New York Times outs confidential NSA/CIA sources. Will Obama flee or fight?

[LowRider44M]

Part One
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE3z9sa9Kdc

Part Two
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFAEiIXZ9Nc



WASHINGTON — American law enforcement and intelligence agencies are examining intercepted communications and financial transactions as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump, including his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, current and former senior American officials said.

The continuing counterintelligence investigation means that Mr. Trump will take the oath of office on Friday with his associates under investigation and after the intelligence agencies concluded that the Russian government had worked to help elect him. As president, Mr. Trump will oversee those agencies and have the authority to redirect or stop at least some of these efforts.

It is not clear whether the intercepted communications had anything to do with Mr. Trump’s campaign, or Mr. Trump himself. It is also unclear whether the inquiry has anything to do with an investigation into the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s computers and other attempts to disrupt the elections in November. The American government has concluded that the Russian government was responsible for a broad computer hacking campaign, including the operation against the D.N.C.

The counterintelligence investigation centers at least in part on the business dealings that some of the president-elect’s past and present advisers have had with Russia. Mr. Manafort has done business in Ukraine and Russia. Some of his contacts there were under surveillance by the National Security Agency for suspected links to Russia’s Federal Security Service, one of the officials said.
Continue reading the main story
Russian Hacking in the U.S. Election
Complete coverage of Russia’s campaign to disrupt the 2016 presidential election.



Mr. Manafort is among at least three Trump campaign advisers whose possible links to Russia are under scrutiny. Two others are Carter Page, a businessman and former foreign policy adviser to the campaign, and Roger Stone, a longtime Republican operative.

The F.B.I. is leading the investigations, aided by the National Security Agency, the C.I.A. and the Treasury Department’s financial crimes unit. The investigators have accelerated their efforts in recent weeks but have found no conclusive evidence of wrongdoing, the officials said. One official said intelligence reports based on some of the wiretapped communications had been provided to the White House.

Counterintelligence investigations examine the connections between American citizens and foreign governments. Those connections can involve efforts to steal state or corporate secrets, curry favor with American government leaders or influence policy. It is unclear which Russian officials are under investigation, or what particular conversations caught the attention of American eavesdroppers. The legal standard for opening these investigations is low, and prosecutions are rare.

“We have absolutely no knowledge of any investigation or even a basis for such an investigation,” said Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for the Trump transition.

In an emailed statement Thursday evening, Mr. Manafort called allegations that he had interactions with the Russian government a “Democrat Party dirty trick and completely false.”

“I have never had any relationship with the Russian government or any Russian officials. I was never in contact with anyone, or directed anyone to be in contact with anyone,” he said.

“On the ‘Russian hacking of the D.N.C.,’” he said, “my only knowledge of it is what I have read in the papers.”

The decision to open the investigations was not based on a dossier of salacious, uncorroborated allegations that were compiled by a former British spy working for a Washington research firm. The F.B.I. is also examining the allegations in that dossier, and a summary of its contents was provided to Mr. Trump earlier this month.

Representatives of the agencies involved declined to comment. Of the half-dozen current and former officials who confirmed the existence of the investigations, some said they were providing information because they feared the new administration would obstruct their efforts. All spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the cases.
First Draft



Numerous news outlets, including The New York Times, have reported on the F.B.I. investigations into Mr. Trump’s advisers. BBC and then McClatchy revealed the existence of a multiagency working group to coordinate investigations across the government.

The continuing investigation again puts the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, in the middle of a politically fraught investigation. Democrats have sharply criticized Mr. Comey’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. Mrs. Clinton has said his decision to reveal the existence of new emails late in the campaign cost her the election.

The F.B.I. investigation into Mr. Manafort began last spring, and was an outgrowth of a criminal investigation into his work for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine and for the country’s former president, Viktor F. Yanukovych. In August, The Times reported that Mr. Manafort’s name had surfaced in a secret ledger that showed he had been paid millions in undisclosed cash payments. The Associated Press has reported that his work for Ukraine included a secret lobbying effort in Washington aimed at influencing American news organizations and government officials.

Mr. Stone, a longtime friend of Mr. Trump’s, said in a speech in Florida last summer that he had communicated with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy group that published the hacked Democratic emails. During the speech, Mr. Stone predicted further leaks of documents, a prediction that came true within weeks.

In a brief interview on Thursday, Mr. Stone said he had never visited Russia and had no Russian clients. He said that he had worked in Ukraine for a pro-Western party, but that any assertion that he had ties to Russian intelligence was “nonsense” and “totally false.”

“The whole thing is a canard,” he said. “I have no Russian influences.”

The Senate intelligence committee has started its own investigation into Russia’s purported attempts to disrupt the election. The committee’s inquiry is broad, and will include an examination of Russian hacking and possible ties between people associated with Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia.

Investigators are also scrutinizing people on the periphery of Mr. Trump’s campaign, such as Mr. Page, a former Merrill Lynch banker who founded Global Energy Capital, an investment firm in New York that has done business with Russia.

In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Page expressed bewilderment about why he might be under investigation. He blamed a smear campaign — that he said was orchestrated by Mrs. Clinton — for media speculation about the nature of his ties to Russia.

“I did nothing wrong, for the 5,000th time,” he said. His adversaries, he added, are “pulling a page out of the Watergate playbook.”

The lingering investigations will pose a test for Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, who has been nominated for attorney general. If Mr. Sessions is confirmed, he will for a time be the only person in the government authorized to seek foreign intelligence wiretaps on American soil.

Mr. Sessions said at his confirmation hearing that he would recuse himself from any investigations involving Mrs. Clinton. He was not asked whether he would do so in cases involving associates of Mr. Trump.

[LowRider44M]

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Brief interview with The Shadow Brokers, the hackers selling NSA exploits

In August, a group calling themselves The Shadow Brokers publicly released a cache of NSA hacking tools, and promised to sell more. After a failed crowd-funding and auction attempt, the group now appears to be offering a wealth of trojans, exploits, and implants directly to potential customers.

Since August, Motherboard has attempted to contact The Shadow Brokers through various different channels. On Thursday, the group replied.

“TheShadowBrokers no arrested,” someone from the group wrote in an encrypted message.

Full story…
Motherboard
Dec. 15, 2016

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“TheShadowBrokers is not being irresponsible criminals."

In August, a group calling themselves The Shadow Brokers publicly released a cache of NSA hacking tools, and promised to sell more. After a failed crowd-funding and auction attempt, the group now appears to be offering a wealth of trojans, exploits, and implants directly to potential customers.

Since August, Motherboard has attempted to contact The Shadow Brokers through various different channels. On Thursday, the group replied.

"TheShadowBrokers no arrested," someone from the group wrote in an encrypted message.

In August, the US government charged Hal Martin, an NSA contractor who allegedly stole classified information from the agency, and who is the prime suspect behind The Shadow Brokers leaks, according to a Washington Post report.

Martin has been in detention since his arrest, but The Shadow Brokers have continued to post cryptographically signed messages. This latest communication is the strongest public evidence yet that The Shadow Brokers and Hal Martin, although possibly connected, are not necessarily one and the same.

On Wednesday, Motherboard reported that the group was apparently selling hacking tools from 1 to 100 bitcoins each ($780—$78,000). In their new message, The Shadow Brokers confirmed that the site did belong to the group.

"TheShadowBrokers is not being irresponsible criminals," the group told Motherboard. "TheShadowBrokers is opportunists. TheShadowBrokers is giving 'responsible parties' opportunity to making things right."

"They choosing no. Not very responsible parties!" they continued, not specifying who these responsible parties may be. "TheShadowBrokers is deserving reward for taking risks so ask for money. Risk is not being free. Behavior is obfuscation no deception."

The files the group dumped in August included exploits for hardware firewalls made by companies such as Cisco, Huawei, and Fortinet. Some hackers even went onto use the Cisco exploits in the wild. Another Shadow Brokers dump apparently included IP addresses and other information linked to the NSA.

According to a Reuters report from September, a leading theory for The Shadow Brokers leak is that an NSA hacker left the exploits on a remote server, which were then discovered by Russian hackers. Former NSA staffers previously told Motherboard they believed the leak could have originated from a rogue agency insider, with one claiming that this sort of material would only be available internally. The NSA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

"TheShadowBrokers is not commenting on operation details, is bad opsec," the group told Motherboard

[LowRider44M]

Moral Outrage Is Self-Serving, Say Psychologists
Perpetually raging about the world's injustices? You're probably overcompensating.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown|Mar. 1, 2017 8:45 am

akg-images/Newscomakg-images/NewscomWhen people publicly rage about perceived injustices that don't affect them personally, we tend to assume this expression is rooted in altruism—a "disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others." But new research suggests that professing such third-party concern—what social scientists refer to as "moral outrage"—is often a function of self-interest, wielded to assuage feelings of personal culpability for societal harms or reinforce (to the self and others) one's own status as a Very Good Person.

Outrage expressed "on behalf of the victim of [a perceived] moral violation" is often thought of as "a prosocial emotion" rooted in "a desire to restore justice by fighting on behalf of the victimized," explain Bowdoin psychology professor Zachary Rothschild and University of Southern Mississippi psychology professor Lucas A. Keefer in the latest edition of Motivation and Emotion. Yet this conventional construction—moral outrage as the purview of the especially righteous—is "called into question" by research on guilt, they say.

Feelings of guilt are a direct threat to one's sense that they are a moral person and, accordingly, research on guilt ?nds that this emotion elicits strategies aimed at alleviating guilt that do not always involve undoing one's actions. Furthermore, research shows that individuals respond to reminders of their group's moral culpability with feelings of outrage at third-party harm-doing. These findings suggest that feelings of moral outrage, long thought to be grounded solely in concerns with maintaining justice, may sometimes reflect efforts to maintain a moral identity.

To test this guilt-to-outrage-to-moral-reaffirmation premise, Rothschild and Keefer conducted five separate studies assessing the relationships between anger, empathy, identity, individual and collective guilt, self perception, and the expression of moral outrage.

For each study, a new group of respondents (solicited through Amazon's Mechanical Turk program) were presented with a fabricated news article about either labor exploitation in developing countries or climate change. For studies using the climate-change article, half of participants read that the biggest driver of man-made climate change was American consumers, while the others read that Chinese consumers were most to blame. With the labor exploitation article, participants in one study were primed to think about small ways in which they might be contributing to child labor, labor trafficking, and poor working conditions in "sweatshops"; in another, they learned about poor conditions in factories making Apple products and the company's failure to stop this. After exposure to their respective articles, study participants were given a series of short surveys and exercises to assess their levels of things like personal guilt, collective guilt, anger at third parties ("multinational corporations," "international oil companies") involved in the environmental destruction/labor exploitation, desire to see someone punished, and belief in personal moral standing, as well as baseline beliefs about the topics in question and positive or negative affect. Here's the gist of Rothschild and Keefer's findings:

Triggering feelings of personal culpability for a problem increases moral outrage at a third-party target. For instance, respondents who read that Americans are the biggest consumer drivers of climate change "reported significantly higher levels of outrage at the environmental destruction" caused by "multinational oil corporations" than did the respondents who read that Chinese consumers were most to blame.
The more guilt over one's own potential complicity, the more desire "to punish a third-party through increased moral outrage at that target." For instance, participants in study one read about sweatshop labor exploitation, rated their own identification with common consumer practices that allegedly contribute, then rated their level of anger at "international corporations" who perpetuate the exploitative system and desire to punish these entities. The results showed that increased guilt "predicted increased punitiveness toward a third-party harm-doer due to increased moral outrage at the target."
Having the opportunity to express outrage at a third-party decreased guilt in people threatened through "ingroup immorality." Study participants who read that Americans were the biggest drivers of man-made climate change showed significantly higher guilt scores than those who read the blame-China article when they weren't given an opportunity to express anger at or assign blame to a third-party. However, having this opportunity to rage against hypothetical corporations led respondents who read the blame-America story to express significantly lower levels of guilt than the China group. Respondents who read that Chinese consumers were to blame had similar guilt levels regardless of whether they had the opportunity to express moral outrage.
"The opportunity to express moral outrage at corporate harm-doers" inflated participants perception of personal morality. Asked to rate their own moral character after reading the article blaming Americans for climate change, respondents saw themselves as having "significantly lower personal moral character" than those who read the blame-China article—that is, when they weren't given an out in the form of third-party blame. Respondents in the America-shaming group wound up with similar levels of moral pride as the China control group when they were first asked to rate the level of blame deserved by various corporate actors and their personal level of anger at these groups. In both this and a similar study using the labor-exploitation article, "the opportunity to express moral outrage at corporate harm-doing (vs. not) led to significantly higher personal moral character ratings," the authors found.
Guilt-induced moral outrage was lessened when people could assert their goodness through alternative means, "even in an unrelated context." Study five used the labor exploitation article, asked all participants questions to assess their level of "collective guilt" (i.e., "feelings of guilt for the harm caused by one's own group") about the situation, then gave them an article about horrific conditions at Apple product factories. After that, a control group was given a neutral exercise, while others were asked to briefly describe what made them a good and decent person; both exercises were followed by an assessment of empathy and moral outrage. The researchers found that for those with high collective-guilt levels, having the chance to assert their moral goodness first led to less moral outrage at corporations. But when the high-collective-guilt folks were given the neutral exercise and couldn't assert they were good people, they wound up with more moral outrage at third parties. Meanwhile, for those low in collective guilt, affirming their own moral goodness first led to marginally more moral outrage at corporations.

These findings held true even accounting for things such as respondents political ideology, general affect, and background feelings about the issues.

Ultimately, the results of Rothschild and Keefer's five studies were "consistent with recent research showing that outgroup-directed moral outrage can be elicited in response to perceived threats to the ingroup's moral status," write the authors. The findings also suggest that "outrage driven by moral identity concerns serves to compensate for the threat of personal or collective immorality" and the cognitive dissonance that it might elicit, and expose a "link between guilt and self-serving expressions of outrage that reflect a kind of 'moral hypocrisy,' or at least a non-moral form of anger with a moral facade."

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Smokey
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02qzeV00-EQ

[Jeremy H. Denisovan]

On Sunday, March 5, 2017 at 6:19:17 PM UTC-8, LowRider44M wrote:
> Part One
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE3z9sa9Kdc
>
> Part Two
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFAEiIXZ9Nc

What's the point of that crap supposed to be?
The poster uses abusive, meaningless words like
'libtards', and appears to take glee in violence
perpetrated on protesters.

Yesterday, Bernie Sanders noted:
"Republican cowards in Arizona introduced a bill to
punish protesters. The answer was more protesting.
The people of Arizona stood up, fought back and won.
The Arizona House Speaker withdrew the bill after
receiving hundreds of phone calls. Across this nation
we are seeing young and old people, white people and
people of color, gay and straight people come together
to resist an agenda that aims to silence them."

You ask, will Obama flee?
What the heck do you think Obama has to flee from?
Obama is planing to work on undoing gerrymandering,
and he's been doing some surfing and swimming.

When One President Smears Another:
http://tinyurl.com/hrlmtut

Excerpts:

"President Trump had no evidence on Saturday morning when he smeared his predecessor, President Barack Obama, accusing him of ordering that Trump Tower phones be tapped during the 2016 campaign. Otherwise, the White House would not be scrambling to find out if what he said is true.

Just contemplate the recklessness — the sheer indifference to truth and the moral authority of the American presidency — revealed here: one president baselessly charging criminality by another, all in a childish Twitter rampage."

"F.B.I. director, James Comey, was so alarmed by Mr. Trump’s fact-free claim — which implicitly accused the F.B.I. of breaking the law by wiretapping an American citizen at a president’s behest — that he was asking the Justice Department to publicly call it false. In other words, the F.B.I. director was demanding that Justice officially declare the president to be misleading the public.

This is a dangerous moment, which requires Congress and members of this administration to look beyond partisan maneuvering and tend to the health of the democracy itself."

"Mr. Trump declared as fact a theory he apparently encountered on alt-right websites."

"Mr. Obama issued a statement saying that neither he “nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen.” James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, denied on Sunday that the government had wiretapped Trump Tower before the election, and said he had no knowledge of any effort to do so before Mr. Obama left office."

"Mr. Trump has tweeted himself into a corner. His accusation is so sensational — so explosive if it turned out to have some basis in fact and so corrosive if not — that Congress has no credible option but to convene a bipartisan select committee to investigate all questions related to Russian interference in the election. And if Mr. Trump has confidence in his claim, he should have no reluctance about the appointment of an independent counsel to get to the bottom of the Russia affair.

As for those senior officials of this administration who have integrity: It is past time for them to begin asking themselves if they can continue lending their names and exposing their reputations to a president with so little regard for democratic institutions, and for the truth."

[jackofhearts]

yeah i don't think i'll be using that
cell phone so much anymore. the thrill
is gone.