THE ERA OF TRUMP

[ssu]

They are probably going to ignore the hackings and blame it on the Obama Administration's security fauiler. I mean if they do follow the trail of the hackings, it all leads back to Russia (and I am still talking about the DNC hacks) but maybe they will keep an open investigation or something to save face?

Get your hands on some evidence, eh? Let's see it.

What the Trump administration will do is there to be seen.

And evidence on the hackings or active measures in general? What evidence would you believe, really?

Like that Fancy Bear was linked to the war in Ukraine... so it's really likely it is GRU.

cyber-espionage group linked to the Russian military has developed Android malware which it used to infect the smartphones of Ukrainian soldiers and track Ukrainian field artillery units. The group behind the Android malware that targeted Ukrainian military forces is named Fancy Bear, one of the two groups involved in the DNC hack, albeit the other group, named Cozy Bear, was far more active

See here

Perhaps the 400 pound guy on the bed with a Computer ....or the Chinese, really wanted to participate in the Ukrainian Civil War against the Ukrainian side, just for fun. Yes, who can ever know.

Hmm... what's on the other side of the story? Denial from Assange (when his credibility is on the line) and denial from Trump (of Russians hacking anything). Nothing else.

Asked by reporters if the United States should sanction Russia, Trump replied: "I think we ought to get on with our lives. I think that computers have complicated lives very greatly. The whole age of computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what's going on."

See Donald Trump on Russian Hacking: ‘We Ought to Get on with Our Lives’

Yeah, computers are complicated, so just move on...

[Fife]

It's not over yet. He might find another opening to stab the Jews in the back again or try to sabotage the incoming administration with some impossible treaty or UN resolution.

It will be interesting to look at all the things that are going to happen in the next three weeks. Gonna have to go off-channel from MSM to get the meat off the bone, tho.

http://hotair.com/archives/2016/12/29/a ... land-grab/

There was a time when we didn’t need to worry about “undoing” these sorts of actions. That’s because previous presidents acted on the honor system, exercising restraint and not attempting to bend the rules in order to advance their own agenda. Sadly, those days are gone. The idea that a president elected for four or eight years can permanently effect such sweeping changes regardless of the wishes of either future office holders or the voters is dubious at best.

Sadly, we needed that “honor system” all of this time to avoid turning the routine practice of designating monuments or managing natural resources into a political football. I doubt anyone wanted a situation where alternating presidents from different parties were creating and then invalidating a series of statues. But when you have a president abusing the system to this degree there may simply be no way around it.

When a hoary old empire starts coughing up flies, the transition from one emperor to the next gets more and more messy every time.

[Speaker to Animals]

What he did was not a legitimate use of executive order. Start there. Executive orders are meant to govern how the executive branch carries out legitimate laws passed by Congress, not to make entirely new laws, seize property, etc. These orders absolutely should be negated and should be done so explicitly because they are not legitimate orders.

The past two presidents have been so bad, and their defenders so utterly blind to it, that I don't really see much hope for the future of this republic. Better to break up at this point.

[Fife]

DC private schools giving Kellyanne Conway the brush-off

While in DC on Wednesday with her kids looking at schools, Conway told me, “I would not characterize myself as ‘worried’ so much as amused by the silence and sighs on the other end of the phone when friends and allies have made preliminary inquiries on our behalf.”

While the posh private schools’ handbooks and websites all preach “diversity” and “open-mindedness,” Conway said, “For some, there is a comfort in sameness.”

Good!

Start your own school, Kellyanne. There will be plenty of demand when the medieval know-nothing shithole beltway schools are shuttered.

[ssu]

Ok, you guys who wanted some "proof" to chew on,

here's the FBI and Homeland Security joint paper on the Russian hackings published on this Thursday.

https://www.us-cert.gov/sites/default/f ... -20296.pdf

Some quotes from the above official paper (13 pages long):

This activity by Russian Intelligence Services (RIS) is part of an ongoing campaign of cyber-enabled operations directed at the
U.S. government and its citizens. These cyber operations have included spearphishing campaigns
targeting government organizations, critical infrastructure entities, think tanks, universities,
political organizations, and corporations leading to the theft of information. In foreign countries,
RIS actors conducted damaging and/or disruptive cyber-attacks, including attacks on critical
infrastructure networks. In some cases, RIS actors masqueraded as third parties, hiding behind
false online personas designed to cause the victim to misattribute the source of the attack. This
JAR provides technical indicators related to many of these operations, recommended mitigations,
suggested actions to take in response to the indicators provided, and information on how to
report such incidents to the U.S. Government.

And then the specifics, again, this the FBI and the Homeland Security, not the CIA btw:

In the course of that campaign, APT29 successfully
compromised a U.S. political party. At least one targeted individual activated links to malware
hosted on operational infrastructure of opened attachments containing malware. APT29
delivered malware to the political party’s systems, established persistence, escalated privileges,
enumerated active directory accounts, and exfiltrated email from several accounts through
encrypted connections back through operational infrastructure.

In spring 2016, APT28 compromised the same political party, again via targeted spearphishing.
This time, the spearphishing email tricked recipients into changing their passwords through a
fake webmail domain hosted on APT28 operational infrastructure. Using the harvested
credentials, APT28 was able to gain access and steal content, likely leading to the exfiltration of
information from multiple senior party members. The U.S. Government assesses that information
was leaked to the press and publicly disclosed.

Actors likely associated with RIS are continuing to engage in spearphishing campaigns,
including one launched as recently as November 2016, just days after the U.S. election.

Actions taken now:

the White House sanctioned the two major Russian intelligence services — the GRU and FSB — and four GRU officers. It also levied penalties on three companies that the White House says provided “material support” to the GRU’s cyber operations.

Although this is the first time the Obama administration has used the cyber sanctions, officials threatened to use the tool against China in 2015 over what the White House said was a government-orchestrated program to steal U.S. trade secrets and funnel the information to Chinese firms.

See White House sanctions Russia over election hacks

[Fife]

At least you had the courtesy to put "proof" inside quotation marks.

[Speaker to Animals]

At least you had the courtesy to put "proof" inside quotation marks.

Seriously.

F A K E N E W S
A
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[ssu]

At least you had the courtesy to put "proof" inside quotation marks.

Nothing is proof for you, because people think it looks bad on Trump. Somehow people don't notice that nobody has claimed that Russia rigged the elections.

Trump is just messing the thing insisting that it wasn't the Russians. As I've said long ago, the Russians have been active in many Western elections, especially in the UK. That doesn't make the SNP or the UKIP "fronts" of Russia.

And what people don't remember that there is a history in this why Putin would be, even personally, interested in this. When Putin had his election for the second round after Medvedev, Putin himself was blaming nobody else than Hillary Clinton, then the secretary of State, for US interference in the Russian elections. Something that is rarely mentioned.

Yeah, the FBI is so Pro-Hillary.

[Fife]

One point you can give to duopoly thinking; it's as predictable as sunup.

[StCapps]

This is just more of "take our word for it". The only difference is they have now moved the goalposts to "we told you some of the details of how the hack was done and because Russia has done similar hacks in the past it must be them this time, yet we still won't show you the proof we have to back that up this assumption".

More Fake News. Still waiting on actual proof. My opinion on this has nothing to do with Trump, if Trump agreed with the intelligence communities assessment without any proof being presented to the public, I'd still wait on the actual proof before believing in it myself. Trump being skeptical was not the trigger for my skepticism, the complete lack of any evidence being presented to back up a major claim that requires seeing before believing was the trigger. Stop trying to write off any "Russian was behind the email hacks skeptics" as only being Trump nuthuggers, that is a label you falsely accuse others of being so you don't have to listen to their superior counter-argument.