January 11, 2017

Bill O'Reilly likes to beat his meat on the phone while women listen in:

In the weeks after Roger Ailes was ousted as the chairman of Fox News in July amid a sexual harassment scandal, company executives secretly struck an agreement with a longtime broadcast personality who had come forward with similar accusations about the network’s top host, Bill O’Reilly.

The employee, Juliet Huddy, had said that Mr. O’Reilly pursued a sexual relationship with her in 2011, at a time he exerted significant influence over her career. When she rebuffed his advances, he tried to derail her career, according to a draft of a letter from her lawyers to Fox News that was obtained by The New York Times.

The letter includes allegations that Mr. O’Reilly had called Ms. Huddy repeatedly and that it sometimes sounded as if he was masturbating. He invited her to his house on Long Island, tried to kiss her, took her to dinner and the theater, and after asking her to return a key to his hotel room, appeared at the door in his boxer shorts, according to the letter.

In exchange for her silence and agreement not to sue, she was paid a sum in the high six figures, according to people briefed on the agreement. The agreement was between Ms. Huddy, 47, and 21st Century Fox, the parent company of Fox News. The company and Mr. O’Reilly’s lawyer said her allegations were false.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/10/business/media/bill-oreilly-sexual-harassment-fox-news-juliet-huddy.html?smid=tw-nytimesbusiness&smtyp=cur&_r=1

January 10, 2017

Russian Hackers Find Ready Bullhorns in the Media

As the dust settles on Russian interference in the United States election, journalists are confronting an aspect that has received less scrutiny than the hacking itself but poses its own thorny questions: Moscow’s ability to steer Western media coverage by doling out hacked documents.

Reporters have always relied on sources who provide critical information for self-interested reasons. The duty, tricky but familiar, is to publicize information that serves the public interest without falling prey to the source’s agenda. But in this case, the source was Russia’s military intelligence agency, the G.R.U. — operating through shadowy fronts who worked to mask that fact — and its agenda was to undermine the American presidential election.

By releasing documents that would tarnish Hillary Clinton and other American political figures, but whose news value compelled coverage, Moscow exploited the very openness that is the basis of a free press. Its tactics have evolved with each such operation, some of which are still unfolding. Thomas Rid, a professor of security studies at King’s College London who is tracking the Russian influence campaign, said it goes well beyond hacking: “It’s political engineering, social engineering on a strategic level.”

Great powers have long meddled in one another’s affairs. But Russia, throughout 2016, developed a previously unseen tactic: setting up fronts to seed into the press documents it had obtained by hacking.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/08/world/europe/russian-hackers-find-ready-bullhorns-in-the-media.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0

This is the same kind of hacking Glenn Greenwald still has yet to admit even exists...

January 6, 2017

How Edward Snowden Sabotaged the War on Terrorism

The following is excerpted from Edward Jay Epstein’s book, How America Lost Its Secrets: Snowden, the Man and the Theft, to be published this week by Knopf.

The slaughter of civilians by terrorists using guns, bombs and even trucks shows no sign of abating, with deadly attacks in Baghdad, Berlin and Istanbul serving up bloody headlines over the holidays. With ISIS losing its traditional war on the battlefield, it is bringing more mayhem to our cities, which offer a nearly infinite number of soft targets. Police can’t protect them all—their only hope is to sniff out plots before they end in carnage. But these perpetrators are coordinating their assaults using end-to-end encryption on the internet and their mobile devices, which makes it almost impossible for government intelligence services to track them.

The situation was very different three years ago, before Edward Snowden intentionally sabotaged several of America’s best weapons against attacks. The first system he exposed was what the National Security Agency (NSA) called the “215” program because it had been authorized by Section 215 of the Patriot Act. This program compiled the billing records of every phone call made in the United States, including the number called and the duration of the call, but not the name of the caller. This anonymous data was archived into a huge database, and when any foreigner on the FBI’s terrorist watch list called any number in the U.S., the FBI could trace that person’s entire chain of telephone contacts to try to determine if he or she was connected to a known cell.

There was, however, a major flaw in this program: After Osama bin Laden was tracked down at his Pakistan compound and killed in 2011, militant organizations realized how vulnerable overseas calls were, and they moved most of their communication to the internet. In this case, then, Snowden’s revelations did only limited damage.

He did vastly more harm by revealing the reach of the PRISM program, which was extraordinarily effective because militant organizations in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan believed the encryption and other safeguards used by internet giants such as Apple, Google, Twitter and WhatsApp protected their communications. They evidently did not know the NSA could intercept data before it was encrypted. Despite metaphors such as the cloud and cyberspace, all data on the internet initially travels through fiber cables, almost all of which run through the United States and the Bahamas. That includes tweets, social media postings, Skype conversations and even Xbox messages.

http://www.newsweek.com/edward-snowden-undermined-war-terrorism-edward-epstein-539066


The butthurt from Snowden and his acolytes on Twitter is thick enough to cut with a knife

January 4, 2017

MEANWHILE, in Germany...

German man opens his front door, finds a brick wall was built overnight

BERLIN — Police say a man in western Germany ran into a wall, literally, as he opened his front door to leave the house earlier this week.

The man was heading out of his house in Mainhausen, near Frankfurt, on Monday morning but found that unknown perpetrators had — it seems quietly and without attracting anyone’s attention — built a wall in the doorway during the night. He had to tear down the wall to leave.

A police statement said the man “must have felt like a Berliner in August 1961,” referring to East Germany’s unannounced sealing of its border with the Berlin Wall.

Police spokesman Ingbert Zacharias told news agency dpa late Tuesday that officers don’t know whether a prank, a dare or an act of revenge was behind the wall.

http://www.dw.com/en/german-family-opens-front-door-finds-brick-wall/a-36997874

January 4, 2017

The Fable of Edward Snowden

Of all the lies that Edward Snowden has told since his massive theft of secrets from the National Security Agency and his journey to Russia via Hong Kong in 2013, none is more provocative than the claim that he never intended to engage in espionage, and was only a “whistleblower” seeking to expose the overreach of NSA’s information gathering. With the clock ticking on Mr. Snowden’s chance of a pardon, now is a good time to review what we have learned about his real mission.

Mr. Snowden’s theft of America’s most closely guarded communication secrets occurred in May 2013, according to the criminal complaint filed against him by federal prosecutors the following month. At the time Mr. Snowden was a 29-year-old technologist working as an analyst-in-training for the consulting firm of Booz Allen Hamilton at the regional base of the National Security Agency (NSA) in Oahu, Hawaii. On May 20, only some six weeks after his job there began, he failed to show up for work, emailing his supervisor that he was at the hospital being tested for epilepsy.

This excuse was untrue. Mr. Snowden was not even in Hawaii. He was in Hong Kong. He had flown there with a cache of secret data that he had stolen from the NSA.

This was not the only lie Mr. Snowden told. As became clear during my investigation over the past three years, nearly every element of the narrative Mr. Snowden has provided, which reached its final iteration in Oliver Stone’s 2016 movie, “Snowden,” is demonstrably false.

This narrative began soon after Mr. Snowden arrived in Hong Kong, where he arranged to meet with Laura Poitras, a Berlin-based documentary filmmaker, and Glenn Greenwald, a Brazil-based blogger for the Guardian. Both journalists were longtime critics of NSA surveillance with whom Mr. Snowden (under the alias Citizen Four) had been in contact for four months.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fable-of-edward-snowden-1483143143

January 4, 2017

The Fable of Edward Snowden

Of all the lies that Edward Snowden has told since his massive theft of secrets from the National Security Agency and his journey to Russia via Hong Kong in 2013, none is more provocative than the claim that he never intended to engage in espionage, and was only a “whistleblower” seeking to expose the overreach of NSA’s information gathering. With the clock ticking on Mr. Snowden’s chance of a pardon, now is a good time to review what we have learned about his real mission.

Mr. Snowden’s theft of America’s most closely guarded communication secrets occurred in May 2013, according to the criminal complaint filed against him by federal prosecutors the following month. At the time Mr. Snowden was a 29-year-old technologist working as an analyst-in-training for the consulting firm of Booz Allen Hamilton at the regional base of the National Security Agency (NSA) in Oahu, Hawaii. On May 20, only some six weeks after his job there began, he failed to show up for work, emailing his supervisor that he was at the hospital being tested for epilepsy.

This excuse was untrue. Mr. Snowden was not even in Hawaii. He was in Hong Kong. He had flown there with a cache of secret data that he had stolen from the NSA.

This was not the only lie Mr. Snowden told. As became clear during my investigation over the past three years, nearly every element of the narrative Mr. Snowden has provided, which reached its final iteration in Oliver Stone’s 2016 movie, “Snowden,” is demonstrably false.

This narrative began soon after Mr. Snowden arrived in Hong Kong, where he arranged to meet with Laura Poitras, a Berlin-based documentary filmmaker, and Glenn Greenwald, a Brazil-based blogger for the Guardian. Both journalists were longtime critics of NSA surveillance with whom Mr. Snowden (under the alias Citizen Four) had been in contact for four months.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fable-of-edward-snowden-1483143143

January 4, 2017

Just wondering, is anyone around here still trying to defend Glenn Fucking Greenwald?

If so, read these and get back to me (will update as needed)

https://twitter.com/jonathanchait/status/816304417255411712

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/12/27/glenn-greenwald-breitbart-news-editorial-independence-left-establishment-right-lack/


https://twitter.com/_cingraham/status/816703886065074178

January 1, 2017

Russia is harassing U.S. diplomats all over Europe

At a recent meeting of U.S. ambassadors from Russia and Europe in Washington, U.S. ambassadors to several European countries complained that Russian intelligence officials were constantly perpetrating acts of harassment against their diplomatic staff that ranged from the weird to the downright scary. Some of the intimidation has been routine: following diplomats or their family members, showing up at their social events uninvited or paying reporters to write negative stories about them.

But many of the recent acts of intimidation by Russian security services have crossed the line into apparent criminality. In a series of secret memos sent back to Washington, described to me by several current and former U.S. officials who have written or read them, diplomats reported that Russian intruders had broken into their homes late at night, only to rearrange the furniture or turn on all the lights and televisions, and then leave. One diplomat reported that an intruder had defecated on his living room carpet.

In Moscow, where the harassment is most pervasive, diplomats reported slashed tires and regular harassment by traffic police. Former ambassador Michael McFaul was hounded by government-paid protesters, and intelligence personnel followed his children to school. The harassment is not new; in the first term of the Obama administration, Russian intelligence personnel broke into the house of the U.S. defense attache in Moscow and killed his dog, according to multiple former officials who read the intelligence reports.

But since the 2014 Russian intervention in Ukraine, which prompted a wide range of U.S. sanctions against Russian officials and businesses close to Putin, harassment and surveillance of U.S. diplomatic staff in Moscow by security personnel and traffic police have increased significantly, State Department press secretary John Kirby confirmed to me.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/russia-is-harassing-us-diplomats-all-over-europe/2016/06/26/968d1a5a-3bdf-11e6-84e8-1580c7db5275_story.html?utm_term=.1cf0043c0c17