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FireEye and US Treasury Department hacked, Russia blamed

December 17, 2020

FireEye and US Treasury Department hacked, Russia blamed

Security consulting company FireEye has been hacked and their “Red Team” tools, which was their proprietary intrusion detection and testing toolkit has been stolen. In a blog post about the incident the company attributed the breach to a highly skilled nation state actor possessing “world class capabilities.” FireEye’s clients include agencies at all levels of government and Fortune 500 companies globally.

“The stolen “red team” tools — which amount to real-world malware — could be dangerous in the wrong hands,”

FireEye in an effort to mitigate the damage potential of the toolkits being in the wild, giving security teams the ability to build out defences against them.

The attack is being widely attributed to Russia (which I have to admit, kinda gets an eyeroll from me)

As I was writing this, a Washington Post article also trotted out Russian hackers in a piece about a breach at the US Treasury Department which cited, as its source material a one sentence report from Reuters. The entire Reuters report is as follows:

“A sophisticated hacking group backed by a foreign government stole information from the U.S. Treasury Department and a U.S. agency responsible for deciding policy around the internet and telecommunications, according to people familiar with the matter.”

From this sentence, Washington Post ran a story that starts out with “Russian government hackers breached the Treasury and Commerce departments”  attributing the allegation to  “people familiar with the matter.”

Read: https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-cyber-amazoncom-idUSL1N2IT0HS

I find it frustrating that the mainstream media bias is always quick to blame things on Russia and slow to acknowledge documented hostile behaviour from China. It’s just kind of strange.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“The Most Destructive Breach In History”: Hackers Use NSA Code To Grind Baltimore To A Halt

May 27, 2019

“The Most Destructive Breach In History”: Hackers Use NSA Code To Grind Baltimore To A Halt

The United States is no longer supplying its enemies only with conventional weapons – that list now also includes cyberweapons. While Baltimore has been struggling with an aggressive cyber-attack over the last three weeks, previously profiled here , it has now been revealed that a key component of the malware used by cyber-criminals was actually developed just a short drive from Baltimore – at the NSA, according to the New York Times.

The tool used – called EternalBlue – has been used by hackers in North Korea, Russia and China to “cut a path of destruction around the world”, and resulted in billions of dollars in damages.

Now, it has come full circle and is back in the US, wreaking havoc just miles from Washington. In fact, security experts say that attacks using EternalBlue have soared and cyber-criminals are honing in on vulnerable towns and cities, using it to paralyze governments. The NSA’s connection to the attacks had previously not been reported and the NSA hasn’t commented about it since an unidentified group leaked the weapon online in April 2017.

The NSA and the FBI still don’t know whether or not it was leaked by foreign spies or US insiders.

The leak has been referred to as “the most destructive and costly N.S.A. breach in history,” by Thomas Rid, a cybersecurity expert at Johns Hopkins University. He continued: “The government has refused to take responsibility, or even to answer the most basic questions. Congressional oversight appears to be failing. The American people deserve an answer.”

An answer that we’re sure they won’t get. 

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

US Electric Grid Hacked: Perpetrators Could Have Shut Down the System

January 11, 2019

US Electric Grid Hacked: Perpetrators Could Have Shut Down the System

Hackers broke into the US electric grid with spearphishing techniques targeting contractors with system access.

The Wall Street Journal has a detailed report out today regarding a sophisticated, and successful attack by hackers into the US electric grid. The hackers could have temporarily shut off power.

The Journal claims Russia is responsible. I hate such assumptions. In the absence of hard proof, the hack could have come from China, North Korea, Israel, or even the US. Even if Russian hackers did this, there is a difference between “Russian” and “Russia”.

Early victims

In the summer of 2016, U.S. intelligence officials saw signs of a campaign to hack American utilities, says Jeanette Manfra, assistant secretary of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity and communications program. The tools and tactics suggested the perpetrators were Russian. Intelligence agencies notified Homeland Security, Ms. Manfra says.

Mr. Vitello of All-Ways Excavating has no idea how the hackers got into his email account. He doesn’t recall reading CFE’s websites or clicking on tainted email attachments. Nonetheless, the intrusion was part of the Russian campaign, according to the security companies that studied the hack.

On March 2, 2017, the attackers used Mr. Vitello’s account to send the mass email to customers, which was intended to herd recipients to a website secretly taken over by the hackers.

Once Mr. Vitello realized his email had been hijacked, he tried to warn his contacts not to open any email attachments from him. The hackers blocked the message.

Sneak Attack

Hackers sent bogus emails from the account of Oregon construction contractor Mike Vitello to herd recipients to a website they had secretly taken over, called imageliners.com. Hackers then used the site to seek access to contractors that do business with U.S. power utilities.

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

“The Criminals Who Run The Deep State Will Be Exposed”: Kim Dotcom Teases “Next Round Of Leaks”

January 5, 2019

“The Criminals Who Run The Deep State Will Be Exposed”: Kim Dotcom Teases “Next Round Of Leaks”

Hacker and serial entrepreneur Kim Dotcom is out with a new prediction for 2019:

“Get ready for the next round of leaks.”

✔

I smile every day watching the aftermath of preventing Hillary.
Deep State exposed.
Fake news exposed.
DOJ & FBI exposed.
I’m happy youu are more informed than ever. 2019 will reveal so much more. Get ready for the next round of leaks. Monumental stuff

😎

Dotcom then tweeted “This year the criminals who run the Deep State will be exposed,” adding “The shareholders profiting from war and chaos. The billionaires who turn democracy into an illusion. They own politicians, judges and all your data. They are the biggest pirates in history. Want to know who they are?“

✔

For those paying attention, Dotcom dropped massive breadcrumbs going all the way back to 2015 regarding the WikiLeaks release of Hillary Clinton’s emails during the 2016 US election.

And while he’s has made headlines for years, in February Dotcom boldly stated that the DNC “hack” which kicked off the Russian election interference narrative was bogus, tweeting: “Let me assure you, the DNC hack wasn’t even a hack. It was an insider with a memory stick. I know this because I know who did it and why.” 

Dotcom says he offered to produce evidence to Special Counsel Robert Mueller, twice, and they never even replied to him.

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

U.S. cybersecurity experts scrambling to thwart major attacks on power, water, gas infrastructure by “bolting on” fixes to old vulnerable systems

December 31, 2018

Image: U.S. cybersecurity experts scrambling to thwart major attacks on power, water, gas infrastructure by “bolting on” fixes to old vulnerable systems
(Natural News) Crammed into a small building in Idaho Falls, Idaho, a group of about 50 cyber security experts and researchers are working around the clock to protect American infrastructure from debilitating attacks.

As The Associated Press reports, much of what goes on at the Idaho National Laboratory, once known as the country’s primary nuclear research facility, isn’t discussed. But what is known is that those who fill the dimmed rooms full of wires, cables, computers, and detection gear are diligently trying to guard against the unthinkable: Attacks on power grids, water treatment facilities, financial institutions, and even traffic lights that could bring large sections of the country to a standstill.

Followed by chaos.

The lab’s director of cybersecurity, Scott Cramer, admits that the task at hand is a difficult one and that the United States is playing catch-up, of sorts. He describes the cybersecurity work as “bolting on” protections for infrastructure control systems that are decades old with the belief that many of them have already been infiltrated by malicious actors — nation-states and non-state actors alike — who are waiting for the time to launch attacks.

“This is no joke — there are vulnerabilities out there,” Cramer told the AP. “We’re pretty much in reaction mode right now.”

That’s not hyperbole. A recently released report from the President’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council lays out a similarly dire warning. After interviewing “dozens of senior leaders and experts” as well as conducting an in-depth review of existing studies and statues, the NIAC “found that existing national plans, response resources, and coordination strategies would be outmatched by a catastrophic power outage,” the report noted.

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

Major Psy-Op in Europe Exposed: UK Government Tramples on Values It Vowed to Protect

November 26, 2018

Major Psy-Op in Europe Exposed: UK Government Tramples on Values It Vowed to Protect

Major Psy-Op in Europe Exposed: UK Government Tramples on Values It Vowed to Protect

Those who have been saying that the West has turned Russia into a scapegoat to be blamed for each and every thing that goes wrong have been proved right. We have witnessed concocted stories invented to denigrate Moscow that have gone viral as directed by the secret services. The UK, the country that is spearheading the anti-Russian information campaign, offers a good example that illustrates how this is being done.

An online group of hackers known as Anonymous has just revealed covert UK activities in the EU. According to the documents released by that group, London is in the midst of a major program to interfere in the internal affairs of EU members, the US, and Canada. Anonymous threatens to release more information on the clandestine operations of the UK government, unless it agrees to remove the shroud of secrecy protecting those information-warfare efforts. On Nov. 24 Twitter deleted RT comments on the issue. The UK knows it has friends it can rely on in a crunch.

The Integrity Initiative is a London-based organization set up and funded by the government-friendly Institute for Statecraft, in cooperation with the Free University of Brussels (VUB) to wage information-warfare operations against Russia. Anonymous calls it a “large-scale information secret service.” It aims to “change attitudes in Russia itself” as well as the influence of Russian natives living abroad. The Integrity Initiative’s budget for the fiscal year ending on March 31, 2019 is estimated at £1.96 million ($2.51 million). The network has received grants from NATO, the US State Department, and Facebook.

The Initiative’s operations have been kept under wraps. Its activities are conducted by “clusters” of local politicians, journalists, military personnel, scientists, and academics involved in anti-Russian propaganda efforts. The list includes William Browder, a US-British businessman convicted in absentia in Russia for tax evasion.

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

DNA Website MyHeritage Hacked; 92 Million User Accounts Exposed

June 6, 2018

DNA Website MyHeritage Hacked; 92 Million User Accounts Exposed

In an odd coincidence, earlier today we asked rhetorically “what could go wrong” if millions of Americans trust a DNA collecting company – in this case ancestry.com – with their genetic code. At almost the exact same time, Bloomberg reported that the Israeli-based consumer genealogy website, MyHeritage had been hacked, and that the email addresses and password information linked to more than 92 million user accounts have been “compromised.”

According to MyHeritage, its security officer had received a message from a researcher who unearthed a file named “myheritage” containing email addresses and hashed passwords of 92,283,889 of its users on a private server outside the company.

“There has been no evidence that the data in the file was ever used by the perpetrators,” the company said in a statement late Monday, supposedly in an attempt to make its nearly 100 million users and customers feel comfortable.

It was not explicitly clear if any client “genetic material” had also been compromised as part of the security breach.

Like Ancestry.com and 23andMe, MyHeritage lets users submit their DNA, build family trees, search historical records and hunt for potential relatives. Founded in Israel in 2003, the site launched a service called MyHeritage DNA in 2016 that lets users send in a saliva sample for genetic analysis. The website currently has 96 million users of whom 1.4 million users have taken the DNA test.

In a blog post, MyHeritage said the breach took place on Oct. 26, 2017, and impacts users who signed up for an account through that date. Armed with that information, a hacker could access personal information such as the identity of family members. While the company said it is unlikely that they could easily access a user’s raw genetic information, that’s precisely what one would expect them to say as the alternative is going out of business as its entire user base flees.

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

Quantum Computers Will Make Even “Strong” Passwords Worthless

March 13, 2018

The race is on to perfect quantum computing. It will make your bank passwords and all existing security methods useless.

The Hutch Report has a fascinating 44-page PDF on Quantum Computing.

If perfected, existing methods of encryption will cease to work. Your bank account password and passwords to cryptocurrencies will easily be hackable.

The ability to break the RSA coding system will render almost all current channels of communication insecure.

This is a national security threat.

The benefits are also huge: Quantum computers will be superior at hurricane detection, airplane design, and in searching DNA for markers to help find cures for diseases such as Autism, Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, and Parkinson’s.

Classical Computers

Classical computers use strings of 0’s and 1’s with a single digit a “bit” and strings of bits a “byte”. A bit is either a one or a zero.

Excerpts from the Hutch report now follow. I condensed 44 pages to a hopefully understandable synopsis of the promise and problems of quantum computing.

Quantum Background

Quantum computing does not use bits, but uses qubits which can be one, zero, or both zero and one at the same time. This state or capability of being both is called superposition. Where it gets even more complex is that qubits also exhibit a property called entanglement. Entanglement is an extraordinary behaviour in quantum physics in which particles, like qubits, share the same state simultaneously even when separated by large distance.

As comparison a classic computer using bits of zero and one can only store one state at a time and can represent 2n states where n is the number of bits. In the case of two bits, this would be 2*2 which is four states: 00, 01, 10, 11.

A normal computer would require four operations to examine each state. Two qubits could store the four states at one time. When the number of states are low there is not a major processing difference. As the number of possible state combinations increases, the difference in processing time between quantum computers using qubits and a classic computer using classic bits, increases exponentially. The following chart depicts this well showing that 20 qubits can represent simultaneously over 1 million permutations of classical bits.

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

Leaked Files Show How NSA Tracks Other Countries’ Hackers

March 7, 2018

FILE - In this June 6, 2013 file photo, the National Security Agency (NSA) campus in Fort Meade, Md. Some U.S. states are reviewing their election systems for signs of intrusion after a leaked NSA report describes a hacking effort by Russian military intelligence. There’s no indication so far that potential intrusions affected voting or ballot counting. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)
AP

LEAKED FILES SHOW HOW NSA TRACKS OTHER COUNTRIES’ HACKERS

WHEN THE MYSTERIOUS entity known as “Shadow Brokers” released a tranche of stolen NSA hacking tools to the internet a year ago, most experts who studied the material honed in on the most potent tools, so-called “zero-day” exploits that could be used to install malware and take over machines. But a group of Hungarian security researchers spotted something else in the data, a collection of scripts and scanning tools the NSA uses to detect other nation-state hackers on the machines it infects.

It turns out those scripts and tools are just as interesting as the exploits. They show that in 2013 — the year the NSA tools were believed to have been stolen by Shadow Brokers  — the agency was tracking at least 45 different nation-state operations, known in the security community as Advanced Persistent Threats, or APTs. Some of these appear to be operations known by the broader security community — but some may be threat actors and operations currently unknown to researchers.

The scripts and scanning tools dumped by Shadow Brokers and studied by the Hungarians were created by an NSA team known as Territorial Dispute, or TeDi. Intelligence sources told The Intercept the NSA established the team after hackers, believed to be from China, stole designs for the military’s Joint Strike Fighter plane, along with other sensitive data, from U.S. defense contractors in 2007; the team was supposed to detect and counter sophisticated nation-state attackers more quickly, when they first began to emerge online.

“As opposed to the U.S. only finding out in five years that everything was stolen, their goal was to try to figure out when it was being stolen in real time,” one intelligence source told The Intercept.

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

Russian Hackers Target U.S. Energy Infrastructure

March 3, 2018

Russian Hackers Target U.S. Energy Infrastructure

comtech

Russia has been trying to interfere with U.S. energy markets and influence U.S. energy policy by using Russian operatives to troll social media platforms with divisive and inflammatory posts, a report by House Republicans has revealed.

The report—issued by the United States House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology—includes examples of Russian-propagated content on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, targeting U.S. energy markets and domestic energy policy.

“Russian-sponsored agents funneled money to U.S. environmental organizations in an attempt to portray energy companies in a negative way and disrupt domestic energy markets,” the report said.

“Documents that the American social media companies produced for the Committee confirmed that Russian agents were exploiting American social media platforms in an effort to disrupt domestic energy markets, suppress research and development of fossil-fuels, and stymie efforts to expand the use of natural gas,” the Republicans’ report says.

“By posting content that supports positions held by both liberals and conservatives alike, the Russians used social media to instigate and inflame discord in the United States. Russian social media manipulators intentionally injected foreign propaganda into American political discourse. These Russian agents are only interested in creating discord in America while hiding behind an anonymous and misleading social media pseudonym, as demonstrated by the highly divisive, often contradictory posts provided in this report.”

The Chairman of the U.S. House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said in a statement, commenting on the report:

“Russia benefits from stirring up controversy about U.S. energy production. U.S. energy exports to European countries are increasing, which means they will have less reason to rely upon Russia for their energy needs. This, in turn, will reduce Russia’s influence on Europe to Russia’s detriment and Europe’s benefit.

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

Kim Dotcom: “Let Me Assure You, The DNC Hack Wasn’t Even A Hack”

February 19, 2018

Kim Dotcom: “Let Me Assure You, The DNC Hack Wasn’t Even A Hack”

Kim Dotcom has once again chimed in on the DNC hack, following a Sunday morning tweet from President Trump clarifying his previous comments on Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

Donald J. Trump
✔@realDonaldTrump
I never said Russia did not meddle in the election, I said “it may be Russia, or China or another country or group, or it may be a 400 pound genius sitting in bed and playing with his computer.” The Russian “hoax” was that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia – it never did!

In response, Dotcom tweeted “Let me assure you, the DNC hack wasn’t even a hack. It was an insider with a memory stick. I know this because I know who did it and why,” adding “Special Counsel Mueller is not interested in my evidence. My lawyers wrote to him twice. He never replied. 360 pounds!” alluding of course to Trump’s “400 pound genius” comment.

Kim Dotcom
✔@KimDotcom

Let me assure you, the DNC hack wasn’t even a hack. It was an insider with a memory stick. I know this because I know who did it and why. Special Counsel Mueller is not interested in my evidence. My lawyers wrote to him twice. He never replied. 360 pounds!https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.smh.com.au/world/us-election/dnchack-did-kim-dotcom-warn-the-world-about-the-democratic-party-hacking-20160622-gpp15a.html … https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/965202556204003328 …

Dotcom’s assertion is backed up by an analysis done last year by a researcher who goes by the name Forensicator, who determined that the DNC files were copied at 22.6 MB/s – a speed virtually impossible to achieve from halfway around the world, much less over a local network – yet a speed typical of file transfers to a memory stick.

The local transfer theory of course blows the Russian hacking narrative out of the water, lending credibility to the theory that the DNC “hack” was in fact an inside job, potentially implicating late DNC IT staffer, Seth Rich.

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

How UK Spies Hacked a European Ally and Got Away With It

February 17, 2018

The Belgacom Group is the largest telecommunications company in Belgium, headquartered in Brussels.Belgacom flag, Belgian national flag hang together at the entrance mirrored in the windows. (Photo by Sander de Wilde/Corbis via Getty Images)
Photo: Sander de Wilde/Corbis/Getty Images

HOW UK SPIES HACKED A EUROPEAN ALLY AND GOT AWAY WITH IT

FOR A MOMENT, it seemed the hackers had slipped up and exposed their identities. It was the summer of 2013, and European investigators were looking into an unprecedented breach of Belgium’s telecommunications infrastructure. They believed they were on the trail of the people responsible. But it would soon become clear that they were chasing ghosts – fake names that had been invented by British spies.

The hack had targeted Belgacom, Belgium’s largest telecommunications provider, which serves millions of people across Europe. The company’s employees had noticed their email accounts were not receiving messages. On closer inspection, they made a startling discovery: Belgacom’s internal computer systems had been infected with one of the most advanced pieces of malware security experts had ever seen.

As The Intercept reported in 2014, the hack turned out to have been perpetrated by U.K. surveillance agency Government Communications Headquarters, better known as GCHQ. The British spies hacked into Belgacom employees’ computers and then penetrated the company’s internal systems. In an eavesdropping mission called “Operation Socialist,” GCHQ planted bugs inside the most sensitive parts of Belgacom’s networks and tapped into communications processed by the company.

GCHQ Computer Network Exploitation presentation22 pages

The covert operation was the first known example of a European Union member state hacking the critical infrastructure of another. The malware infection triggered a massive cleanup operation within Belgacom, which has since renamed itself Proximus. The company – of which the Belgian government is the majority owner – was forced to replace thousands of its computers at a cost of several million Euros. Elio di Rupo, Belgium’s then-prime minister, was furious, calling the hack a “violation.” Meanwhile, one of the country’s top federal prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into the intrusion.

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

The “Meltdown” Story: How A Researcher Discovered The “Worst” Flaw In Intel History

January 5, 2018

The “Meltdown” Story: How A Researcher Discovered The “Worst” Flaw In Intel History

Daniel Gruss didn’t sleep much the night he hacked his own computer and exposed a flaw in most of the chips made in the past two decades by hardware giant Intel, something we discussed in “Why The Implications Of The Intel “Bug” Are Staggering.” And as Reuters describes in fascinating detail, the 31-year-old information security researcher and post-doctoral fellow at Austria’s Graz Technical University had just breached the inner sanctum of his computer’s CPU and stolen secrets from it.

Until that moment, Gruss and colleagues Moritz Lipp and Michael Schwarz had thought such an attack on the processor’s ‘kernel’ memory, which is meant to be inaccessible to users, was only theoretically possible.

“When I saw my private website addresses from Firefox being dumped by the tool I wrote, I was really shocked,” Gruss told Reuters in an email interview, describing how he had unlocked personal data that should be secured.
Gruss, Lipp and Schwarz, working from their homes on a weekend in early December, messaged each other furiously to verify the result.

“We sat for hours in disbelief until we eliminated any possibility that this result was wrong,” said Gruss, whose mind kept racing even after powering down his computer, so he barely caught a wink of sleep.

Gruss and his colleagues had just confirmed the existence of what he regards as “one of the worst CPU bugs ever found”.

The flaw, now named Meltdown, was revealed on Wednesday and affects most processors manufactured by Intel since 1995.

Separately, a second defect called Spectre has been found that also exposes core memory in most computers and mobile devices running on chips made by Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and ARM Holdings, a unit of Japan’s Softbank.

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

“Everyone Is Affected”: Why The Implications Of The Intel “Bug” Are Staggering

January 3, 2018

“Everyone Is Affected”: Why The Implications Of The Intel “Bug” Are Staggering

Earlier today, we reported that according to a press reports, Intel’s computer chips were affected by a bug that makes them vulnerable to hacking. Specifically, The Register said the bug lets some software gain access to parts of a computer’s memory that are set aside to protect things like passwords, and making matters worse, all computers with Intel chips from the past 10 years appear to be affected. The news, which sent Intel’s stock tumbling, was later confirmed by the company.

In a statement issued on Monday afternoon, Intel said it was working with chipmakers including Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and ARM Holdings, and operating system makers to develop an industrywide approach to resolving the issue that may affect a wide variety of products, adding that it has begun providing software to help mitigate the potential exploits. Computer slowdowns depend on the task being performed and for the average user “should not be significant and will be mitigated over time” the company promised despite much skepticism to the contrary.

As Bloomberg helpfully puts it, Intel’s microprocessors “are the fundamental building block of the internet, corporate networks and PCs” and while Intel has added to its designs over the years trying to make computers less vulnerable to attack, arguing that hardware security is typically tougher to crack than software, there now appears to be a fundamental flaw in the design.

In a vain attempt to mitigate the damage, Intel claimed that the “flaw” was not unique to its products.

“Intel and other technology companies have been made aware of new security research describing software analysis methods that, when used for malicious purposes, have the potential to improperly gather sensitive data from computing devices that are operating as designed,” the Santa Clara, California-based company said. “Intel believes these exploits do not have the potential to corrupt, modify or delete data.”

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

NBC Pushes an Unfounded Conspiracy Theory on Behalf of CIA

November 27, 2017

NBC Pushes an Unfounded Conspiracy Theory on Behalf of CIA

NBC Pushes an Unfounded Conspiracy Theory on Behalf of CIA

Retired National Security Agency (NSA) chief technology officer William Binney is being branded as a “conspiracy theorist” by corporate media outlets, most notably, the Comcast-owned National Broadcasting Corporation, for co-authoring a controversial memo issued this past summer by a group of former intelligence officers – Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

The memo opined that the leak of Democratic National Committee e-mails during the 2016 presidential campaign were not the result of Russian state-sponsored hacking but the result of an inside job by a DNC staffer who loaded the purloined e-mails onto a thumb drive. That view is contrary to an assessment made in a 2017 intelligence assessment by 17 US intelligence agencies. That assessment claimed that Russian government-sponsored hackers broke into the email servers of the DNC and then provided the emails to WikiLeaks. However, the assessment was not the unanimous view of 17 US intelligence agencies, but merely four – the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It was provided a chapeau of legitimacy by the Director of National Intelligence. Contrary to news reports, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and intelligence elements of the military services did not provide input to the assessment.

Binney was also accused by NBC “national security reporter” Ken Dilanian of pushing the “conspiracy theory” that the “NSA is collecting and storing nearly every US communication.” Far from being a conspiracy theory, NSA’s unconstitutional eavesdropping program, code-named STELLAR WIND and officially known as the “President’s Surveillance Program,” was proven in classified documents revealed by NSA whistleblower Ed Snowden and, earlier, by Justice Department prosecutor Thomas Tamm. A metadata-capturing program called PRISM ensnared the personal data of millions of Americans from AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL.

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

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