Tuesday, June 27, 2017

Deep State, Seth Rich, Russians

Our mainstream dinosaur media, epitomized by the disgraced Washington Post, the failing New York Times and the Clinton News Network (CNN), is a sick trifecta of fake news resembling state-controlled media in authoritarian countries. 

I rarely link to their content. The majestic newspaper that broke the Watergate burglary is now a propaganda mouthpiece for the deep state and the intelligence community, which are not one and the same. 

The intelligence community is amply represented within the deep state, but not all intelligence officers are leakers and traitors. Just a few who gamble with classified information, dealing themselves into the great card game of American politics. 
"2.13 Limitation on Covert Action. No covert action may be conducted which is intended to influence United States political processes, public opinion, policies, or media."

CIA officers are not supposed to operate domestically. That is in the Bible of the intelligence community, EO12333. But we see what we see. Some spooks are off the reservation. 

Former DCI Brennan set a bad example. So did General Hayden. Our problems with intelligence officers meddling in domestic politics go back further than we like to think, and a strong argument can be made that the Kennedy assassination was the malign apex of all deep state ops. 

This past weekend, we saw the Washington Post yet again publishing the "official version" of events that the deep state wanted to plant in the media, the claim that the Obama regime "failed to punish the Russians." 

The deep state will stop at nothing to perpetuate its cover story, even if Obama gets splashed with this fable of his incompetence. 

The Washington Post dances for its deep state puppeteers, and its owner, Mr. Bezos, will accede to it since he just got a fat $600 million contract for hosting the intelligence community cloud. 

Julian Assange repeatedly stated, "Russia was not our source." He obviously cannot confirm that Seth Rich leaked the DNC and Podesta emails, but Mr. Assange can pledge $20,000 for the arrest of Mr. Rich's murderers, and you can draw your own conclusions. 



In fact, when you watch the infamous video where Julian Assange refuses to confirm that Seth Rich was his source, you can actually see Mr. Assange gently nod after the 1:02 mark just before he speaks. Body language is more evocative than mere words. 

The murder of Seth Rich contradicts the deep state's cover story, so the investigation into his assassination is suppressed, despite the right of the Rich family to know who killed their son and why. 

Gunning down Seth Rich, and then imposing a coverup before our very eyes, means that the deep state can literally kill American citizens on our own streets and get away with it. Why not? They murdered President Kennedy, in public, as he was seated next to his wife. 

But ask yourself another question: The investigation into the murder of Seth Rich is frozen. Who has that kind of juice? Who has the capability to censor Mr. Rich's social media accounts after his death? 

Worse, who could ensure that Seth Rich did not survive his critical wounding? 

But bear with me. I do have a point. Vladimir Putin, who is admittedly an epic liar, also insists that Russia was not the WikiLeaks source. 

We see in the Vault 7 leak, purportedly the worst breach that CIA ever suffered (but stay tuned), the capability for CIA to spoof the telltale fingerprints in malware code that security analysts use to identify hacking perpetrators. 

Dubbed MARBLE, this "obfuscating" framework enables CIA to falsely pin an attack on China, Iran, Russia, or North Korea, though those who know actual NSA geeks will tell you that they joke about blaming everything on the Israelis anyway. Maybe this is why NSA only had "moderate confidence" that Russia was the hidden hand behind the DNC and Podesta leaks. 

Just three intelligence agencies weighed in on that assessment, FBI, CIA and NSA, and it was an assessment, not a formal estimate, a distinction that is lost on civilians but one that speaks volumes to intelligence insiders. Intelligence estimates include input from all seventeen intelligence agencies, and are products of the National Intelligence Council. 

Only two agencies, CIA and FBI, confirmed with high confidence that it was the Russians. But Hillary Clinton will inveigh that "seventeen intelligence agencies said that it was the Russians!" Which is a dirty lie, but what do you expect from Crooked Hillary. 



Then it comes out that the DNC forbade FBI access to their hacked servers, no agency within the US government ever did a forensic analysis of those servers, and the entire edifice of the Russian / Trump collusion narrative is collapsing because it depends upon findings from an increasingly discredited private firm, CloudStrike. 

The hacker Kim Dotcom offered to tell his story to the DOJ, he claimed that he knew Seth Rich as "Panda," but for a price. Mr. Dotcom is embroiled in a legal dispute with the Department of Justice, so he has personal matters on his mind. 

Mr. Rich did use the Gmail accounts [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected], but Mr. Dotcom has yet to furnish any forensic evidence confirming a relationship with Mr. Rich, and Mr. Dotcom has a criminal record. 

Among others, these two protagonists of debatable integrity,  Mr. Putin and Mr. Dotcom, insist that Russia had nothing to do with the DNC and Podesta hacks. It seems crazy to assert that Mr. Assange has more credibility and a longer track record of truth telling than everyone in this sordid mess, but that is where we are. 

After six months of orchestrated deep state information warfare in the American state media, no proof of Russian culpability exists. The intelligence community leaks like a sieve, the deep state plants tall tales everywhere, yet evidence of Russian complicity is yet to be published by partisan fake patriots. 

The deep state leaks everything else, including the smear that President Donald J. Trump​ hired Russian hookers to urinate on a bed in a fancy Moscow hotel, a calumny that the FBI paid $50,000 for Mr. Steele to corroborate. And it sure did get Senator McCain exercised, but not enough to give him a stroke. I am also at risk of having a stroke, so I will not wish one on him. 

Even Senator Feinstein, whom I do not like one bit, concedes that there is no evidence of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign. So did that other liar, DNI Clapper. Even discredited former FBI Director Comey admitted that there is no proof. After six months of investigations. 

This article links to Wired. I will still link to them. If you wish to click through and read what the Washington Post said, you can. But I will abet neither state sponsored nor deep state propaganda by linking to them myself. 

I have my limits.

This article is based on a rant that originally appeared on my Facebook page, Magic Kingdom Dispatch.  

I edited and expanded this article on 28 June, 2017. 

One more thing: HIS NAME WAS SETH RICH. 


Sunday, June 25, 2017

Is American Intelligence Wide Open?

In Episode 2 of Oliver Stone's interviews with Russian President Vladimir Putin we see glimpses of the old spy. Putin flat out lies two or three times, and he sticks to his cover stories like school trained spooks do.
YouTube links to all four episodes of Oliver Stone's Interviews with President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin.
Part 1: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b6YgjFxyT5EPart 2: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eVnWsjlBarwPart 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOeOcnng0toPart 4: https://youtu.be/avr4gGxNP4k
Which reminds me of something that I learned sometime during my own government employment, which was reinforced when I attended SERE-C. You recognize a hostile service intelligence officer by detecting the residual indicators in their behaviors that they are school trained.

Those marks, the body language, the careful control of facial expressions, emanate off of Vladimir Putin. He was obviously a professional, formally trained intelligence officer when he was younger. You can just see it. 

Most interesting to me in this installment, Putin says that he thinks that “Snowden went too far,” though surely Russian SIGINT celebrated the release of the Snowden documents. Putin never says so, and Mr. Stone does not pressure him on this.

It is possible that this is the lone aspect of the Snowden breaches that everyone can agree to: that their release gave adversarial intelligence agencies a bonanza to work with.

Suddenly, like everybody else, intelligence agencies worldwide, both hostile and allied, got an unprecedented peek into the arcana of American SIGINT, and some of them may have been as dismayed as we were.

I am sure that the Snowden documents filled in deficits in the knowledge base of hostile services, and they surely incited envy, but one other thing bugs me.

The mandarins of American intelligence know now that an undetected leaker, someone with wide access to data, blew more information than everything that Snowden released. 

In this case, and I obviously refer to the Vault 7 breach, an unidentified leaker, potentially a patriot, exposed classified CIA SIGINT data to WikiLeaks. 

My concern is that this breach, and others that I will discuss below, may not be the only ones that American counterintelligence knows about. 

An unknowable number of yet undetected leakers may have exposed this data and potentially even more to hostile intelligence agencies.

Yet another gross breach of NSA security is seen in the Shadow Broker’s hack, which spawned the WannaCry malware which is causing havoc worldwide. 

NSA literally does not know how the Shadow Brokers ended up with their weaponized code tools, which Snowden confirmed came out of NSA’s TAO, Tailored Access Operations. 

The CIA Vault 7 breach is already assessed as the worst breach in the history of American intelligence, and WikiLeaks says that they have umpteen gigabytes of data, which they are systematically working through on a weekly release schedule. Every week, WikiLeaks publishes yet another blown project, yet another blown capability, yet another blown tool. 

The CEO of Microsoft publicly lambasted NSA and CIA for hoarding zero day exploits, and then failing to adequately warn private firms about leaked malware. Cybersecurity researchers worldwide are livid that weaponized NSA code was used to create the WannaCry exploit. 

But back to Snowden: I consider Snowden a self-inflicted wound on the part of the mandarins of the intelligence community. I will explain. 

Bradley Manning, now Chelsea Manning, preceded Snowden. Manning was deployed to Iraq in 2009, and he leaked to WikiLeaks in 2010. 

Manning was our great wakeup call. When he released hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables, we should have realized that access permissions, and clearance processes, were too liberal.

Remember that Manning was detected because he confided in Adrian Lamo, who ratted him out and informed US Army Counterintelligence. 

No system detected Manning as he transferred gigabytes of classified cables to a CD-R as he worked in his SCIF. Manning was caught due to a tip. Even Manning’s supervisors, who should have realized that Manning was a problem due to multiple red flags, were clueless about his activities.

Manning’s modus operandi was simple: he pretended to be rocking out to Lady GaGa CD’s while he worked. He was actually capturing massive quantities of data and burning it to that CD. 

There was a push to drop the walls between the fiefdoms of the multiple intelligence agencies in the aftermath of 9-11. One initiative was Intellipedia, a classified online Wiki for the intelligence community. 

Intellipedia debuted in 2006, and was intended to improve interagency collaboration. Manning was the result. Did the mandarins of American intelligence respond by re-erecting those walls?

They did not. They left the walls down, and then Snowden happened in 2013. You would think that after Snowden that more effective filters would be emplaced, but then we see that Reality Winner in 2017 not only retained a TS/SCI clearance against all logic, she could access information well beyond her need to know. And she did just that.

Reality Winner was not even working in a compartment that would have justified her searching for the document that she blew to The Intercept, much less printing a hard copy.

Both Manning and Winner are prime examples of people who never should have received security clearances in the first place, much less retained them. To my knowledge nobody was ever punished over the failure of the clearance process in either of these two cases.

In the old Stasi, or the old KGB, somebody would have been shot for these failures.

Which brings us to the strange case of Mr. Harold T. Martin, who was indicted in February by prosecutors for illicitly exfiltrating more than 50 terabytes of highly classified material and several bankers boxes of hard copy documents, a quantity that eclipses both Snowden and Manning by several orders of magnitude. 

Over a 20 year career, Martin accumulated massive quantities of classified data in hard copy and in digital form that he hoarded in his home, in his shed, in his car, and in the portfolio that was in his hands at the moment of his arrest. 

Martin was arrested on August 27, 2016, but no details have been released about how he was detected. Perhaps new “Insider Threat” programs are actually effective? 

Authorized leaks by intelligence sources discussing the Martin case closely coincide throughout mainstream media, outlining the parameters of the government’s case against him. 

And no further information has been released. 

One point of interest is that the monumental hoarder Mr. Martin was a contractor working for Booz Allen Hamilton at the time of his apprehension, though he did work for a total of seven separate private firms with intelligence contracts over his 20 year career. 

Snowden was also a contractor with Booz at the time that he extracted his infamous documents from an NSA facility in Hawaii. 

While Martin was detected and arrested, the question whether truly effective reforms are in place and successful must remain doubtful as Martin is yet another contractor who was able to access vast quantities of classified information, in his case for 20 years, far in excess of his legitimate need to know. 

And then we see what happened with Ms. Reality Winner. 

There are now seven separate cases where leakers breached NSA security, just in the past three years. 

Putin does get a funny little smile on his face when he is telling a flat out lie. If you watch his body language, you will see it.

Then of course there is at least one other leaker that we barely know about, and about whom state controlled media in America has regurgitated minimal official anonymous leaks, though the record of court cases involving him is not lean. 

This leaker’s long history of dubious interactions with the US government paints him as litigious, and his character is so successfully assassinated that his own lawyer described him as a conman.

Which makes you wonder whether recent articles about him happened despite his long legal history with the US government, or if the journalists who wrote about him failed to do the simplest due diligence investigation into his background. 

I refer of course to Mr. Dennis Montgomery, characterized by some as the most epic intelligence leaker of all time, who legally duplicated and retained in his custody some 28 million distinct NSA records, and some 600 million pages of classified documents. Yes, those numbers were reported in historically trustworthy media.  

In his latest act, Mr. Montgomery sued multiple mandarins of the intelligence community and their organizations, naming former FBI Director James Comey, current DIRNSA Mike Rogers, former DCI John Brennan, and former POTUS Barack Hussein Obama. He also named the FBI, the CIA, the NSA and the DIA and other agencies in his lawsuit. 

Mr. Montgomery’s complaint: he was ignored, and he was shunned by Congressmen, Senators, and by Mr. Comey, whom he accuses of suppressing these records in order to perpetuate a series of illegal programs that surveil the American people and preeminent figures like the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, other Supreme Court Justices, prominent businessmen like Donald J. Trump, and Mr. Montgomery himself and his lawyer, Mr. Larry Klayman. 

Mr. Montgomery and Mr. Klayman first blipped my radar when InfoWars published an article on 20 March 2017 confirming that Donald J. Trump was surveilled. The examples provided were persuasive. 

The surveillance was confirmed between 2004 and 2009, but records provided to Sheriff Joe Arpaio only covered years up to 2010. So it is possible that further surveillance took place. 

On 22 March 2017, Bob Unruh published an article on wnd.com stating that Mr. Montgomery provided testimony to the FBI under a grant of immunity nearly two years ago. No investigation was mounted. 

The USG henceforth ignored Mr. Montgomery and his problematic whopping quantities of forensic evidence of illegal mass surveillance of the domestic US population, and resumed its whispering campaign that he is unreliable, a conman and a fraudster, and perhaps mentally unstable. 

Did they shoot the messenger? Or is their character assassination of Mr. Montgomery accurate? Is it possible that Mr. Montgomery is a nutcase, but he also has in his custody evidence of illegal government domestic mass surveillance? 

Mr. Montgomery’s lawyer, Larry Klayman of Freedom Watch, sent a letter to Congressman Devin Nunes (R-CA), the chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in the House, demanding that former Director Comey be asked about this forensic evidence under oath during his testimony. 

Obviously, that did not happen. Mr. Klayman also demanded a meeting with the Congressman who instead sent a staffer to listen to the lawyer. 

It is inescapable that Mr. Klayman and Mr. Montgomery were treated with rudeness and contempt by officials at the highest levels of the intelligence community, and now, by Mr. Nunes. Was it merited? 

Mr. Montgomery’s lawsuit was assigned to Judge Richard J. Leon of the District Court for the District of Columbia, who issued an historic ruling in December, 2013 that NSA’s Bulk Telephony Metadata Program likely violates the Constitution. 

Judge Leon however stayed his own injunction ordering a halt to the surveillance in light of the national security interests at stake and the novelty of the constitutional issues raised, he said. Judge Leon was also optimistic that the appeals process would move expeditiously. 

Judge Leon’s optimism was betrayed, however, until he ruled two years later that the program likely violates the constitution. Then the appeals court moved expeditiously on behalf of the government, and a panel of three appellate court judges ruled in favor of NSA.

Judge Richard Leon is considered an ally of the people, and this court case may end up with rulings against mandarins of the intelligence community and against the former president and the intelligence agencies themselves. Or it may be dismissed, like other litigation involving Mr. Montgomery.

Mr. Montgomery’s long history of litigation with the US government remains problematic, and it appears possible that journalist Mr. Bill Still was deceived, as was Bob Unruh, as was Sheriff Joe Arpaio, as were John Solomon and Sara A. Carter of Circa

Mr. Montgomery’s Wiki entry is devastating. It states that Mr. Montgomery “conned the Pentagon” and “won millions in federal contracts” for software that was later characterized as “an elaborate hoax.” 

The talk page for that entry shows Mr. Montgomery himself attempting to edit his own entry, which drove Wikipedia editors into a frenzy.

In a final condemnation, the entry states that Mr. Montgomery’s former lawyer “called him a “con artist” and an “habitual liar engaged in fraud.”

As interesting that all of this is, my point is that Mr. Montgomery may have exfiltrated classified records. Mr. Martin certainly did, Mr. Snowden definitely did, and so did Mr. Manning. So did Ms. Winning. 

We can also consider the OPM breach in this context, which is blamed on Chinese hackers, as well as another recent breach, this time of Air Force personnel files. All of these breaches happened, while only Mr. Montgomery’s remains problematic. 

What about the spies that we never hear about? 

We are still apparently wide open. Reality Winner was just an exception because she got caught. What about the leakers that did not make her mistakes?

Nobody knows.