Espionage

December 9, 2018

MI6’s Spymaster Revealed How The UK Is Conducting “Fourth Generation Espionage

The head of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) Alex Younger briefed the public about the challenges of so-called “fourth generation espionage”.

The UK’s top spy spent some of his time blaming Russia for trying to, as he put it, “subvert the UK way of life” by supposedly poisoning the Skripals and through other mischievous but ultimately never verified actions, though moving beyond the infowar aspect of his speech and into its actual professional substance, he nevertheless touched on some interesting themes. According to him, “fourth generation espionage” involves “deepening our partnerships to counter hybrid threats, mastering covert action in the data age, attaching a cost to malign activity by adversaries and innovating to ensure that technology works to our advantage.” In other words, it’s all about applying what he calls the “Fusion Doctrine” for building the right domestic and international teams across skillsets in order to best leverage new technologies for accomplishing his agency’s eternal mission, which is “to understand the motivations, intentions and aspirations of people in other countries.”

While he remarked that the so-called “hybrid threats” associated with “fourth generation espionage” necessitate “being able to take steps to change [targets’] behavior”, this has actually been part and parcel of the intelligence profession since time immemorial, albeit nowadays facilitated by social media and other technological platforms that allow shadowy actors such as the UK’s own “77th Brigade” to carry out psychological, influence, and informational operations. Younger warned that “bulk data combined with modern analytics” could be “a serious challenge” if used against his country, obviously alluding to Cambridge Analytica’s purported weaponization of these cutting-edge technological processes to supposedly “hack” elections…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The “Magnitsky Trio” Pushes For War With Russia with New Sanctions

August 4, 2018

The “Magnitsky Trio” Pushes For War With Russia with New Sanctions

If half of what I have come to understand about the Curious Case of Bill Browder is true, then the “Magnitsky Trio” of Senators John McCain, Lindsay Graham and Ben Cardin are guilty of espionage, at a minimum.

Why?  Because they know that Browder’s story about Sergei Magnitsky is a lie.  And that means that when you tie in the Trump Dossier, Christopher Steele, Fusion GPS, the Skripal poisoning and the rest of this mess, these men are consorting with foreign governments and agencies against the sitting President.

As Lee Stranahan pointed out recently on Fault Lines, Cardin invited Browder to testify to Congress in 2017 to push through last year’s sanctions bill, a more stringent version of the expiring Magnitsky Act of 2011, which has since been used to ratchet up pressure on Russia.

Cardin knew there were problems with Browder’s story about Magnitsky’s death and yet brought him into Congress to testify to secure the vote.

That’s suborning perjury, as Lee points out.

Just the holes in Browder’s story about Magnitsky’s death are alone enough to warrant a perjury charge on him.  If you haven’t read Luck Komisar’s detailed breakdown of Browder’s dealings then you owe it to yourself to do so.

I’d read it a few times, because it’s about as murky as The Swamp gets. And, still my eyes glaze over.

The Magnitsky Act and its sequel have been used to support aggressive policy actions by the U.S. against Russia and destroy the relationship between the world’s most prominent militaries and nuclear powers.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

White House Accuses China Of “Persistent Economic Espionage And Aggression”

June 20, 2018

White House Accuses China Of “Persistent Economic Espionage And Aggression”

In what Bloomberg billed as the White House’s “latest salvo in the trade war between the world’s two largest economies”, the Trump administration released a 35-page report late last night fleshing out its national security concerns emanating from China’s theft of intellectual properties as well as economic policies that shield domestic Chinese companies from competition.

The report, titled “How China’s Economic Aggression Threatens the Technologies and Intellectual Property of the United States and the World“, accuses China of achieving its brisk economic growth through “aggressive acts, policies, and practices that fall outside of global norms and rules (collectively, ‘economic aggression’)” (surprisingly, not through nosebleed levels of debt issuance), before it lists two categories of said “economic aggression” that are the focus of the report; they are:

  • Acquire Key Technologies and Intellectual Property From Other Countries, Including the United States.
  • Capture the Emerging High-Technology Industries That Will Drive Future Economic Growth15 and Many Advancements in the Defense Industry.

The cites comments from the US intelligence community, which note that “Chinese actors are the world’s most active and persistent perpetrators of economic espionage” and that China covets technology in key industries like “electronics, telecommunications, robotics, data services, pharmaceuticals, mobile phone services, pharmaceuticals, satellite communications and imagery and business application software.”

When thefts of technology are reported, China does everything it can to stymie investigations. Indeed, economic espionage is a main focus of China’s intelligence services, and the US believes that China’s Ministry of State Security has no fewer than 50,000 intelligence officers operating abroad – and no fewer than 40,000 operating domestically.

China

The report also offers details about how China violates US export-control laws by exploiting the growth in “dual-use” technologies (aka those that have civilian and military purposes). As an example, the report cites a conspiracy involving a naturalized US citizen who was born in China.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

NSA Leaker Thomas Drake Praises Report Showing U.S.’ Failure Toward Whistleblowers

November 24, 2015

NSA Leaker Thomas Drake Praises Report Showing U.S.’ Failure Toward Whistleblowers 

    Former National Security Agency official Thomas Drake was originally charged with leaking classified information. (Jacquelyn Martin / AP)

Whistleblower Thomas Drake, who in 2010 became the first American charged with espionage in almost 40 years and who was a predecessor of Edward Snowden, applauds a new report by the PEN American Center accusing the government of failing to protect whistleblowers.

The report comes after presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said at last month’s Democratic debate that NSA whistleblower Snowden “could have gotten all the protections of being a whistleblower” instead of leaking materials to the press. PEN’s report shows that Clinton is wrong and that the U.S. government gives employees and contractors little assurance that they won’t be prosecuted, even if they go through sanctioned channels.

Of his experience as a whistleblower, Drake said during “Secret Sources: Whistleblowers, National Security and Free Expression,” a panel at the Newseum in Washington examining the impact of the Obama administration’s response to national security leaks, “I had become a dissident, as far as the NSA was concerned […] If you become a dissident, the white blood cells kick in, culturally, to get rid of you.”

Charges that Drake passed classified documents to a newspaper reporter were dropped in 2011. He said of the PEN report to Al-Jazeera’s “America Tonight”:

Probably the biggest takeaway for me is it’s one of the first reports that actually pulled this information all together in a cogent fashion. It gives a history. It shows the dynamics. It shows how things have evolved. It shows how far the administrations, particularly President Obama, have gone in pursuing those who would dare hold up a mirror to power. It talks about the lack of protections for sources. It highlights the risks to journalism, as sources, like myself, are considering engaging in criminal activity. It raises serious questions, extraordinarily disturbing questions, about the government.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Angela Merkel’s NSA Nightmare Just Got A Lot Worse

May 2, 2015

Angela Merkel’s NSA Nightmare Just Got A Lot Worse

Angela Merkel, Germany’s most successful and popular politician, could be in serious trouble, after revelations that Germany’s national intelligence agency, the BND, has been spying on key European assets on behalf of US intelligence. Those “assets” include top French officials, the EU’s headquarters, the European defense corporation EADS, the helicopter manufacturer Eurocopter and even German companies.

To wit, from Der Spiegel:

In 2008, at the latest, it became apparent that NSA selectors were not only limited to terrorist and weapons smugglers… But it was only after the revelations made by whistleblower Edward Snowden that the BND decided to investigate the issue. In October 2013, an investigation came to the conclusion that at least 2,000 of these selectors were aimed at Western European or even German interests.

Today, the German foreign intelligence agency is accused of processing over 40,000 spy requests from the NSA, many of which represent a clear violation of the Memorandum of Agreement that the US and Germany signed in 2002. Washington and Berlin agreed at the time that neither Germans nor Americans — neither people nor companies or organizations — would be among the surveillance targets.

 

From Victim to Villain

The scandal could be particularly damaging for the Minister of Interior Thomas de Maiziere, whose ministry is accused of misleading parliament after claiming, as recently as April 14, to have no knowledge of alleged US economic spying in Europe, and of Germany’s alleged involvement.

For Merkel, it is a dizzying reversal of roles and fortunes. In 2013 she was arguably the most high-profile victim of NSA surveillance when it was revealed that the NSA had targeted her cellphone. When confronted with Edward Snowden’s allegations of US National Security Agency mass surveillance of European citizens, Merkel famously said that “spying on friends is just not on.” According to official accounts, she even placed a “strongly worded phone call” to US President Barack Obama.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is Merkel a CIA Asset?

May 2, 2015

Is Merkel a CIA Asset?

The claims that Merkel’s government knew about German state intelligence spying on behalf of the Americans against the country’s own industrial interests raise disturbing questions about the i ntegrity of German government leaders.

The apparent betrayal of German national interests by Chancellor Angela Merkel is not only evident over the recent industrial spying scandal on behalf of America. The slavish pursuit by Merkel of Washington’s anti-Russian policy over Ukraine — in contradistinction to her country’s national interests — also cogently suggests that the chancellor is serving a foreign master.Recent reports that German state intelligence was spying on behalf of the Americans against the country’s own industrial interests are bad enough. But then added to that are claims that the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel knew about the espionage — and turned a blind eye.

This raises disturbing questions about the integrity of German government leaders, and primarily Angela Merkel. Is Merkel an asset for American intelligence, serving the geopolitical interests of Washington rather than the good of her own nation, or the wider good of Europe?

The news story in question refers to reports in the German media last week of how Germany’s Federal Intelligence (BND) collaborated with the US National Security Agency (NSA) in spying on multinational European defence companies, including EADS and Eurocopter. The specific eavesdropping on these firms — in which Germany has major national economic interests — reportedly dates back to 2008. It is inconceivable that the highest levels of German government, including Chancellor Merkel — did not know about the industrial espionage. Yet Merkel appears to have countenanced the illegal activity, even though such activity would have vitiated German national interests, affording advantage to American competitors.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

 

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