US versus NATO

[Altair]

Brennan is very opposed to Trump.With Putin claiming the intelligence agencies gave $400m to Hillary I wouldn't be supportive either.Its now looking like the CIA and others worked against Trump.Until he cleans the Democrats out of those agencies he would be smart not to trust them.I know I don't.

Much better to outsource that kind of stuff to the SVR and GRU.

I mean, they supported him, they must be trustworthy.

 

[tomahawk6]

Much better to outsource that kind of stuff to the SVR and GRU.

I mean, they supported him, they must be trustworthy.

Ask the Clintons they would know.

 

[Altair]

Ask the Clintons they would know.

When in doubt,  talk about Clinton?

 

[PPCLI Guy]

Ask the Clintons they would know.

:Tin-Foil-Hat:

 

[Retired AF Guy]

Not in my recollection.

I am pretty sure that no definitive claim was ever made by any of them, just "probabilities" etcetera, despite what Hillary repeated at every opportunity to lay blame elsewhere.

Here is an extract of the Key Assessments from the Unclassified version of the "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections" report.

We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election.  Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.  We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments.

We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him. All three agencies agree with this judgment.  CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence.

Moscow’s approach evolved over the course of the campaign based on Russia’s understanding of the electoral prospects of the two main candidates.  When it appeared to Moscow that Secretary Clinton was likely to win the election, the Russian influence campaign began to focus more on undermining her future presidency.

Further information has come to light since Election Day that, when combined with Russian behavior since early November 2016, increases our confidence in our assessments of Russian motivations and goals. Moscow’s influence campaign followed a Russian messaging strategy that blends covert intelligence operations—such as cyber activity—with overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or “trolls.” Russia, like its Soviet predecessor, has a history of conducting covert influence campaigns focused on US presidential elections that have used intelligence officers and agents and press placements to disparage candidates perceived as hostile to the Kremlin.

Russia’s intelligence services conducted cyber operations against targets associated with the 2016 US presidential election, including targets associated with both major US political parties.

We assess with high confidence that Russian military intelligence (General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate or GRU)used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets and relayed material to WikiLeaks.

Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple US state or local electoral boards.  DHS assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying.

Russia’s state-run propaganda machine contributed to the influence campaign by serving as a platform for Kremlin messaging to Russian and international audiences. We assess Moscow will apply lessons learned from its Putin-ordered campaign aimed at the US presidential election to future influence efforts worldwide, including against US allies and their election processes.

Full report can be found here.

 

[Altair]

https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/17/politics/trump-nato-fox/index.html

NATO requires all members to help defend fellow member nations that have been attacked, which Carlson noted to Trump.
"Why should my son go to Montenegro to defend it from attack?" Carlson inquired.
Trump responded: "I've asked the same question. Montenegro is a tiny country with very strong people. ... They are very strong people. They are very aggressive people, they may get aggressive, and congratulations, you are in World War III."

Well...I actually don't know what to say here.

 

[CBH99]

Haha!!  Suckers!!

Here you thought it was going to be the USA & China starting WW3.  With the US sailing it's ships all around SE Asia like it owns the place, sailing carrier groups off the coast of China, the US telling China what it can & can't do.  Surrounding it militarily with countries like Japan & Korea & Australia, which also happen to be incredibly important trading partners with China.  Or, starting an economic trade war with it's rival economic powerhouse, slapping tariff's on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of goods. 

OR....you thought it would be with Russia!!  Those sneaky Russians, always up to no good.  Taking care of brush fires along their own borders?  Nah, ruthless Russian aggression.  Diversifying their economy to export primarily wheat, natural gas, and oil due to the never ending economic sanctions called for by the US?  That's just them trying outsmart the free world, so they can fund a military that can invade everybody. 

Big military exercises within their own borders, due to a paranoia that NATO may try to invade on false pretenses & annex a little sliver of a disputed territory?  Clearly rehearsing for a full scale invasion of Europe.  When NATO does it, it's to 'demonstrate solidarity with our allies & tell the evil Russians we are ready for em!'

Or or or...you thought we would all be wiped out by nuclear armageddon!!  Because with each missile containing enough warheads to wipe out 6 to 10 cities, or more -- having thousands upon thousands of missiles is clearly required.  I mean why nuke just one entire city with one little warhead, and waste the others that came with it?  And why stop there, when you could nuke the same place 1000 times over?  Clearly a good use of hundreds of billions of dollars, and absolutely a plausible way for WW3 to start...  :facepalm:



But clearly, we were all wrong.  Montenegro, with a population of a whopping 650,000 -- and peaceful relations with all of it's neighbours, and an economically stable country with growing economic support from China & a strong tourism industry...absolutely.  That's where WW3 is going to start.

Because, even if Montenegro SOMEHOW happens to SOMEHOW start WORLD WAR 3...FFS...I'm sure the rest of the world cares enough about Montenegro to send their soldiers to their deaths.  :facepalm:

I know already, the people of New Zealand are absolutely fixated on what happens in!!!! ...wait, where again?  where is that?  what's happening?  We care so much we forgot to give a s**t...


Rest easy there Carlson.  You don't want your son to go to Montenegro?  Don't think you have to worry there champ. 

 

[Remius]

Maybe President Trump read this article from 2017  ;D

https://makeamericathebest.com/2017/05/26/montenegro-responds-to-trump-insult-declares-war-on-u-s/

 

[Fishbone Jones]

The Mouse that Roared?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mouse_That_Roared

 

[Retired AF Guy]

Sure. I've seen no credible proof of serious, government-led meddling - despite a lengthy "investigation" -  and the DNC refused to turn over their server for analysis of the alleged hacking. Why?

Well, I hate to disappoint you, but yes the DNC did allow the FBI to examine the servers, and it wasn't one server, there were actually 140 different servers.

This article from the Daily Beast explains what actual happened.

Trump’s ‘Missing DNC Server’ Is Neither Missing Nor a Server

KEVIN POULSEN 07.16.18 9:58 PM ET

Donald Trump turns to right-wing conspiracy theories when he’s cornered, and he was cornered on Monday. Standing feet away from Vladimir Putin at a press conference following their Helsinki tete-a-tete, a reporter challenged Trump to condemn Putin for Russia’s election interference, “in front of the world.” Instead, the world watched as the president of the United States took Putin’s side against his own Justice Department and his own intelligence agencies, and launched into a rambling discourse about Hillary Clinton’s emails and a supposedly missing DNC server that hides the truth about Putin’s innocence.

“You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server. Why didn’t they take the server? Where is the server, I want to know, and what is the server saying?”


The server is saying shut up.

The “server” Trump is obsessed with is actually 140 servers, most of them cloud-based, which the DNC was forced to decommission in June 2016 while trying to rid its network of the Russian GRU officers working to help Trump win the election, according to the figures in the DNC’s civil lawsuit against Russia and the Trump campaign. Another 180 desktop and laptop computers were also swapped out as the DNC raced to get the organization back on its feet and free of Putin’s surveillance.

But despite Trump’s repeated feverish claims to the contrary, no machines are actually missing.

“Despite Trump’s repeated feverish claims to the contrary, no machines are actually missing.”

It’s true that the FBI doesn’t have the DNC’s computer hardware. Agents didn’t sweep into DNC headquarters, load up all the equipment and leave Democrats standing stunned beside empty desks and dangling cables. There’s a reason for that, and it has nothing to do with a deep state conspiracy to frame Putin.

Trump and his allies are capitalizing on a basic misapprehension of how computer intrusion investigations work. Investigating a virtual crime isn’t a like investigating a murder. The Russians didn’t leave DNA evidence on the server racks and fingerprints on the keyboards. All the evidence of their comings and goings was on the computer hard drives, and in memory, and in the ephemeral network transmissions to and from the GRU’s command-and-control servers.

When cyber investigators respond to an incident, they capture that evidence in a process called “imaging.” They make an exact byte-for-byte copy of the hard drives. They do the same for the machine’s memory, capturing evidence that would otherwise be lost at the next reboot, and they monitor and store the traffic passing through the victim’s network. This has been standard procedure in computer intrusion investigations for decades. The images, not the computer’s hardware, provide the evidence.

Both the DNC and the security firm Crowdstrike, hired to respond to the breach, have said repeatedly over the years that they gave the FBI a copy of all the DNC images back in 2016. The DNC reiterated that Monday in a statement to the Daily Beast.

“The FBI was given images of servers, forensic copies, as well as a host of other forensic information we collected from our systems,” said Adrienne Watson, the DNC’s deputy communications director. “We were in close contact and worked cooperatively with the FBI and were always responsive to their requests. Any suggestion that they were denied access to what they wanted for their investigation is completely incorrect.”

The FBI declined comment for this story, but in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee last year, then-director James Comey said that Crowdstrike “ultimately shared with us their forensics.”

At that same hearing, Comey complained that the DNC didn’t give the FBI direct access to the DNC’s servers. It’s unclear why Comey wanted the FBI operating on the DNC’s live network, but if the DNC demurred it wouldn’t be an unusual call, particularly five months before election day.

“The FBI is looking to investigate and prosecute crimes, and we’re looking to return a system to operation as quickly as possible with minimal impact,” said Rendition Infosec’s Jake Williams, one of several incident response professionals interviewed for this story. “I can tell you honestly that had I been part of that incident response, I would not have advocated calling in the FBI. Every minute the FBI spends keeping the actors in play, that’s a minute I don’t get back in prepping for the election. I would absolutely have shared images with them.”

Kenn White, a security expert and former DHS adviser, agreed that the FBI wouldn’t have expected direct access to DNC’s computers, “The FBI had one of the best cyber security firms in the world giving them forensics, and going in depth and reverse engineering to the byte level these implants and turning it over.”

In some versions of the servergate conspiracy theory now espoused by Trump, nothing less than physical possession of the hardware will suffice, because Crowdstrike, a respected security firm helmed by a former senior FBI agent, might be part of the deep state’s efforts to frame Putin. White scoffs at that notion, noting that National Republican Congressional Committee is one of Crowdstrike’s customers.

“I’ve done incident response for defense contractors and healthcare groups, this is all standard practice,” said White. “It’s completely defensible in terms of best practices and what was going on.”

“We were in close contact and worked cooperatively with the FBI. Any suggestion that they were denied access to what they wanted for their investigation is completely incorrect.”
— DNC's Adrienne Watson

It’s also consistent with the Department of Justice’s electronic evidence manual, which recommends capturing images when practical even when the FBI is executing a search warrant against a uncooperative suspect. When the computers belong to a cooperating victim, seizing the machines is pretty much out of the question, said James Harris, a former FBI cybercrime agent who worked on a 2009 breach at Google that’s been linked to the Chinese government.

“In most cases you don’t even ask, you just assume you’re going to make forensic copies,” said Harris, now vice president of engineering at PFP Cyber. “For example when the Google breach happened back in 2009, agents were sent out with express instructions that you image what they allow you to image, because they’re the victim, you don’t have a search warrant, and you don’t want to disrupt their business.”

There’s a final bit of evidence that the FBI got what it wanted from the DNC, and it was filed in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. last Friday: 29-pages of inside details showing exactly how and when the GRU’s hackers moved through the DNC’s network on their mission to help Trump.

If the president really wants to know what the DNC server is saying, it’s all in the indictment against Putin’s hackers. He just has to listen.

Kevin Poulsen
@kpoulsen
Kevin.Poulsen@thedailybeast.com

Article Link

 

[Brad Sallows]

Before leaping triumphantly into yet another game of "Trump is such a fool" (easy to play), it's worth considering if his mind really understands the distinction between Hillary's (single - perhaps redundant pair) "email server" and the DNC's servers, particularly while he is extemporizing.  His ignorance isn't excusable, but it's a waste of time to analyze basic ignorance - an exercise in GIGO.

 

[PuckChaser]

How many people actually understand the difference between a single server and distributed server (cloud) solutions? To hammer Trump for that of all things is just ridiculous.

 

[Altair]

How many people actually understand the difference between a single server and distributed server (cloud) solutions? To hammer Trump for that of all things is just ridiculous.

Yes and no.

For any one individual to not understand the nuances and complexities of that is understandable.

But...isn't this the president of the united states? Could he not ask for a briefing with some of the greatest minds America has to offer on the subject?

 

[PuckChaser]

He's not the Manchurian Candidate, with an army of speech writers crafting his every single word. The reason he appealed to the rust belt states that carried him to the presidency was that he was willing to fire from the hip and not sound like a political robot. Realistically what does a briefing on how distributed servers work bring to the discussion? Its a red herring.

 

[Retired AF Guy]

How many people actually understand the difference between a single server and distributed server (cloud) solutions? To hammer Trump for that of all things is just ridiculous.

The purpose of the article was not to explain the differences between different types of servers, but to point out the fact that contrary to what the POTUS has been saying the FBI did examine the DNC servers.

 

[Colin Parkinson]

Yes and no.

For any one individual to not understand the nuances and complexities of that is understandable.

But...isn't this the president of the united states? Could he not ask for a briefing with some of the greatest minds America has to offer on the subject?

Have you ever seen a Briefing note? They are set to a particular style, generally 3 pages at most, point form and the information has been massaged by multiple staffers, many that have no clue what they are editing. I always suggest keeping a copy of the draft briefing note, so if things go sideways, you can point out that you did provide the pertinent information, but it was edited out along the way. Also keep a copy of the final briefing note if you get a copy, because chances are you get asked for it again in 3 months, as they have longed forgotten it was already been done. 

 

[daftandbarmy]

Have you ever seen a Briefing note? They are set to a particular style, generally 3 pages at most, point form and the information has been massaged by multiple staffers, many that have no clue what they are editing. I always suggest keeping a copy of the draft briefing note, so if things go sideways, you can point out that you did provide the pertinent information, but it was edited out along the way. Also keep a copy of the final briefing note if you get a copy, because chances are you get asked for it again in 3 months, as they have longed forgotten it was already been done.

Your bosses must fear you

 

[Remius]

Have you ever seen a Briefing note? They are set to a particular style, generally 3 pages at most, point form and the information has been massaged by multiple staffers, many that have no clue what they are editing. I always suggest keeping a copy of the draft briefing note, so if things go sideways, you can point out that you did provide the pertinent information, but it was edited out along the way. Also keep a copy of the final briefing note if you get a copy, because chances are you get asked for it again in 3 months, as they have longed forgotten it was already been done.

Quoted for truth.  My very first task in the PS was to get a briefing note up to the DM about a stupid cake for an event the ADM was attending.  11 weeks later it went through so many changes at every level asking for changes to wording etc etc.  The final version was exactly the same as my first version.  :brickwall:

 

[FJAG]

Quoted for truth.  My very first task in the PS was to get a briefing note up to the DM about a stupid cake for an event the ADM was attending.  11 weeks later it went through so many changes at every level asking for changes to wording etc etc.  The final version was exactly the same as my first version.  :brickwall:

A sure sign that there are entirely too many staff officers/managers in the chain of command/hierarchy with entirely too much time on their hands.

:cheers:

 

[tomahawk6]

Bolton is doing great work. I don't know how accurate the article is because msn tends to be anti-administration.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/us-officials-scrambled-behind-the-scenes-to-shield-nato-deal-from-trump/ar-BBLILmn?ocid=spartanntp 

U.S. Officials Scrambled Behind the Scenes to Shield NATO Deal From Trump