Jared Kushner’s use of WhatsApp to allegedly message world leaders about policy issues has been well-documented. But with recent reports alleging that the Saudi Royal Family hacked into Jeff Bezos’ phone via his WhatsApp account, this raises very serious national security concerns about Kushner, who was also messaging members of the royal family.
If they can get into Bezos’ account, they can certainly get into Kushner’s, as Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains.
To be part of your local law enforcement's surveillance network, all you need is a little tech from Amazon. Amazon's Ring doorbell/camera is being handed out to cops, who can then give them to citizens with the implication the recipients of this corporate/government largesse will deliver recordings upon request.
Every Ring installed is another contributor to this ad hoc network of cameras -- something both cops and Amazon have access to. Amazon is looking to corner two markets at one time, roping in both the public and private sectors with an eye on dominating both. The added bonus -- at least as far as Amazon is concerned -- is its Neighbors app. Neighbors allows people to report suspicious things to other neighbors, as well as law enforcement.
The whole process is guided by Amazon's heavy hand. Government agencies participating in the Ring handouts are given talking points, pre-written press releases, and contractual obligations to promote the product they're giving away. Recently-obtained documents show Amazon has even crafted scripts for police officers and press relations staff to use when questioned by citizens.
If the community member doesn’t want to supply a Ring video that seems vital to a local law enforcement investigation, police can contact Amazon, which will then essentially “subpoena” the video.
“If we ask within 60 days of the recording and as long as it’s been uploaded to the cloud, then Ring can take it out of the cloud and send it to us legally so that we can use it as part of our investigation,” [Fresno County Sheriff's Office public information officer Tony Botti] said.
So much for asserting your rights. The only way to shut law enforcement out completely and demand they actually get a warrant supported by probable cause is to store all recordings locally. (It appears only a subpoena is needed to obtain footage from Amazon.) Very few people will be taking those steps. And, as Tony Botti points out, most people "play ball" and allow cops to collect footage without a warrant.
If the implicit obligation of "repaying" a government agency for giving you a free doorbell camera isn't persuasive enough, Amazon is crafting scripts for law enforcement to use to talk people out of their Constitutional rights. Thanks to even more public document requests, the pitches are now public. Caroline Haskins has more details at Motherboard.
Emails obtained from police department in Maywood, NJ—and emails from the police department of Bloomfield, NJ, which were also posted by Wired—show that Ring coaches police on how to obtain footage. The company provides cops with templates for requesting footage, which they do not need a court warrant to do. Ring suggests cops post often on Neighbors, Ring’s free “neighborhood watch” app, where Ring camera owners have the option of sharing their camera footage.
"I have noticed you have been posting alerts and receiving feedback from the community,” a Ring representative told Bloomfield police. “You are doing a great job interacting with them and that will be critical in increasing the opt-in rate.”
“The more users you have, the more useful the information you can collect,” the representative added.
“Seems like you wasted no time sending out your video Request out to Ring Users which is awesome!!” a Ring “Partner Success Associate” told Maywood police.
This guidance is supposed to create a perverse circle of life that ditches Constitutional niceties in favor of keeping cops awash in doorbell footage and Amazon well ahead of the pack in the doorbell camera market.
Ring's PR partners encourage law enforcement agencies to increase their social media presence. (There are scripts for that as well.) While engaging with local residents, agencies should also be pushing the Neighbors app. This gives cops more credits to trade in for more cameras to give to more people. Everyone receiving a camera is nudged by the app to post footage publicly. Cops will be online more often to encourage further sharing of recordings.
Once this feedback loop is engaged, people will be nudged towards thinking there are no legal barriers between police officers and their camera footage. When the cops ask for footage they haven't seen yet, homeowners will likely feel there's no difference between posting footage to Neighbors or handing it over to law enforcement.
While many people do install security cameras at their homes, they seldom do so with the intent of becoming an unofficial extension of a government agency's surveillance network. The pitches and scripted pushes accompanying the Ring rollout suggest Amazon believes this is nothing more than the evolution of snitch tech. It has repeatedly shown it prefers to ingratiate itself to government agencies at the expense of the millions of customers who helped it become the retail behemoth it is.
And those are the people Amazon is leaving behind in its quest to dominate a market very few consumers wanted to see it entering.
In a stunning admission, the resident told ABC News that he has no
problem accepting dirt on a political opponent from a foreign power. In
fact, Trump denied that foreign help should even be considered election
interference.
During an interview with George Stephanopoulos for ABC News, Donald
Trump said that he would take information from a foreign country if he
felt that it could help his campaign and that no one in their right
minds would contact the FBI. He contradicted himself multiple times in
the short interview, but the bottom line is that he’s now willing to
admit that he’d absolutely accept illegal foreign help for his
campaigns. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.
Donald Trump is a menace and it seems Republicans don't care and
Democrats lack the fortitude to stop him. He told George Stephanopoulos
that, not only is the FBI Director WRONG, but that if he's approached by
a foreign operative with dirt on an opponent, he would take the meeting
and the information they have to offer!
resident Donald Trump may not alert the FBI if foreign governments
offered damaging information against his 2020 rivals during the upcoming
presidential race, he said, despite the deluge of investigations
stemming from his campaign's interactions with Russians during the 2016
campaign.
Asked by ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos in the Oval Office
on Wednesday whether his campaign would accept such information from
foreigners - such as China or Russia - or hand it over the FBI, Trump
said, "I think maybe you do both."
The FBI on Friday issued a formal warning that a sophisticated Russia-linked hacking campaign is compromising hundreds of thousands of home network devices worldwide and it is advising owners to reboot these devices in an attempt to disrupt the malicious software.
The law enforcement agency said foreign cyber actors are targeting routers in small or home offices with a botnet — or a network of infected devices — known as VPNFilter.
Cybersecurity experts and officials say VPNFilter has infected an estimated 500,000 devices worldwide.
The FBI recommends any owner of small office and home office routers reboot the devices to temporarily disrupt the malware and aid the potential identification of infected devices," the bureau's cyber division wrote in a public alert.
"Owners are advised to consider disabling remote management settings on devices and secure with strong passwords and encryption when enabled. Network devices should be upgraded to the latest available versions of firmware."
Earlier this week, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the bureau was working to disrupt the malware, which officials have linked to the cyber espionage group known as APT 28 or Sofacy.
Experts at Cisco’s threat intelligence arm Talos on Wednesday first called attention to VPNFilter, warning that hackers are ramping up malware attacks against Ukraine, infecting thousands of devices ahead of an upcoming national holiday in the country.
"While this isn't definitive by any means, we have also observed VPNFilter, a potentially destructive malware, actively infecting Ukrainian hosts at an alarming rate, utilizing a command and control infrastructure dedicated to that country," Talos wrote in a blog post.
"Both the scale and the capability of this operation are concerning. Working with our partners, we estimate the number of infected devices to be at least 500,000 in at least 54 countries."
The firm warned that VPNFilter could wreak havoc in a number of ways, from stealing website credentials to causing widespread internet disruption.
"The malware has a destructive capability that can render an infected device unusable, which can be triggered on individual victim machines or en masse, and has the potential of cutting off Internet access for hundreds of thousands of victims worldwide."
Michael Woff’s book Fire and Fury has attracted tons of
attention for anyone even vaguely curious about life inside the Trump
White House and copies have been flying off the shelves. Wikileaks
posted a PDF copy of the book and pirated copies quickly began making
the rounds. Unsurprisingly, hackers jumped on the opportunity to do some
misdeeds. Cybersecurity firm employee Michael Molsner tweeted the
discovery.
The Daily Beast did a little digging into malware, which is in a PDF file with almost 100 pages cut from the full 328 page version.
The Daily Beast obtained a sample of the malware, and processed it
through an online analysis service, which marked the files as a
so-called backdoor. A backdoor may give hackers remote access to a
victim’s computer.
It’s not the most exciting or underground malware in the world: A
slew of antivirus programs detect the malicious program, according to
results from malware analysis site Virus Total.
So it isn’t the most devastating cyber attack, but it’s important to
get your materials from authorized sources. Hackers aren’t above
capitalizing on nonfiction political bestsellers to gain access to your
computer.
A crippling flaw in a widely used code library has fatally undermined
the security of millions of encryption keys used in some of the
highest-stakes settings, including national identity cards, software
and application signing, and trusted platform modules protecting
government and corporate computers.
The weakness allows attackers to calculate the private portion of any
vulnerable key using nothing more than the corresponding public
portion. Hackers can then use the private key to impersonate key owners,
decrypt sensitive data, sneak malicious code into digitally signed
software, and bypass protections that prevent accessing or tampering
with stolen PC's.
The 5 year old flaw is also troubling because it's
located in code that complies with two internationally recognized
security certification standards that are binding on many governments,
contractors, and companies around the world.
The code library was
developed by German chipmaker Infineon, and has been generating weak keys
since 2012 at the latest.
A
quarter of the members of the National Infrastructure Advisory Council,
whose purview includes national cybersecurity, have resigned. In a
group resignation letter, they cited both specific shortfalls in the
administration’s approach to cybersecurity, and broader concerns that
Trump and his administration have undermined the “moral infrastructure”
of the U.S.
The resignations came Monday and were acknowledged by the White House on Tuesday. Nextgov has recently published the resignation letter that the departing councilors submitted. According to Roll Call, seven members resigned from the 27 member Council.
Several of those resigning were Obama-era appointees, including former U.S. Chief Data Scientist DJ Patil and former Office of Science and Technology Policy Chief of Staff Cristin Dorgelo.
Not surprisingly, then, the issues outlined in the resignation letter
were broad, faulting both Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris
climate accords and his inflammatory statements after the
Charlottesville attacks, some of which came during what was intended to
be an infrastructure-focused event.
“The
moral infrastructure of our Nation is the foundation on which our
physical infrastructure is built,” reads the letter in part. “The
Administration’s actions undermine that foundation.”
But
the resigning advisors also said the Administration was not “adequately
attentive to the pressing national security matters within the NIAC’s
purview, or responsive to sound advice received from experts and
advisors.” The letter also zeroed in on “insufficient attention to the
growing threats to the cybersecurity of the critical systems upon which
all Americans depend,” including election systems.
While he has ordered better security for government networks, Trump has shown little understanding
or seriousness when it comes to the broader issues surrounding, in his
words, “the cyber.” Most notably, he has refused to accept the U.S.
intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia engineered a hacking and
propaganda campaign meant to subvert the 2016 presidential election,
and even floated the idea of forming a cyber-security task force with Russia. The administration also missed a self-imposed deadline for presenting a comprehensive cyber-security plan.
In a report issued just after the mass resignations, the NIAC issued a report saying that dramatic steps were required to prevent a possible "9/11-level cyberattack."
On Monday, the Interceptpublished a classified internal NSA document
noting that Russian military intelligence mounted an operation to hack
at least one US voting software supplier—which provided software related
to voter registration files—in the months prior to last year’s
presidential contest. It has previously been reported that Russia
attempted to hack into voter registration systems, but this NSA document
provides details of how one such operation occurred.
According to the Intercept:
The top-secret National Security Agency document, which was provided
anonymously to The Intercept and independently authenticated, analyzes
intelligence very recently acquired by the agency about a months-long
Russian intelligence cyber effort against elements of the US election
and voting infrastructure. The report, dated May 5, 2017, is the most
detailed US government account of Russian interference in the election
that has yet come to light.
While the document provides a rare window into the NSA’s
understanding of the mechanics of Russian hacking, it does not show the
underlying “raw” intelligence on which the analysis is based. A US
intelligence officer who declined to be identified cautioned against
drawing too big a conclusion from the document because a single analysis
is not necessarily definitive.
The report indicates that Russian hacking may have penetrated further
into US voting systems than was previously understood. It states
unequivocally in its summary statement that it was Russian military
intelligence, specifically the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence
Directorate, or GRU, that conducted the cyber attacks described in the
document:
Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate actors … executed
cyber espionage operations against a named U.S. company in August 2016,
evidently to obtain information on elections-related software and
hardware solutions. … The actors likely used data obtained from that
operation to … launch a voter registration-themed spear-phishing
campaign targeting U.S. local government organizations.
A meeting arranged by Donald
Trump Jr. was held at Trump Tower in June 2016 with a Russian lawyer who
has connections to the Kremlin.Credit
Sam Hodgson for The New York Times
President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton
before agreeing to meet with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer during
the 2016 campaign, according to three advisers to the White House
briefed on the meeting and two others with knowledge of it.
The
meeting was also attended by his campaign chairman at the time, Paul J.
Manafort, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Mr. Manafort and Mr.
Kushner only recently disclosed the meeting, though not its content, in
confidential government documents described to The New York Times.
The Times reported the existence of the meeting on Saturday. But in subsequent interviews, the advisers and others revealed the motivation behind it.
The meeting — at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, two weeks after Donald J. Trumpclinched the Republican nomination
— points to the central question in federal investigations of the
Kremlin’s meddling in the presidential election: whether the Trump
campaign colluded with the Russians. The accounts of the meeting
represent the first public indication that at least some in the campaign
were willing to accept Russian help.
And
while Trump has been dogged by revelations of undisclosed
meetings between his associates and the Russians, the episode at Trump
Tower is the first such confirmed private meeting involving members of
his inner circle during the campaign — as well as the first one known to
have included his eldest son. It came at an inflection point in the
campaign, when Donald Trump Jr., who served as an adviser and a
surrogate, was ascendant and Mr. Manafort was consolidating power.
It
is unclear whether the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, actually
produced the promised compromising information about Mrs. Clinton. But
the people interviewed by The Times about the meeting said the
expectation was that she would do so.
In
a statement on Sunday, Donald Trump Jr. said he had met with the
Russian lawyer at the request of an acquaintance. “After pleasantries
were exchanged,” he said, “the woman stated that she had information
that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic
National Committee and supporting Ms. Clinton. Her statements were
vague, ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information
was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no
meaningful information.”
He
said she then turned the conversation to adoption of Russian children
and the Magnitsky Act, an American law that blacklists suspected Russian
human rights abusers. The law so enraged President Vladimir V. Putin of
Russia that he retaliated by halting American adoptions of Russian
children.
“It
became clear to me that this was the true agenda all along and that the
claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the
meeting,” Mr. Trump said.
When
he was first asked about the meeting on Saturday, he said only that it
was primarily about adoptions and mentioned nothing about Mrs. Clinton.
President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, also attended the meeting last year at Trump Tower.Credit
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
Mark
Corallo, a spokesman for the president’s lawyer, said on Sunday that
“Trump was not aware of and did not attend the meeting.”
Lawyers
and spokesmen for Mr. Kushner and Mr. Manafort did not immediately
respond to requests for comment. In his statement, Donald Trump Jr. said
he asked Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kushner to attend, but did not tell them
what the meeting was about.
American intelligence agencies have concluded
that Russian hackers and propagandists worked to tip the election
toward Donald J. Trump, in part by stealing and then providing to
WikiLeaks internal Democratic Party and Clinton campaign emails that
were embarrassing to Mrs. Clinton. WikiLeaks began releasing the
material on July 22.
A
special prosecutor and congressional committees are now investigating
the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with the Russians. Mr. Trump has
disputed that, but the investigation has cast a shadow over his
administration.
Mr.
Trump has also equivocated on whether the Russians were solely
responsible for the hacking. On Sunday, two days after his first meeting
as president with Mr. Putin, Mr. Trump said in a Twitter post:
“I strongly pressed President Putin twice about Russian meddling in our
election. He vehemently denied it. I’ve already given my opinion.....”
He also tweeted that
they had “discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit so that
election hacking, & many other negative things, will be
guarded...””
On
Sunday morning on Fox News, the White House chief of staff, Reince
Priebus, described the Trump Tower meeting as a “big nothing burger.”
“Talking
about issues of foreign policy, issues related to our place in the
world, issues important to the American people is not unusual,” he said.
But
Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the leading Democrat on
the House Intelligence Committee, one of the panels investigating
Russian election interference, said he wanted to question “everyone that
was at that meeting.”
“There’s
no reason for this Russian government advocate to be meeting with Paul
Manafort or with Mr. Kushner or the president’s son if it wasn’t about
the campaign and Russia policy,” Mr. Schiff said after the initial Times
report.
Ms.
Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer invited to the Trump Tower meeting,
is best known for mounting a multipronged attack against the Magnitsky
Act.
The
adoption impasse is a frequently used talking point for opponents of
the act. Ms. Veselnitskaya’s campaign against the law has also included
attempts to discredit the man after whom it was named, Sergei L.
Magnitsky, a lawyer and auditor who died in 2009 in mysterious
circumstances in a Russian prison after exposing one of the biggest
corruption scandals during Mr. Putin’s rule.
Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul J. Manafort, at the Republican National Convention in July 2016 in Cleveland.Credit
Sam Hodgson for The New York Times
Ms.
Veselnitskaya’s clients include state-owned businesses and a senior
government official’s son, whose company was under investigation in the
United States at the time of the meeting. Her activities and
associations had previously drawn the attention of the F.B.I., according
to a former senior law enforcement official.
Ms.
Veselnitskaya said in a statement on Saturday that “nothing at all
about the presidential campaign” was discussed. She recalled that after
about 10 minutes, either Mr. Kushner or Mr. Manafort walked out.
She
said she had “never acted on behalf of the Russian government” and
“never discussed any of these matters with any representative of the
Russian government.”
The
Trump Tower meeting was disclosed to government officials in recent
days, when Mr. Kushner, who is also a senior White House aide, filed a
revised version of a form required to obtain a security clearance.
The Times reported in April
that he had failed to disclose any foreign contacts, including meetings
with the Russian ambassador to the United States and the head of a
Russian state bank. Failure to report such contacts can result in a loss
of access to classified information and even, if information is
knowingly falsified or concealed, in imprisonment.
Mr.
Kushner’s advisers said at the time that the omissions were an error,
and that he had immediately notified the F.B.I. that he would be
revising the filing.
In
a statement on Saturday, Mr. Kushner’s lawyer, Jamie Gorelick, said:
“He has since submitted this information, including that during the
campaign and transition, he had over 100 calls or meetings with
representatives of more than 20 countries, most of which were during
transition. Mr. Kushner has submitted additional updates and included,
out of an abundance of caution, this meeting with a Russian person,
which he briefly attended at the request of his brother-in-law Donald
Trump Jr. As Mr. Kushner has consistently stated, he is eager to
cooperate and share what he knows.”
Mr.
Manafort, the former campaign chairman, also recently disclosed the
meeting, and Donald Trump Jr.’s role in organizing it, to congressional
investigators who had questions about his foreign contacts, according to
people familiar with the events. Neither Mr. Manafort nor Mr. Kushner
was required to disclose the content of the meeting.
A spokesman for Mr. Manafort declined to comment.
Since
the president took office, Donald Trump Jr. and his brother Eric have
assumed day-to-day control of their father’s real estate empire. Because
he does not serve in the administration and does not have a security
clearance, Donald Trump Jr. was not required to disclose his foreign
contacts.
Federal and congressional investigators have not publicly
asked for any records that would require his disclosure of Russian
contacts.
Ms.
Veselnitskaya is a formidable operator with a history of pushing the
Kremlin’s agenda. Most notable is her campaign against the Magnitsky
Act, which provoked a Cold War-style, tit-for-tat dispute with the
Kremlin when President Barack Obama signed it into law in 2012.
Under
the law, about 44 Russian citizens have been put on a list that allows
the United States to seize their American assets and deny them visas.
The United States asserts that many of them are connected to the fraud
exposed by Mr. Magnitsky, who after being jailed for more than a year
was found dead in his cell. A Russian human rights panel found that he
had been assaulted. To critics of Mr. Putin, Mr. Magnitsky, in death,
became a symbol of corruption and brutality in the Russian state.
An
infuriated Mr. Putin has called the law an “outrageous act,” and, in
addition to banning American adoptions, he compiled what became known as
an “anti-Magnitsky” blacklist of United States citizens.
Among
those blacklisted was Preet Bharara, then the United States attorney in
Manhattan, who led notable convictions of Russian arms and drug
dealers. Mr. Bharara was abruptly fired in March, after previously being asked to stay on by President Trump.
One
of Ms. Veselnitskaya’s clients is Denis Katsyv, the Russian owner of
Prevezon Holdings, an investment company based in Cyprus. He is the son
of Petr Katsyv, the vice president of the state-owned Russian Railways
and a former deputy governor of the Moscow region. In a civil forfeiture
case prosecuted by Mr. Bharara’s office, the Justice Department alleged
that Prevezon had helped launder money linked to the $230 million
corruption scheme exposed by Mr. Magnitsky by putting it in New York
real estate and bank accounts. Prevezon recently settled the case for $6
million without admitting wrongdoing.
Ms. Veselnitskaya was also deeply involved in the making of a film that disputes the widely accepted version
of Mr. Magnitsky’s life and death. In the film and in her statement,
she said the true culprit of the fraud was William F. Browder, an
American-born financier who hired Mr. Magnitsky to investigate the fraud
after three of his investment funds companies in Russia were seized.
Mr. Browder called the film a state-sponsored smear campaign.
“She’s not just some private lawyer,” Mr. Browder said of Ms. Veselnitskaya. “She is a tool of the Russian government.”
John O. Brennan, a former C.I.A. director, testified in May
that he had been concerned last year by Russian government efforts to
contact and manipulate members of Mr. Trump’s campaign. “Russian
intelligence agencies do not hesitate at all to use private companies
and Russian persons who are unaffiliated with the Russian government to
support their objectives,” he said.
Among those now under investigation is Michael T. Flynn, who was forced to resign as
Mr. Trump’s national security adviser after it became known that he had
falsely denied speaking to the Russian ambassador about sanctions
imposed by the Obama administration over the election hacking.
Congress
later discovered that Mr. Flynn had been paid more than $65,000 by
companies linked to Russia, and that he had failed to disclose those
payments when he renewed his security clearance and underwent an
additional background check to join the White House staff.
In May, the president fired the F.B.I. director,
James B. Comey, who days later provided information about a meeting
with Mr. Trump at the White House. According to Mr. Comey, the president
asked him to end the bureau’s investigation into Mr. Flynn; Mr. Trump
has repeatedly denied making such a request. Robert S. Mueller III, a
former F.B.I. director, was then appointed as special counsel.
The
status of Mr. Mueller’s investigation is not clear, but he has
assembled a veteran team of prosecutors and agents to dig into any
possible collusion.
Follow Jo Becker, Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman on Twitter.
Maggie Haberman, Sophia Kishkovsky and Eric Lipton contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
Early last August, an envelope with extraordinary
handling restrictions arrived at the White House.
Sent by courier from
the CIA, it carried “eyes only” instructions that its contents be shown
to just four people: President Barack Obama and three senior aides.
Inside was an intelligence bombshell, a report drawn from sourcing
deep inside the Russian government that detailed Russian President
Vladimir Putin’s direct involvement in a cyber campaign to disrupt and
discredit the U.S. presidential race.
But it went further. The intelligence captured Putin’s specific
instructions on the operation’s audacious objectives — defeat or at
least damage the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and help elect her
opponent, Donald Trump.
At that point, the outlines of the Russian assault on the U.S.
election were increasingly apparent.
Hackers with ties to Russian
intelligence services had been rummaging through Democratic Party
computer networks, as well as some Republican systems, for more than a
year. In July, the FBI had opened an investigation of contacts between
Russian officials and Trump associates. And on July 22, nearly 20,000
emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee were dumped online
by WikiLeaks.
Election Hackers Altered Voter Rolls, Stole Private Data, Officials Say
Massimo Calabresi - Jun 22, 2017
The hacking of state and local election databases in 2016 was more extensive than previously reported, including at least one successful attempt to alter voter information, and the theft of thousands of voter records that contain private information like partial Social Security numbers, current and former officials tell TIME.
In one case, investigators found there had been a manipulation of voter data in a county database but the alterations were discovered and rectified, two sources familiar with the matter tell TIME. Investigators have not identified whether the hackers in that case were Russian agents.
The fact that private data was stolen from states is separately providing investigators a previously unreported line of inquiry in the probes into Russian attempts to influence the election. In Illinois, more than 90% of the nearly 90,000 records stolen by Russian state actors contained drivers license numbers, and a quarter contained the last four digits of voters’ Social Security numbers, according to Ken Menzel, the General Counsel of the State Board of Elections.
Congressional investigators are probing whether any of this stolen private information made its way to the Trump campaign, two sources familiar with the investigations tell TIME.
“If any campaign, Trump or otherwise, used inappropriate data the questions are, How did they get it? From whom? And with what level of knowledge?” the former top Democratic staffer on the House Intelligence Committee, Michael Bahar, tells TIME. “That is a crux of the investigation."
Exclusive: Sources close to the intelligence
community report that Director Comey’s FBI computer was illegally
accessed immediately after he was dismissed from his post. They further
report that ‘removable media’ was used in the commission of this crime.
‘Removable media’ is a category describing physical devices that can be
placed into a computer, either to download information or to upload it,
such as a memory card, a USB stick, a removable hard drive, a thumb
drive or similar items.
Sources further report that a person or persons allied to Donald
Trump passed data accessed from Director Comey’s computer to Russian
diplomats. It is not known when or how this took place. A piece of
removable media containing all the data in question has been recovered
from hostile actors, sources say, and is now in the possession of the
Justice Department.
Director Comey is said to have known in advance
that Mr. Trump would dismiss him. He took careful steps, these sources
say, to leave not only a paper trail as we have seen in the story of the
‘Comey Memo’ but
also a digital one. Director Comey’s own primary work computer, and
other computers in and around his former office, were fitted with
sophisticated intelligence community software allowing the Justice
Department to see precisely how and when they were attacked.
The official Foreign Ministry of Russia’s Twitter account posted a tweet showing Foreign Minister Lavarov laughing with Rex Tillerson,
the Secretary of State who has won the Order of Friendship of Vladimir
Putin, over Director Comey’s firing, on the day Donald Trump hosted the
Russians in the White House and verbally gave them top-secret allied intelligence, later published by the Russian news agency Tass.
White House sources say Trump has already discussed his resignation more
than once. Perhaps when he discovers that the justice and intelligence
communities are well aware he breached Director Comey’s computer and
handed FBI data to Russia, he may decide to spare the nation further
trauma and resign.
If he becomes President, Mike Pence will be unable to pardon Donald Trump for any crimes at the state level.
The
MSNBC host told America to "get back to the main point," which is that
it's slowly looking like the Trump campaign was working with Russia to
topple Hillary Clinton.
On MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show on Tuesday, the liberal superstar
dropped another Russian reality check on viewers, telling America to
“get back to the main point,” which is that it’s slowly looking like the
Trump campaign was working with Russia to topple Hillary Clinton last
year.
In her opening segment, Maddow focused on a so-far unsubstantiated
dossier released in January that details damning links between Trump and
high-ranking Russian officials. While Trump and his apologists try to
muddy the waters, point fingers, and deny any wrongdoing, more and more
of that controversial dossier has become verified as truth.
As Maddow said, pieces from that document continue to fall into
place, which is slowly raising the likelihood that Russia and Trump’s
campaign worked together.
Rachel Maddow notes that while the dossier of intelligence about Donald
Trump ties to Russia remains unconfirmed, pieces of it have checked out
upon investigation by the press, though the primary government
investigators are former Trump campaign officials.
Maddow said:
Forget all the salacious personal stuff. Forget all the
stuff that made the White House so mad when this was published. The
bottom line of this dossier, the bottom line allegation, the point of it
is that the Trump campaign didn’t just benefit from Russia interfering
in our presidential campaign. The point of this is that they colluded,
they helped, they were in on it. The money quote from this dossier is,
“The operation had been conducted with the full knowledge of Trump and
senior members of his campaign team.” That’s basically what this whole
dossier alleges – that the Trump folks were in on it. There were
multiple people close to Trump, involved in the Trump campaign, who were
in contact with the Russian government about the Russian government’s
attacks on Hillary Clinton, while those attacks were happening, while
Russia was waging these attacks. Overall, yes, we still have to describe
this as a sheaf of uncorroborated allegations, but little pieces
supporting that bottom line thesis really do keep falling in line.
Maddow then listed the series of Russian revelations – and secret
meetings between Trump associates and the Russian officials – that have
come out over the past several weeks, despite initial claims from the
president that nobody on his team met with the Russians during the
campaign.
It turns out that more than a half-dozen Trump associates are linked
to Russia, including Jeff Sessions, Michael Flynn, Carter Page, J.D.
Gordon, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and Michael Cohen.
As Maddow noted in her coverage, it was reported by Politico
on Tuesday that one of those associates, Carter Page, was given
permission by the Trump campaign last year to make a visit to Russia in
the heat of the 2016 election cycle.
All of these bits of information are turning what was previous an
unverified dossier into a credible document implicating Donald Trump’s
presidential campaign in what would be the biggest political scandal in
U.S. history.
Even though there is so much going on in our politics right now, much
of it disturbing and distracting, we must not lose focus on this
scandal.
Suggestion they have compromising information on him !!!
Communications between Trump and Russian officials.
This is beyond huge !!!
Intel chiefs presented Trump with claims of Russian efforts to compromise him
By Evan Perez, Jim Sciutto, Jake Tapper and Carl Bernstein, CNN
Updated 5:15 PM ET, Tue January 10, 2017
(CNN) Classified documents presented last week to President Obama
and President-elect Trump included allegations that Russian operatives
claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr.
Trump, multiple US officials with direct knowledge of the briefings tell
CNN.
The allegations were presented in a two-page synopsis that was
appended to a report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. The
allegations came, in part, from memos compiled by a former British
intelligence operative, whose past work US intelligence officials
consider credible. The FBI is investigating the credibility and accuracy
of these allegations, which are based primarily on information from
Russian sources, but has not confirmed many essential details in the
memos about Mr. Trump.
The classified briefings last week were presented by four of the
senior-most US intelligence chiefs -- Director of National Intelligence
James Clapper, FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and
NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers.
One reason the nation's intelligence chiefs took the extraordinary
step of including the synopsis in the briefing documents was to make the
President-elect aware that such allegations involving him are
circulating among intelligence agencies, senior members of Congress and
other government officials in Washington, multiple sources tell CNN.
These senior intelligence officials also included the synopsis to
demonstrate that Russia had compiled information potentially harmful to
both political parties, but only released information damaging to
Hillary Clinton and Democrats. This synopsis was not an official part of
the report from the intelligence community case about Russian hacks,
but some officials said it augmented the evidence that Moscow intended
to harm Clinton's candidacy and help Trump's, several officials with
knowledge of the briefings tell CNN.
The two-page synopsis also included allegations that there was a
continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump
surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government, according to
two national security officials.
Sources tell CNN that these same allegations about communications
between the Trump campaign and the Russians, mentioned in classified
briefings for congressional leaders last year, prompted then-Senate
Democratic Leader Harry Reid to send a letter to FBI Director Comey in
October, in which he wrote, "It has become clear that you possess
explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald
Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government -- a foreign
interest openly hostile to the United States."
CNN has confirmed that the synopsis was included in the documents
that were presented to Mr. Trump but cannot confirm if it was discussed
in his meeting with the intelligence chiefs.
The Trump transition team declined repeated requests for comment.
CNN has reviewed a 35-page compilation of the memos, from which the
two-page synopsis was drawn. The memos originated as opposition
research, first commissioned by anti-Trump Republicans, and later by
Democrats. At this point, CNN is not reporting on details of the memos,
as it has not independently corroborated the specific allegations. But,
in preparing this story, CNN has spoken to multiple high ranking
intelligence, administration, congressional and law enforcement
officials, as well as foreign officials and others in the private sector
with direct knowledge of the memos.
Some of the memos were circulating as far back as last summer. What
has changed since then is that US intelligence agencies have now checked
out the former British intelligence operative and his vast network
throughout Europe and find him and his sources to be credible enough to
include some of the information in the presentations to the President
and President-elect a few days ago.
On the same day that the President-elect was briefed by the
intelligence community, the top four Congressional leaders, and chairmen
and ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees --
the so-called "Gang of Eight" -- were also provided a summary of the
memos regarding Mr. Trump, according to law enforcement, intelligence
and administration sources.
The two-page summary was written without the detailed specifics and
information about sources and methods included in the memos by the
former British intelligence official. That said, the synopsis was
considered so sensitive it was not included in the classified report
about Russian hacking that was more widely distributed, but rather in an
annex only shared at the most senior levels of the government:
President Obama, the President-elect, and the eight Congressional
leaders.
CNN has also learned that on December 9, Senator John McCain gave a
full copy of the memos -- dated from June through December, 2016 -- to
FBI Director James Comey. McCain became aware of the memos from a former
British diplomat who had been posted in Moscow. But the FBI had already
been given a set of the memos compiled up to August 2016, when the
former MI6 agent presented them to an FBI official in Rome, according to
national security officials.
The raw memos on which the synopsis is based were prepared by the
former MI6 agent, who was posted in Russia in the 1990s and now runs a
private intelligence gathering firm. His investigations related to Mr.
Trump were initially funded by groups and donors supporting Republican
opponents of Mr. Trump during the GOP primaries, multiple sources
confirmed to CNN. Those sources also said that once Mr. Trump became the
nominee, further investigation was funded by groups and donors
supporting Hillary Clinton.
Spokespeople for the FBI and the Director of National Intelligence
declined to comment. Officials who spoke to CNN declined to do so on the
record given the classified nature of the material.
Some of the allegations were first reported publicly in Mother Jones one week before the election.
One high level administration official told CNN, "I have a sense the
outgoing administration and intelligence community is setting down the
pieces so this must be investigated seriously and run down. I think
concern was to be sure that whatever information was out there is put
into the system so it is evaluated as it should be and acted upon as
necessary."
ALTHOUGH PRESIDENT Obama’s sanctions
against Russia for interfering with the U.S. presidential election came
late, his action on Thursday reflected a bipartisan consensus that penalties must be imposed
for Moscow’s audacious hacking and meddling.
But one prominent voice in
the United States reacted differently. President-elect Donald Trump said “it’s time for our country to move on to bigger and better things.” Earlier in the week, he asserted that the “whole age of computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what is going on.”
No,
Mr. Trump, it is not time to move on. U.S. intelligence agencies are in
agreement about “what is going on”: a brazen and unprecedented attempt
by a hostile power to covertly sway the outcome of a U.S. presidential
election through the theft and release of material damaging to
Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. The president-elect’s dismissive
response only deepens unanswered questions about his ties to Russia in
the past and his plans for cooperation with Vladimir Putin.
For
his part, Mr. Putin seems to be eagerly anticipating the Trump
presidency. On Friday, he promised to withhold retaliatory sanctions,
clearly hoping the new Trump administration will nullify Mr. Obama’s
acts. Then Mr. Trump cheered on Twitter: “Great move on delay (by V. Putin) — I always knew he was very smart!”
For
any American leader, an attempt to subvert U.S. democracy ought to be
unforgivable — even if he is the intended beneficiary. Some years ago,
then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned
of a “cyber-Pearl Harbor,” and the fear at the time was of a
cyberattack collapsing electric grids or crashing financial markets. Now
we have a real cyber-Pearl Harbor, though not one that was anticipated.
Mr. Obama has pledged a thorough investigation and disclosure; the information released on Thursday does not go far enough. Congress should not shrink from establishing a select committee for a full-scale probe.
Mr. Obama also hinted
at additional retaliation, possibly unannounced, and we believe it
would be justified to deter future mischief. How about shedding a little
sunshine on Mr. Putin’s hidden wealth and that of his coterie?
Mr.
Trump has been frank about his desire to improve relations with Russia,
but he seems blissfully untroubled by the reasons for the deterioration
in relations, including Russia’s instigation of an armed uprising in
Ukraine, its seizure of Crimea, its efforts to divide Europe and the
crushing of democracy and human rights at home.
Why is Mr. Trump
so dismissive of Russia’s dangerous behavior? Some say it is his lack
of experience in foreign policy, or an oft-stated admiration for
strongmen, or naivete about Russian intentions. But darker suspicions
persist. Mr. Trump has steadfastly refused to be transparent about his
multibillion-dollar business empire. Are there loans or deals with
Russian businesses or the state that were concealed during the campaign?
Are there hidden communications with Mr. Putin or his representatives?
We would be thrilled to see all the doubts dispelled, but Mr. Trump’s
odd behavior in the face of a clear threat from Russia, matched by Mr.
Putin’s evident enthusiasm for the president-elect, cannot be easily
explained.
Researchers that analyzed the malware said it contained multiple defenses
that made reverse-engineering very difficult - some of the most
advanced they've seen - which explains why it managed to fool Google's
security scanner and end up on the official Play Store.
The exploits
contained in the app's rooting functions were able to root any Android
released between 2012 and 2015. The Trojan found inside the app was also
found in nine other apps, affecting another 100,000 users.
The crook
behind this Trojan was obviously riding various popularity waves,
packing his malware in clones for whatever app or game is popular at one
particular point in time.
