#actively denies her of agency as a person inside the narrative

[mrpsychokiller]

tex red vs blue is insanely transgender but im the only one who sees it that way because im crazy in the head.

what if there was a past version of yourself. a woman, a wife, a mother, with long hair and a sweet smile. and she died long ago. and you are her. but you are not her. you're nothing like her, but the people who knew her desperately want you to be her, want to preserve the memory they have in their minds of the woman they loved through you. but you never asked to be her, never asked to carry the burden of someone else's expectation of who or what you should be. you have a new name. you prefer to go by this one. people remark on how weird it is that it's a guy's name. sometimes the people who loved [the past version of] you call you by your old name. they are not referring to you when they say it. you live in the shadows of someone who's long gone, and you're something different now, but you don't feel like you're ever allowed to define yourself on your own terms, to be your own person, to control your own life, because you exist solely through the memories people had of you. and the longer she has been gone for, the more desperately people try to get her back, the less you resemble her and the less you know who you are, or if you ever even got to be anything at all. what i mean is that transition could have saved him

#🧃 #rvb #red vs blue #DONT ask me why i got up in a cold sweat at 7 am with thoughts on tex red vs blue. i miss her so bad #anyways i do think if anyone in rvb could ever be actually trans coded (which nobody is because theyre created by fucking rooster teeth) #its gotta be tex #but because i know a trans subtext couldnt ever possibly be intentional i also think tex is a fascinating subject on the #''dead wife'' trope and the way stories like this treat female characters #and how tex's existence somehow seems surprisingly self aware as she actively rejects being the Dead Wife #and its brought to attention how existing solely as the angst memories men had of their dead wives #actively denies her of agency as a person inside the narrative #but also more generally denies dead wife characters agency in any narrative theyre written on #tex's struggles as a character inside her narrative are also the struggles of fridged/killed off female characters outside their narratives #on a meta textual level by being written by men in male centered stories who dont allow the women they write to exist as people #tex is a fascinating character and i am fucking furious she exists in a that stupid ass show. ill save you girl. ill take you out of there

[tlbodine]

A Brief History of the Slasher

Is there a more iconic face for the horror genre than the knife-wielding psychopath? Many would say no. Although the tried-and-true slasher formula is so played out as to be a cliche -- and fresh examples played straight are tough to come by in the modern age -- for many, slasher films are the heart and soul of horror movies. 

How did that happen? What do they say about us on a cultural level? And where should you start when it comes to a formal study of the topic? Let’s delve deep and find out! 

Murder and mayhem are evergreen topics of fascination for humans, and we’ve been telling stories about murderers since Cain killed Abel. But these stories didn’t become what we would formally call “slashers” until the 1970s. 

So what is a slasher? 

Slasher films are defined by a few shared characteristics: 

A high body count (multiple victims) 

Murders are shown on-screen and often from the POV of the killer 

The murders happen one by one, incorporating pursuit, struggle, and finally death

The killer may have a supernatural influence, but it will have the physical appearance of a human (and may often simply be a human)

In almost every instance, the killer is portrayed as being insane or rendered deeply troubled by a past trauma which had triggered the murderous impulse. The killer is frequently dehumanized, and the victims are usually young. 

Slashers often adhere to their own sort of moral logic, more closely resembling Medieval morality plays than perhaps any other modern genre of storytelling. By utilizing a cast of archetypes, various virtues and flaws can be represented among the victims. 

These traits are what differentiate slashers from other murder-focused horror, thriller and mystery tales. 

Consider, for example, the narrative structure of an Agatha Christie murder mystery like And Then There Were None. In this book, a group of strangers are brought under mysterious circumstances to a remote location, where they are systematically murdered as an act of vengeance. In concept, this seems like it should be a slasher -- but its execution is quite different. In the book, the murders are a backdrop; the characters (and reader) are confronted with bodies rather than scenes of overt violence. 

The First Slasher

In 1974, two films came out that gave birth to the modern slasher. 

The first, released in October, was Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The second, released in the USA in December of that year, was Bob Clark’s Black Christmas. 

Texas Chainsaw Massacre tells the story of a group of friends who run afoul of a family of cannibals living in a rural farmhouse. Black Christmas is about the systemic murder of sorority girls during Christmas break. And both left an indelible mark on horror history. 

It’s important to put some context on the world these films were created in: 

The recent dissolution of the Hays production code meant that movies could be more graphically violent and morally depraved than ever before

The Vietnam war was raging, and for the first time in history, televised footage of the battle was piped into living rooms on the evening news

Multiple serial killers were active in the country, and their exploits also graced the daily newspapers and nightly news to sow terror 

Richard Nixon’s presidency was marked by an as-then unprecedented level of corruption and scandal

Gender politics provided both sexual freedom and career ambitions to a generation of women, and the 1973 landmark Roe v. Wade case legalizing abortions played a massive role in both gender relations and the way we would think about life and bodily autonomy. 

The 1970s provided, in other words, a perfect storm of circumstances that collided to give birth to slashers, and neither Hooper nor Clark are shy about citing these as their inspiration. Texas Chainsaw was billed in theaters as a true story as an act of political defiance against newscasts that spread misinformation; Black Christmas is at its heart a film about abortion and a woman’s right to leave an abusive relationship. They were undeniably films of their time. 

Texas Chainsaw inspired a wave of sensationalist "ripped from the headlines" murder movies loosely based on real killers, such as Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes (1977), which was based on the Sawney Bean legend or Charles B. Pierce's The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976), which was based on the Texarkana Phantom Killer.

And Black Christmas, of course, served as the thematic springboard for a little film called Halloween.

Halloween and the Final Girl 

In 1978, a little-known small-time director named John Carpenter was hired to make a movie with the working title, The Babysitter Murders. It would be about -- you guessed it -- babysitters who got murdered. The idea was later adapted to take place on Halloween, likely for commercial reasons: People like watching scary movies in October, so setting a film on Halloween night would surely help with popularity.

John Carpenter certainly did not wholly plagiarize Black Christmas with his holiday-themed slasher, but the earlier film's influence is visible all the same -- from a shared lineage of "the call is coming from inside the house" babysitter folk legend, to the perspective work on establishing shots of the house and the ambiguously bleak ending.

But compared to Black Christmas, Halloween is horror with its edges filed down so it'll be easier to swallow. Both films have predominately female casts, but the sorority girls in Black Christmas have sexual agency and outspoken opinions that are nowhere to be found in Carpenter's work. In fact, Halloween so aggressively fails the Bechdel Test that it seems to do so on purpose -- there is not a single scene with two girls where they are not talking about a boy. And while Black Christmas deals with complex topics like abortion, domestic violence, and the unreliability of the police, Halloween simplifies its formula down to the utterly basic: Michael Myers kills because he is pure evil, and that is simply what evil does.

Despite its flaws -- or perhaps because of them -- Halloween became an immediate and enormous hit. It also introduced several clever storytelling techniques that were crucial to the advancement and development of the slasher genre:

The introduction of a Final Girl, the lone survivor who holds out against the onslaught of terror. (Carpenter denies that Laurie Strode’s virginal innocence has anything to do with her survival, but “final girl as virgin” would persist as a trope for a very long time) 

A masked killer. Although we’d seen masked murders in many films before (I’ve talked in the past about the trope of the mask-wearing murderer, and the way it is both thematically and logistically useful in storytelling: https://tlbodine.tumblr.com/post/189658195609/the-masked-knife-wielding-psycho), the “look” of Michael Myers is so iconic that it inspired a need for future killers to have a similarly thoughtful design, decking them out almost like comic book superheroes. 

Franchising opportunities. Although earlier movies had spawned sequels, Halloween exploded as a franchise thanks in large part to the iconic design and the simplistic good-vs-evil storytelling formula. Future slashers would latch onto this killer-centric franchise formula for over a decade. 

Halloween became the most profitable independent film, holding the record for 16 years, which goes to show just how successful the formula truly was. 

The Golden Age of Slashers 

As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, the advent of VHS and Betamax formats created a market for low-budget straight-to-video films. Because slashers are so cheap to make (you don't need any famous actors, can film entirely in one location, and practical effects can be as simple as a few gallons of stage blood), they were ideal candidates for the job. On the big screen, horror was enjoying an unusually high level of popularity, a proven money-maker, simultaneously commercial and subversive in a decade of opulence and social conservativism.

So onto that stage walks Sean S. Cunningham's gory slasher, Friday the 13th, where a group of teenage camp counselors are brutally murdered, frequently wile having sex. The film spawned a widely successful franchise, which swiftly began borrowing elements of Halloween -- a silent and indestructible masked killer, a signature musical score -- to become a pop culture mainstay. The 1983 Robert Hiltzik film, Sleepaway Camp, cashes in on the "death to camp counselor" plot in the same way that Fred Walton's When a Stranger Calls touched on babysitter murders in 1979.

A whole slew of less-successful films would follow, most of them lost to the history books but still living in dollar-bin DVD collections. Some, like Prom Night and My Bloody Valentine, would earn a cult following. One noteworthy cult favorite is Slumber Party Massacre, directed and written by women (Amy Holden Jones and Rita Mae Brown, respectively), which turns some slasher tropes in their head.

A glut of films, most of them instantly forgettable, led to a decline in slasher popularity -- until Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984.

Cracking Wise and Slashing Teens 

A Nightmare on Elm Street introduces Freddy Krueger, a different sort of horror villain than audiences had seen before. Krueger is a supernatural killer who stalks his victims in their dreams, bringing a fresh supernatural twist to the slasher genre. And, unlike Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees, Freddy is anything but silent. Thanks in part to the charisma of lead actor Robert Englund, the character's darkly comedic personality became utterly riveting.

Plenty of dream-related horrors would follow, none of which would make much of a splash. But one film franchise did latch on to a similar formula: Child's Play, directed by Tom Holland in 1988, introduced another supernatural wisecracking killer in the form of Chucky, a murderous doll possessed by the soul of as serial killer.

These major film franchises -- Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Child’s Play -- would go on to spawn numerous sequels and become such a thoroughly pervasive part of pop culture that you can find their likeness everywhere. But despite the many imitators, there was little in the way of innovation in the genre until the mid 90s. 

Do You Like Scary Movies? 

Wes Craven toyed with the idea of self-referential horror in New Nightmare, a Freddy Krueger film that was itself a meta-analysis of Freddy Krueger films. But he would revisit the idea with far greater success in 1996 with Scream. 

Created by horror lovers, for horror lovers, Scream is designed to be the most quintessential slasher film ever created. Relying on a hip, young cast to draw in a fresh audience, Scream works by combining nostalgia, meta-analysis, humor, and buckets of blood into a single film. The opening scene is a direct homage to When a Stranger Calls, and the masked killer is a deliberate call-back to earlier films. 

Unsurprisingly, Scream was a huge hit that ushered in a brief but furious wave of slashers, like the star-studded I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and Urban Legend (1998), and Scream itself had several sequels and even a TV series. But the 1990s were something of a dark era for the slasher film, seeing the release of some spectacularly lackluster franchise installments. One exception to that was the fan-favorite Freddy vs Jason, which pits the two killers against one another -- a delightful premise, but one that had strayed far from the slasher roots. 

Modern Slasher Films 

The 1990s slasher reboot was short-lived and mostly forgettable, and by the 2000s filmmakers had mostly turned away from the genre entirely, except for a slew of nostalgia cash-in reboots of every popular franchise. 

The one exception was meta-analysis -- building on Scream, these films began to deconstruct the genre in a way that would combine horror, humor, and criticism. 

The Final Girls (2015), directed by Todd Strauss-Schulson, takes this sort of meta approach. The Cabin in the Woods (2012), directed by Drew Goddard but bearing the fingerprints of co-writer and producer Joss Whedon, takes it to even further excess, providing both a thorough deconstruction of horror gropes and an entirely new mythos to give it a fresh framework.

But the problem with deconstructions is that, once a few truly successful ones have been made, it becomes essentially impossible to create the original thing in earnest anymore. And so the slasher as a sub-genre has reached its bloody end. 

Where Did All The Slashers Go? 

With dozens of slashers spanning more than 40 years of film history, it’s pretty hard to create something new with the format. Which is not to say that people aren’t still making them -- they are -- but there is less room to innovate within the notoriously rigid and simplistic slasher formula. 

Culturally, we’ve moved on a lot from the 1970s as well. For one, serial killers are no longer the threat they once were. Babysitters and camp counselors are rarely teenagers, either -- in fact, teens aren’t leaving the house as much in general. And a rise in information technology, communications and surveillance has made it harder to isolate victims and commit murders over a long period of time -- our mass murders tend to happen in shooting sprees instead these days. For another, that same information technology has made us extremely jaded and hard to impress with gore. 

The 2000s delivered violence at levels utterly beyond anything in history. The rise of the so-called torture porn -- a genre that dispenses with the stalking and killing of multiple victims in favor of lingering on the painful mutilation of a small handful -- delivered gore unlike any seen in earlier slashers. Cable television series like The Walking Dead deliver graphic violence with unprecedented regularity -- you no longer need to pick up a “video nasty” to indulge in some gruesome gore. 

And, well, unfortunately, the internet has made it easier than ever to see real violence, from terrorist beheading videos to medical gore to live-streamed murders. 

Gore for gore’s sake is simply not as compelling in the 21st century, and that takes away much of the slasher’s appeal. 

Slashers have had to morph and adapt to find a foothold for survival. In the 2000s, we saw their metamorphosis in real time: From torture porn to home invasion to a cornucopia of more innovative horrors dwelling on fears both large and small. 

We’ve probably seen the last of masked knife-wielding, babysitter-killing psychos...but the horror genre is richer for it. 

#horror movies #slahsers #slasher films #horror #horror analysis

[dipulb3]

Attorney: This is why Kenosha officer shot Jacob Blake

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/attorney-this-is-why-kenosha-officer-shot-jacob-blake/

Attorney: This is why Kenosha officer shot Jacob Blake

“He’s got my kid. He’s got my keys,” Sheskey heard a woman say, according to attorney Brendan Matthews, who is representing the officer. If Sheskey had allowed Blake to drive away and something happened to the child “the question would have been ‘why didn’t you do something?'” Matthews said.

That explanation, provided in an exclusive interview with Appradab, offers the most detailed rationale to date for Sheskey’s highly scrutinized decision to shoot Blake, who is Black, as he leaned into an SUV with his children inside it on August 23. Cellphone video of the shooting went viral on the internet, sparking days of protests and rioting in the lakeside city of Kenosha. The shooting, which Blake’s family has said resulted in paralysis from his waist down, was widely condemned as yet another unjustified shooting of a Black person by police.

The attorney’s comments to Appradab come as authorities in Wisconsin announced this week that the results of an investigation by the state Department of Justice would soon be turned over to a retired police chief serving as an independent consultant for his review. The consultant is in turn expected to forward the case to local prosecutors along with an analysis intended to help determine whether criminal charges against Sheskey are warranted. The officer remains on paid administrative leave.

Matthews told Appradab he typically does not talk about pending cases but said he felt compelled to provide some additional detail to counter what he described as an “incomplete, inaccurate” narrative that has emerged to date. Matthews directly disputed assertions by Blake’s family and lawyers that he was unarmed and posed no threat to the officers.

At the time Sheskey opened fire, the lawyer said, Blake held a knife in his hand and twisted his body toward the officer. That action is not visible in the video widely circulating on the internet, in which the view of Blake’s body is partially obscured by the driver’s side door of the SUV.

Matthews said a second officer at the scene, whom he also represents, provided investigators with a similar account of Blake turning toward Sheskey with a knife in his hand immediately prior to the shooting. That officer said he too would have opened fire but did not have a clear angle, according to the lawyer.

Authorities have said Blake had a knife in his possession and the weapon was found on the floorboard of the vehicle. But they have released few other details of the incident, citing the ongoing investigation.

Appradab reached out to Blake’s attorney, Benjamin Crump, for comment on Matthews’ assertions, but did not receive a response prior to publication. However, Blake’s lawyers have insisted he never posed a threat to the officers at any time during the encounter, and his father has denied his son was armed. “They shot my son seven times. Seven times. Like he didn’t matter,” Jacob Blake Sr., Blake’s father, told reporters. “But my son matters. He’s a human being, and he matters.”

Blake was the aggressor at the scene, attorney says

But Matthews, who represents the Kenosha Professional Police Association, said Blake was the aggressor in the encounter, based on the statements Sheskey and Officer Vincent Arenas gave to state investigators earlier this month. The officers, he said, were simply doing their jobs. Blake has not been charged with any crimes stemming from the events of the day he was shot.

The shooting occurred minutes after Sheskey and fellow officers responded to a call of “family trouble” in a neighborhood a couple of miles northwest of downtown Kenosha. According to a dispatch log, a woman reported to police that Blake had taken her keys and would not give them back. Blake’s family members later said he’d been attending a birthday party for one of his kids.

Once at the scene, Sheskey watched Blake put one child in the car as he arrived but was unaware that two more children were already in the vehicle, Matthews said. Another officer heard a woman yelling that Blake had her children, he said, but did not see the kids in the car.

Some of what officers say happened next was described in a press release issued by the police association last month.

According to the release, Blake was non-cooperative from the outset and quickly became combative. When the officers attempted to physically take control of him, Blake “actively resisted.”

An officer fired a Taser at him, but it did not stop him, the release states. When officers tried to take Blake into custody a second time, he forcefully fought with them and was able to momentarily place an officer in a headlock, the release said. Matthews said that officer was Sheskey.

Police then Tased Blake a second time and he again appeared unfazed, according to the police association statement.

At that point, Matthews said, officers noticed that Blake was holding a knife. Guns drawn, they demanded that he drop the weapon.

Blake, according to the police association statement, did not drop the weapon and began making his way around the front of the vehicle toward the driver’s side door. Video of the incident shows Blake holding the knife in his left hand as he rounds the front of the car, the statement says. While it appears that Blake is holding an object in his hand, it is unclear what that object is, according to a Appradab review of the video.

Shortly after the release of the statement, Blake’s lawyer disputed the police account as “overblown” and characterized the officers as the aggressors.

Raysean White, who shot video of the encounter, told Appradab’s Erin Burnett he twice heard police tell Blake to “drop the knife,” but that he did not see a knife in Blake’s hand. White disputed other aspects of the police account, but said it was possible some things occurred before he began witnessing the incident unfold.

The police version of events leading up to the shooting bore some similarity to an encounter allegedly involving Blake at the same address three months earlier.

In that case, a woman who described Blake as her ex-boyfriend said he took her car and debit card without her permission and made $1,000 in fraudulent withdrawals, according to court records. She told police at the time that Blake did not have a car and that he would not tell her where he was living, the court records state.

Blake was not charged with taking the car or money, but was charged with sexual assault and other offenses in connection with the incident. He was wanted in connection with those charges at the time of the shooting. Sheskey was aware that Blake was wanted, Matthews said, but did not know the details of the past incident prior to the shooting. Blake entered a not guilty plea to those charges earlier this month.

Matthews said while seven shots may seem excessive to some people, that number of shots is not out of line with other police shootings in Wisconsin and elsewhere that were later deemed justified. He also pointed to studies showing a lag time between an officer’s decision to stop firing and actually doing so.

The lawyer said Sheskey ceased firing when he determined Blake “no longer posed an imminent threat.”

Matthews questioned early reports that Blake was shot seven times in the back. He said Sheskey and fellow officers administered first aid at the scene and did not see any gunshot wounds to Blake’s back. Rather, he said, the officers reported seeing injuries to Blake’s arms, side and abdomen.

The precise location of the gunshot wounds Blake sustained have not been made public. A news release from The Wisconsin Division of Criminal Investigation initially said Sheskey fired his weapon seven times “into Mr. Blake’s back.” The agency later changed the language to say Sheskey fired “towards Mr. Blake’s back.”

Sheskey ‘absolutely did not want this to happen’

For Sheskey, the fallout from the highly publicized shooting has been devastating, his lawyer said.

He had to move out of his house and get rid of his phone because he’s been hounded by reporters and depicted as a racist and brutal cop on the internet, Matthews said.

Matthews said his client has never pulled the trigger in the line of duty before now, and has no history of abusing suspects in his 10 years as a police officer, the last seven with Kenosha PD.

Rather, the lawyer described his client as a lifelong do-gooder, who as a young man served as a mentor on a cycling team for at-risk youth and worked as a lifeguard. He wanted to become a cop to continue helping people.

Matthews said Sheskey immediately dropped to the ground in the moments after the shooting and began rendering first aid to Blake and comforted him when he expressed fear that he was going to die.

“He didn’t go to work wanting to shoot anybody. He went to work trying to help people. That’s what he does every day,” Matthews said of Sheskey. “He absolutely did not want this to happen.”

Appradab’s Sara Sidner contributed to this report.

[megadarkbouquettidalwavethings]

The Most Vexing Unanswered Questions of 2017

There is something to this argument, as Kaepernick actually lost his starting job with the 49ers before the protests began and only got it back because his replacement was less effective. But that argument ignores the fact that 72 quarterbacks have appeared in a game this season, dozens of whom cannot match Kaepernick’s talent in any system.

Did the owners collectively agree not to sign him? Such outright collusion is unlikely. But in a league that has often overlooked domestic violence, animal cruelty, steroid use and vehicular manslaughter all in the name of talent, it is curious that Kaepernick was shown the door for a demonstration that did not violate any rules. BENJAMIN HOFFMAN

Did the Russians influence the election?

The political scientist Emily Thorson used her 2013 dissertation to investigate whether fact checking was an effective way to combat misinformation. She found that even when readers believed fact checks, they could not banish false information from their minds entirely. The power of fake news, she concluded, incentivized politicians to strategically spread untruths.

Not just American politicians. In January, a declassified report informed the public that the C.I.A., F.B.I. and National Security Agency concluded that Russia’s leader, President Vladimir V. Putin, had ordered an influence campaign to affect the 2016 election. Facebook’s general counsel, Colin Stretch, called posts disseminated by Russians “an insidious attempt to drive people apart.”

So there is little doubt that Russia meddled in the election (though, for the record, President Trump has said that Mr. Putin denies it). Determining influence is trickier. Did even one person change his or her vote after seeing a mocked-up Facebook advertisement?

Dr. Thorson coined a term for the residue of untruth left behind by misinformation: “belief echoes.” One of her experiments tested whether people became besotted by misinformation only when it confirmed their previously held opinions. She found that was not the case. Humans change their minds. They are subject to influence. And when a state actor summons a sonic boom of nonsense and sends it rattling through the largest communication platform ever invented, there’s no telling who might hear the echoes — and maybe even follow that actor’s lead. JONAH ENGEL BROMWICH

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Lena Dunham in February. Credit Hilary Swift for The New York Times

Is Lena Dunham a feminist?

Lena Dunham has embraced the feminist mantle with gusto, often posting about gender politics on Twitter, where she has 5.72 million followers, courting thinkers who espouse similar views in her newsletter and on her podcast, and writing about the well-being of women for Glamour magazine, LinkedIn, The New York Times and elsewhere.

Continue reading the main story

What’s a feminist now? And is she one? There’s a joke she once made on her podcast about wishing she had had an abortion. (She later apologized.) Or the time when she compared reading Gawker to “going back to a husband who beat me in the face.” (She later apologized.)

This year, particularly dismaying was Ms. Dunham’s statement accusing Aurora Perrineau, an actress, of lying when she filed a police report alleging that Murray Miller, a writer on “Girls,” raped her when she was 17 and he was 35. In a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, Ms. Dunham and Jenni Konner, her co-showrunner, wrote that “this accusation is one of the 3 percent of assault cases that are misreported every year.”

Believing rather than discrediting assault and rape survivors is a tenet of most feminist philosophies — and a stance Ms. Dunham has taken in the past, including in a tweet she sent this year: “Things women do lie about: what they ate for lunch. Things women don’t lie about: rape.”

Ms. Dunham, once again, apologized. And since mid-November, her Instagram and her Twitter have been silent. VALERIYA SAFRONOVA

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Credit Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Is wine good or bad for you or what?

Everyone who smokes cigarettes knows that their lungs get a little blacker and death draws a little nearer with each puff. Now those who pour a glass of pinot for pleasure, or to harvest its “medicinal” properties, can’t help but think of cancer too.

This fall, the American Society of Clinical Oncology stated that alcohol consumption may slightly raise the risk of breast cancer (also: esophageal, mouth, throat, liver and colorectal cancers). Its statement came after years of studies suggesting that drinking red wine (in moderation) lowers the risk of heart disease, reduces the incidence of Type 2 diabetes and improves cholesterol.

To put things in perspective, there are hundreds of known and probable carcinogens, many of which you could certainly find at home and not all of which are strictly bad for you. Moreover, just because we have evidence that alcohol consumption is associated with cancer doesn’t mean we can conclude that the relationship between them is causal.

So, the real question is: Are the effects of wine net positive? Actually, don’t answer that. BONNIE WERTHEIM

Are there any good men left?

Last month in New York magazine, the writer Rebecca Traister noted how, in this moment of post-Harvey Weinstein cultural reckoning, her husband had asked, with genuine feeling, “How can you even want to have sex with me at this point?” It’s a question many women I know — those who sleep with men, anyway — have found themselves contemplating, as the list of terrible men doing terrible things seems to metastasize (and not just terrible men we knew were terrible; terrible men we thought were good guys, in some cases feminists, even).

Continue reading the main story

But, O.K., let’s not get carried away. Statistically speaking, not all men are harassers — in fact, most of them aren’t — and there have been plenty of good men who did good things this year. Like Snackman. Remember him? He broke up a fight on a New York City subway by standing in between two people snacking on a tube of Pringles. Or this guy, Oscar Gonzales, who saved a bunny from raging California wildfires (if you haven’t watched the video yet, prepare to sob).

There were the men of the El Bolillo bakery, who baked pounds and pounds of bread while trapped inside as Hurricane Harvey pummeled Houston. (They donated it to evacuees.) And, of course, there was salt bae, a Turkish chef by the name of Nusret Gokce, who tickled women and men alike with his flamboyant sprinkling of salt onto a carved steak.

What these men have in common — with the exception of, perhaps, our Turkish chef — is that they were bystanders. Bystanders who jumped in, active in the face of larger events they often couldn’t control. Their participation fits with this particular cultural moment, as one of the only agreed upon methods for effectively combating sexual harassment and assault is, in fact, to intervene. If 2017 was the year of bad men falling like dominoes, let’s raise a glass to 2018 as the year that the good ones will stand up for the rest of us. JESSICA BENNETT

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Cardi B at the W hotel in Midtown Manhattan before for her show at MoMA PS. 1’s Warm Up series. Credit Amy Lombard for The New York Times

Was this the Year of Cardi?

Maybe not officially, but we’re happy to settle the score. Just recall the video of people in New York starting an impromptu dance party to “Bodak Yellow” earlier this month in the Times Square subway station. See how the woman wearing the National Guard jacket transforms within seconds of hearing the beat. The bravado. The debauchery. The absolute lack of concern. In a year of nonstop bad news, Cardi freed us.

Fans who have followed her since she was a stripper in the Bronx named Camilla know that her success didn’t come overnight. She’s been making money moves for years, from her days on VH1’s “Love and Hip-Hop” to her mixtapes which, bafflingly, never took off the way “Bodak” did.

Since June, it’s been nearly impossible to go out or stay in without hearing Cardi’s breakout single, which went triple platinum and earned her two Grammy nominations. The song of summer has staying power. Maybe the real question is: Will Cardi still reign supreme in 2018? JOANNA NIKAS

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Rachel Lindsay and Peter Kraus, of “The Bachelorette.” Credit Scott Baxter/ABC

Why aren’t Rachel and Peter together?

Rachel Lindsay — America’s first and maybe last black “Bachelorette” — walked away with a ring at the end of the last season, but it was not presented by the American steel-haired ironman heartthrob Peter Kraus and so 7.5 million hearts and brains broke at once. The rule of the “Bachelor” franchise is that we will make sense of the heart. The rules of reality television are that enough editing and music can make us understand anything.

But in this case, producers of Rachel’s season of “The Bachelorette” had to dodge an inexplicable gravity sinkhole in the middle of their universe. They know why Rachel and Peter aren’t together, and they have no way, within their limited palette of reality show hues, to paint us the picture that explains it. No one else involved will or can! They are all too busy doing sponsored content and getting paid. The tabloid universe, which lives by similar rules, can’t execute on this narrative either: they tried “Peter Kraus Reveals Why He Turned Down ‘The Bachelor’: ‘I Was Not Ready,’” and it just smells like smoke screen spirit.

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We will probably never know why Rachel and Peter aren’t together. Their relationship is our Roanoke colonists. What’s left to believe? Who believes Rachel and Bryan Abosolo, a.k.a. “Plan Bryan,” are planning their wedding and next dog and/or baby? (No, seriously.) Who is even ready to trust “The Bachelor” again as Season 378 begins shortly? It’s also entirely possible this is 100 percent displaced anxiety about our engagement with the nuclear power of North Korea or maybe even some personal baggage. CHOIRE SICHA

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Jay Ellis and Issa Rae, of “Insecure.” Credit Anne Marie Fox/HBO

And will Issa and Lawrence get back together?

Will they? Who knows. But should they? Probably not — at least not right now. The most recent season of “Insecure” opens with two newly single characters, both so accustomed to the comforts of partnership that navigating the often choppy seas of dating in Los Angeles is naturally a little awkward.

Issa’s attempt at a self-described “hoe-tation,” in which she juggles multiple partners at varying levels of seriousness, only reveals her lack of experience with romantic relationships when boundaries aren’t clearly defined. As for Lawrence, his new and nearly serious relationship highlights just how wounded Issa left him. (Spoiler: In Season 1, Issa cheats on Lawrence with an old flame.)

For many, the ultimate betrayal is finding out the person you’re in a monogamous relationship with has had sex with someone else. But what this season of “Insecure” showed, particularly the heart-tugging finale, was that often both parties have had a hand at the gradual erosion of the union.

It’s clear that Issa and Lawrence love each other. If they even want to entertain the idea of getting back together, though, they’ll need to do some serious self-reflection first. IMAN STEVENSON

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Credit Chris J Ratcliffe/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Is it nuts to start preparing for the apocalypse?

One strange thing about 2017 was that you could talk about preparing for the end of the world and not even have to explain why. The headlines were filled with apocalyptic scenarios — hellish wildfires, North Korean nuclear threats, melting glaciers, not to mention a long-prophesied economic collapse. As such, the popular image of the survivalist is changing, from wild-eyed cave dweller in camouflage fatigues, hoarding canned goods, to the mild-mannered executive or lawyer or insurance salesman who lives next door.

In a world where the bombproof bunker has replaced the Tesla as the hot status symbol for young Silicon Valley plutocrats, everyone, it seems, is a “prepper.” What else is on the list of must-have doomsday items? Artfully stocked bug out bags, folding kayaks, jet packs (yes, they exist), even condoms — and not just for the expected purpose, although they might come in handy for that, too. ALEX WILLIAMS

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Compiled by THE STYLES DESK

The post The Most Vexing Unanswered Questions of 2017 appeared first on dailygate.

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The World Needs Your Outrage.

{source}

  These are unquestionably dark times in which we are living.

The advances for women, minorities, and the environment — hard-won over the last century — have been seemingly erased with the pen stroke of the current dominant hyper-masculine regime. Our world is out of balance, and this week we have witnessed one of the most heart-rending moments of our current era.

The congregation of white nationalists in Charlottesville, which resulted in the death of Heather Heyer and subsequent terrorizing of her family, is indeed a wake-up call. If this does not spark our outrage, what will?

As a spiritual leader and guide of women in my Red Tent community in Louisville, Kentucky, I work closely with the shadow aspect of our collective women’s experience: rage.

As we women experience and witness the current death of our right to equality and well-being — and the death of the right to equality and well-being of all things feminine, including the Earth — combined with literal death of our sisters and daughters and mothers worldwide, our collective rage is building.

Outrage in the face of injustice is one of the most powerful forces in the world — and it is needed now more than ever. But because we have been conditioned by our patriarchal culture to disconnect from and disown our rage, many women have difficulty feeling the full potency of their fury — and then channeling that energy into much-needed action.

Instead we feel overwhelmed with despair, and internalize the belief that nothing can change. The grief that we feel at the current state of affairs is a natural response to the appalling injustices we continue to witness, but when we follow the script of the cultural narrative by blocking our rage, we withhold the vital energy that is necessary to create change.

Despite everything we’ve been conditioned to believe, our feelings of anger and rage are valuable.

It wasn’t until I was being interviewed several years ago that I made the connection between my own personal fury and my deep and unwavering call to activism. I shared in the interview that it was through my experience of pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding my daughter that I came face to face with the immense cultural agenda to disconnect me from my female power and agency.

I was awakened to the reality of being a woman in a patriarchal culture, and it made me furious.

My journey of activism evolved from there, fueled and guided by my intense anger at the many ways that girls and women are disconnected from their bodies, their wisdom, their power; the countless ways we are shamed and systematically constrained because of our femaleness.

As I heard myself telling my own story, I saw with clarity — for the first time — that the stepping stones of my own personal journey of advocacy were connected by a singular thread: my outrage.

The irony, of course, is that as a woman — and a women’s spiritual leader at that — my rage is considered unseemly, unrefined, and unwelcome. Many in the spirituality community hold the position that there is no place for fury in our cultural evolution, and that positive change will come only from holding and exuding love and light. But I beg to differ.

And in fact, I make it a point to intentionally connect women with their buried and blocked rage as a way to own their sovereignty and their power to activate change. When we women are told that we can only do good by feeling good, we deny the transformational power of our rage, which stems from our deepest core of love: our desire for justice, our reverence for life, and our passion to protect the oppressed.

When we give ourselves permission to feel and name our fury at the injustices of the world, we are then empowered to channel our rage into outrage.

Dylan Thomas urged us to “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” and although he was writing about physical death, his words have rung like a bell in my psyche since last November when it became clear that things would likely get worse before they would get better.

Our righteous outrage is needed in our world now more than ever — on a global level, and on an individual level — to spur the action and advocacy that is necessary to bring our planet and our psyches back into balance.

But in order to do so, we must heed the words of Dylan Thomas; we must refuse to go gently into the dark. We must resist the urge to keep the rage in, to tamp it down or transmute it to despair as we have been taught to do. Love and light are unquestionably needed, now and always, but holding our rage within keeps us small and impotent; it does not serve the well-being of the world.

Only by shifting our rage outward — to outrage — can we harness our innate power of transformation that the world so desperately needs.

And transformation is on the horizon, to be sure. As we claim our anger at the oppression and injustices of the world and channel our outrage into action, we contribute to the evolution of our society. Women the world over, like individual drops in the ocean, are coalescing to form a great wave of change, and the tide is now turning — away from the oppression and injustice this planet has known for over 2000 years.

The birth of a new era is imminent. But unlike the hierarchical rule of our toxic administration, this shift is coming not from the top down, but from the bottom up. Like seeds buried generations ago, we rise organically, sensing the time is now to acknowledge ourselves as the awesome force of nature we were born to be.

Using the fire of our outrage to shine light into the shadows of our culture, we can have faith that the darkness we perceive in this current time is, in the words of Valarie Kaur, “not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb.”

***

Ready to take action but not sure where to start? Personal action need not be monumental to be meaningful. Asking yourself what most sparks your outrage will illuminate the areas where your energy and advocacy is most needed.

Each positive action adds to the greater shift that we all wish to manifest, from highly visible acts such as organizing a protest, to the nearly invisible practice of intentionally raising our children to be compassionate humans. Depending on the specifics of your resources, you may make the most valuable contribution by sharing your time, money, leadership skills, your voice, or your public platform.

Resources such as Ten Ways to Fight Hate: A Community Response Guide, provided by the Southern Poverty Law Center, 12 Steps to Achieve Gender Equality in Our Lifetimes by The Guardian, and Want to Volunteer in Your Community? 5 Tips for Finding the Right Opportunity are great places to begin brainstorming about how to channel your energy into positive change.

***

Amy Bammel Wilding is the creator of Red Tent :: Louisville, a sacred interfaith women’s community in Louisville, Kentucky. Amy has been leading sacred women’s circles, mother-daughter circles and retreats, and rite-of-passage ceremonies since 2006, just after her initiation to motherhood. Amy is a perpetual student of womanhood and spirituality, continually inspired by the place where the two realms overlap. Passionate about empowering girls and women, Amy is devoted to witnessing and inspiring the reawakening of the Sacred Feminine from the individual to the global level. Amy’s book, ‘Wild & Wise: Sacred Feminine Meditations for Women’s Circles & Personal Awakening‘, is now available for pre-order.

***

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The post The World Needs Your Outrage. appeared first on Rebelle Society.

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By Scott Ritter / Truthdig.

Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C., in June 2016. (Paul Holston / AP)

Editor’s note: The writer is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), but he was not a signer of the July 24 memorandum that figures prominently in this article.

The current American political canonical theology holds as an incontrovertible truth that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election. According to this dogma, which has been actively promulgated by former and current government officials and echoed by an unquestioning mainstream media, Russian intelligence services, directed by President Vladimir Putin, conducted cyber-operations against targets associated with the U.S. election for the purpose of denigrating the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, to help her opponent, Donald Trump.

Adherence to this conclusion is mandatory, lest one be accused of challenging the gospel according to the U.S. intelligence community. “Russia did it,” Rep. Ted Lieu, a California Democrat who serves on the House Judiciary and the Foreign Affairs committees, has declared. “There’s no rational person who looked at evidence and concluded otherwise.”

While Rep. Lieu himself is not on the House Intelligence Committee and, as such, has not seen the evidence he cites, his fellow representative, Adam Schiff, the Democratic co-chair of the House Intelligence Committee, has. When President Trump dared question the findings of the U.S. intelligence community on Russia, Schiff lashed out. “The president’s comments … casting doubt on whether Russia was behind the blatant interference in our election and suggesting—his own intelligence agencies to the contrary—that nobody really knows, continue to directly undermine U.S. interests.”

It was with some interest, therefore, that I read a memorandum published earlier this week by a group of retired intelligence professionals who, like the president, dare to challenge the conventional wisdom of attributing to Russia the cyberattacks against the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 2016 and the subsequent release of information obtained for the ostensible purpose of harming the candidacy of Clinton. This group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), used a portion of its collective experience to closely examine a forensic analysis of metadata-related information that the U.S. intelligence community and its supporters in Congress claimed was “hacked” by Russia. Documents from the DNC were copied by the persona Guccifer 2.0 on July 5, 2016, collated on Sept. 1 and released to select members of the press on Sept. 13.

The men and women who compose VIPS have, in their prior lives, briefed U.S. presidents and members of Congress. They have served as national intelligence officers, FBI special agents, CIA case officers, National Security Agency (NSA) technical directors, Defense Intelligence Agency and State Department analysts, and more. Their expertise is drawn from decades of highly sensitive work within the three agencies—the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the NSA—responsible for preparing the U.S. intelligence communities’ assessment of Russian meddling and within most, if not all, of the other agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community.

These are rational people whose collective body of work has always been in direct support of the national interest and never against it. They cut across the American political spectrum, holding views that are liberal, conservative and moderate—sometimes simultaneously, as is fitting those intellects that have been conditioned to be open to considering all sources of information. Since 2003, VIPS has published 50 memorandums similar to the one published this week, all addressing current issues on which the intelligence background of its collective membership could weigh in credibly. Like any intelligence collective, the group strives for accuracy but is susceptible to the all-too-human trait of fallibility. The retired professionals of VIPS, like their active counterparts, sometimes get it wrong.

I agree with the argument of the July 24 VIPS memorandum that takes issue with the Jan. 6, 2017, Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on Russian meddling. This NIA evaluation assessed “with high confidence that Russian military intelligence (General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate or GRU) used the Guccifer 2.0 persona … to release U.S. victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets and relayed material to WikiLeaks.” The assessments contained within the Russia ICA, which lies at the very heart of the ongoing controversy surrounding accusations of collusion by people affiliated with the Trump presidential campaign and Russia, is demonstrably wrong. The VIPS memorandum to President Trump is a valuable contribution to a larger discussion of the intelligence community’s erroneous assessment that is, otherwise, lacking.

The heart of the VIPS memorandum can be found in two paragraphs that relate to Guccifer 2.0 and his alleged involvement in the cyberattack against the DNC:

After examining metadata from the “Guccifer 2.0” July 5, 2016 intrusion into the DNC server, independent cyber investigators have concluded that an insider copied DNC data onto an external storage device, and that “telltale signs” implicating Russia were then inserted.

Key among the findings of the independent forensic investigations is the conclusion that the DNC data was copied onto a storage device at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack. [Boldface in original.] Of equal importance, the forensics show that the copying and doctoring were performed on the East Coast of the U.S.

Two issues emerge from these passages. First, the ICA contends that Guccifer 2.0 accessed data from the DNC through a “cyber operation.” Technically, this could mean anything involving computers, including remote hacking and/or direct data removal using an external storage device, such as a thumb drive. However, Guccifer 2.0 has claimed he accessed the DNC server through remote hacking, and an investigation of unauthorized intrusions into the DNC server conducted by a private cybersecurity company, CrowdStrike, has attributed the theft of data to a hacking operation ostensibly overseen by Russian military intelligence, or the GRU. The FBI has endorsed the findings of CrowdStrike when it comes to the cyber-intrusion into the DNC server. As such, there is little doubt that the NIA is referring to a remote hack when it speaks of a “cyber operation” involving the DNC.

The analysis contained in the VIPS memorandum contradicts such an assertion. Unfortunately, this conclusion is not supported by the data. I reached out to the forensic analysts who conducted the analysis of the metadata in question. They have stated that there is no way to use the available metadata to determine where the copying of the data was done. In short, one cannot state that this data proves Guccifer 2.0 had direct access to the DNC server or that the data was located in the DNC when it was copied on July 5, 2016. These same analysts also note that the July 5 date that is pervasive on the metadata probably overwrote all prior modification times, meaning it is impossible to ascertain if there were any prior copy operations.

The VIPS memorandum also speaks of the insertion of “telltale” signs into data copied from the DNC server designed to implicate Russia. I have reached out to the analysts responsible for this assertion, and it appears that they mistakenly attributed actual document manipulation from an earlier date to the July 5 data transfer event. This in no way minimizes the seriousness of the underlying charge—other credible cyber-investigators have proved such data insertion on documents previously published by Guccifer 2.0 on June 15, 2016. Metadata analysis of several Word documents related to that release clearly shows that the contents of at least four documents were cut from the original document and then pasted into a Word template specifically set up for the Cyrillic alphabet, and which showed document attribution, in the Cyrillic alphabet, to “Felix Edmundovich,” the first name and patronymic of the founder of the Soviet intelligence service.

This cut-and-paste activity was conducted after the documents were accessed by Guccifer 2.0, which means Guccifer 2.0, for no practical reason whatsoever, manipulated documents in a way that created the impression of a Russian connection at the same time he was denying any such link. While the July 5 event cannot be used to argue a continuation of the document manipulation that transpired on June 15, it is clear that the false Russian attribution that arose from this manipulation carried over when the July 5 data was finally released, on Sept. 13. “The DNC is the victim of a crime—an illegal cyberattack by Russian state-sponsored agents who seek to harm the Democratic Party and progressive groups in an effort to influence the presidential election” Donna Brazille, the interim chair of the Democratic Party at the time, proclaimed in an official statement after the documents were released by Guccifer 2.0.

The implications of the conclusions reached in the VIPS memorandum (if not the actual technical analysis it relied on) are staggering: The DNC “hack” was actually a cyber-theft perpetrated by an insider with direct access to the DNC server, who then deliberately doctored documents to make them look as if they had been accessed by a Russian-speaking actor prior to releasing them to the public. This is not the narrative being pushed by the U.S. intelligence, Congress and the mainstream media. Moreover, if true, the conclusions reached by VIPS point to a broader conspiracy within the United States to undermine the credibility of an admittedly unpopular, yet legitimately elected president that borders on sedition.

These are serious allegations that should not be made lightly. Indeed, if I were acting solely on the information contained within the VIPS memorandum, I would hesitate to make them—the issue of download rates for a data set dated July 5, 2016, seems irrelevant for a cyber-intrusion alleged to have taken place in April-May of 2016. Either Guccifer 2.0 regained access to the DNC server in an as-of-yet-unreported (and unclaimed) cyber-operation, or the download involved data previously removed from the DNC server, and, as such, is apropos of nothing. The VIPS memorandum does not provide any technical data that would sustain a finding that the information in question was physically in the possession of the DNC on July 5, 2016—the day Guccifer 2.0 supposedly oversaw the transmission from its point of origin. Indeed, the analysts say that assertion cannot be derived from the data.

Such attention to detail, normally the signature of solid intelligence analysis, is not needed in this case. The VIPS memorandum serves a larger purpose here: It questions a premise that has become de rigueur in the national narrative—that Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian actor. “Guccifer 2.0 is known to be the Russians,” Brian Fallon, the press secretary for Hillary Clinton, opined in September 2016. Democratic operatives made similar statements throughout the summer and fall of 2016.

On Oct. 6, 2016, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security published a joint statement that noted that the “recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails” by Guccifer 2.0 (and others) “are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts,” without further elaboration beyond declaring that “the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there.”

Rep. Schiff, the aforementioned Democratic co-chair of the House Intelligence Committee, stated in March 2017 that “a hacker who goes by the moniker, Guccifer 2.0, claims responsibility for hacking the DNC and giving the documents to WikiLeaks. … The U.S. intelligence community also later confirmed that the documents were in fact stolen by Russian intelligence, and Guccifer 2.0 acted as a front.”

The problem is that there simply isn’t any hard data in the public domain to back up these statements of fact. What is known is that a persona using the name Guccifer 2.0 published documents said to be sourced from the DNC on several occasions starting from June 15, 2016. Guccifer 2.0 claims to have stolen these documents by perpetrating a cyber-penetration of the DNC server. However, the hacking methodology Guccifer 2.0 claims to have employed does not match the tools and techniques allegedly uncovered by the cybersecurity professionals from CrowdStrike when they investigated the DNC intrusion. Moreover, cyber-experts claim the Guccifer 2.0 “hack” could not have been executed as he described.

What CrowdStrike did claim to have discovered is that sometime in March 2016, the DNC server was infected with what is known as an X-Agent malware. According to CrowdStrike, the malware was deployed using an open-source, remote administration tool known as RemCom. The malware in question, a network tunneling tool known as X-Tunnel, was itself a repurposed open-source tool that made no effort to encrypt its source code, meaning anyone who gained access to this malware would be able to tell exactly what it was intended to do.

CrowdStrike claimed that the presence of the X-Agent malware was a clear “signature” of a hacking group—APT 28, or Fancy Bear—previously identified by German intelligence as being affiliated with the GRU, Russian military intelligence. Additional information about the command and control servers used by Fancy Bear, which CrowdStrike claims were previously involved in Russian-related hacking activity, was also reported.

The CrowdStrike data is unconvincing. First and foremost, the German intelligence report it cites does not make an ironclad claim that APT 28 is, in fact, the GRU. In fact, the Germans only “assumed” that GRU conducts cyberattacks. They made no claims that they knew for certain that any Russians, let alone the GRU, were responsible for the 2015 cyberattack on the German Parliament, which CrowdStrike cites as proof of GRU involvement. Second, the malware in question is available on the open market, making it virtually impossible to make any attribution at all simply by looking at similarities in “tools and techniques.” Virtually anyone could have acquired these tools and used them in a manner similar to how they were employed against both the German Parliament and the DNC.

The presence of open-source tools is, in itself, a clear indicator that Russian intelligence was not involved. Documents released by Edward Snowden show that the NSA monitored the hacking of a prominent Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, by Russian intelligence, “deploying malicious software which is not available in the public domain.” The notion that the Russians would use special tools to hack a journalist’s email account and open-source tools to hack either the DNC or the German Parliament is laughable. My experience with Soviet/Russian intelligence, which is considerable, has impressed me with the professionalism and dedication to operational security that were involved. The APT 28/Fancy Bear cyber-penetration of the DNC and the Guccifer 2.0 operation as a whole are the antithesis of professional.

Perhaps more important, however, is the fact that no one has linked the theft of the DNC documents to Guccifer 2.0. We do not know either the date or mechanism of penetration. We do not have a list of the documents accessed and exfiltrated from the DNC by APT 28, or any evidence that these documents ended up in Guccifer 2.0’s possession. It is widely assumed that the DNC penetration was perpetrated through a “spear-phishing” attack, in which a document is created that simulates a genuine communication in an effort to prompt a response by the receiver, usually by clicking a specified field, which facilitates the insertion of malware. Evidence of the Google-based documents believed to have been the culprits behind the penetration of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and John Podesta’s email servers have been identified, along with the dates of malware infection. No such information has been provided about the DNC penetration.

Which brings up perhaps the most curious aspect of this entire case: The DNC servers at the center of this controversy were never turned over to the FBI for forensic investigation. Instead, the FBI had to rely upon copies of the DNC server data provided by CrowdStrike. The fact that it was CrowdStrike, and not the FBI, that made the GRU attribution call based upon the investigation of the alleged cyber-penetration of the DNC server is disturbing. As shown here, there is good reason to doubt the viability of the CrowdStrike analysis. That the FBI, followed by the U.S. Congress, the U.S. intelligence community, and the mainstream media, has parroted this questionable assertion as fact is shocking.

The Guccifer 2.0 story is at the center of the ongoing controversy swirling around the Trump White House concerning allegations of collusion with Russia regarding meddling in the 2016 presidential election. While APT 28/Fancy Bear is not the only alleged Russian hacking operation claimed to have been targeting the DNC, it is the one that has been singled out as “weaponizing” intelligence—employing stolen documents for the express purpose of altering public opinion against Hillary Clinton. This act has been characterized as an attack against America, and was cited by President Barack Obama when he imposed sanctions on Russia in December 2016 and expelled 35 Russian diplomats. Congress has also referred to this “attack” as the principal justification for a bill seeking new and tougher sanctions targeting Russia.

This issue is likely to be front and center before the American public in the coming days. President Trump is facing a decision on whether to veto the aforementioned congressional bill sanctioning Russia. Trump has expressed doubts as to the veracity of the intelligence linking Russia to the hacks, contradicting the conclusions of Congress and the U.S. intelligence community. A presidential veto, or strong signing statement in opposition, could trigger a constitutional crisis between the president and Congress over the issue of executive power.

The stakes could not be higher. The American people would do well to demand a proper investigation into what actually transpired at the DNC in the spring of 2016. To date there has been no examination worthy of the name regarding the facts that underpin the accusations at the center of the American argument against Russia—that the GRU hacked the DNC server and used Guccifer 2.0 as a conduit for the release of stolen documents in a manner designed to influence the American presidential election. The VIPS memorandum of July 24, 2017, questions the veracity of these claims. I believe these doubts are well founded.

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[milaleah]

MEET THE LEAKER WHO TRIED TO TAKE DOWN DONALD TRUMP

(By Roger Stone) The extraordinary effort by leakers inside US Intelligence Agencies to create a false narrative accusing Donald Trump and his associates of colluding with the Russian State has been orchestrated by former CIA Chief Brennan. Brennan even took the incredible step of putting out a statement denying he is the leaker, a move so ham- handed it virtually guarantees he is the ring-leader. Who is this man and how did he come to serve both Bush and Obama and thus the Deep State.

John Brennan, CIA chief during the Obama-administration starting in 2013 until 2017. Previously he held the position of Homeland Security Advisor from 2009- 2013. This is a man who has subverted justice and is responsible for planting the seeds of the Russian collusion story designed to undermine the administration of Donald Trump. Well for starters he was a supporter of Hillary Clinton and wanted to retain his position as CIA director under her administration,

Brennan despised Trump for his “Muslim ban.” Brennan himself is almost certainly a believed to be a Muslim convert. Two former CIA employees stationed at the CIA Station in Riyadh told the Stone Cold Truth that their suspicion Brennan had converted to Wahhabism, the most radical form of Islam had been confirmed by things they both saw and heard. Former CIA field operations officer Gene Coyle said Brennan was “known as the greatest sycophant in the history of the CIA, and a supporter of Hillary Clinton before the election. I find it hard to put any real credence in anything that the man says.” (1)http://nypost.com/2017/05/26/how-team-obama-tried-to-hack-the-election/

The origins of the Trump -Russia collision started when John Brennan used phony and uncorroborated intel provided by Estonian spies to British, intel purporting to show a link between the Kremlin and members of Trump’s campaign. (2) April 19, 2017, 12:04 am THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR https://spectator.org/confirmed-john-brennan-colluded-with-foreign-spies-to-defeat-trump/ The BBC’s Paul Wood reported last year that the intelligence agency of an unnamed Baltic State had tipped Brennan off in April 2016 to a conversation purporting to show that the Kremlin was funneling cash into the Trump campaign. Obama’s intel czar James Clapper discounted the report testifying that “we could not corroborate the sourcing.” That should have put an end to the whole thing. Brennan didn’t think so and despite having no corroboration for the Estonian intel, Brennan attached the report to an official report to President Obama. He also included the unverified allegations in a briefing he gave to Hill Democrats known as the “Gang of Eight” practically guaranteeing that it would be leaked, which it was.

According to National Review, the Russian collusion scandal is manufactured. “Throughout our consideration of the “collusion with Russia” narrative, we have taken pains to stress that the probe is a counterintelligence investigation, not a criminal investigation. It is a salient distinction for two reasons. First, the subject of the investigation is the foreign power (in this case, Russia), not those Americans whom the foreign power may seek to trick, co-opt, or recruit. If those Americans were suspected of criminal wrongdoing, they would be made the subject of a criminal investigation; counterintelligence investigations are not conducted for the purpose of building prosecutable court cases. Second, counterintelligence investigations are classified. The presumption is that the information they uncover will never see the light of day.

There are several good reasons for this. The one of most relevance here is to prevent the smearing of Americans. Purely for political gain, officials of the prior administration and Democrats on Capitol Hill are publicizing an investigation that should never be public. It may be called a “counterintelligence investigation,” but the objective is to undermine Trump, not Russia. In a criminal investigation, agents and prosecutors fully expect that their work will eventually become public when arrests are made. Yet even in a criminal investigation, government officials are not supposed to speak publicly about suspicions or uncharged conduct. Due process dictates that they withhold comment unless and until they file a formal charge in court. It is a grave ethical breach to smear a person who is presumed innocent and whom the FBI and Justice Department lack sufficient evidence to charge with a crime.” (3) by Andrew C. McCarthy May 24, 2017, 1:04 PM @ANDREWCMCCARTHY NATIONAL REVIEW

Brennan answered questions posed by members of the House Intelligence Committee this past recently and by his answers, he clearly showed a disconnect with his reasoning in the Trump collision matters. When Rep. Trey Gowdy asked whether he saw any evidence that Trump officials colluded with the Kremlin, Brennan said: “I don’t know.” “I don’t know whether such collusion existed.” Yet in the same response, Brennan said that there was a sufficient basis of information and intelligence that required further investigation by the Bureau (FBI) to determine whether or not US persons were actively conspiring, colluding with Russian officials.”(4) http://nypost.com/2017/05/26/how-team-obama-tried-to-hack-the-election/

Get Your Comey “Nut Job” Shirt!!!

Brennan refused sworn into office on a Bible, as the tradition goes in America, but on an original draft of the Constitution sans the Bill of Rights. He was swearing to uphold the Constitution not on a complete copy, but on one that omitted the documents that most clearly limit State powers, such as the First Amendment and Second Amendment, which prohibit the federal government from abridging freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion and the individual freedom to bear arms. This is also an act intended to appease his Muslim brothers.

In his 1980 graduate thesis at the University of Texas at Austin, Brennan denied the existence of “absolute human rights” and argued in favor of censorship on the part of the Egyptian dictatorship. “Since the press can play such an influential role in determining the perceptions of the masses, I am in favor of some degree of government censorship. Inflammatory articles can provoke mass opposition and possible violence, especially in developing political systems.”

Not surprising with that background, an obscure November 2012 Wikileaks email dump points to Brennan as the person behind the “witch hunt” of journalists who reported unflattering Obama administration leaks.

In his confirmation hearing to become CIA director, Brennan refused to answer direct questions by Sen. Rand Paul about the Obama administration’s use of lethal drone attacks on U.S. citizens on U.S. territory. He would only say the U.S. “has not carried out such attacks” and “has no intentions of doing so.” The Obama administration did, however, conduct such attacks on U.S. citizens abroad.

In November he warned Donald Trump that scrapping the nuclear deal with Iran would be “the height of folly” and “disastrous.” Brennan also started claiming the Russians would hack the election at almost the same time as Clinton Campaign Chief John Podesta coined the phony storyline to distract from his own extensive and lucrative dealings with the circle around Putin not to mention then pay-day realized by Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Brennan admitted in 2016 to support the Communist Party presidential candidate – a hard line, unrepentant Stalinist named Gus Hall – in the 1976 presidential election. Neither was Brennan penitent about casting that vote. Brennan even chortled at his good luck after no Senator in his confirmation hearings to be Director of Central Intelligence asked him directly if he had been a member of the US Communist Party at that time, Brennan has long been cozy with the Muslim Brotherhood. Despite evidence presented (and later upheld) in federal court during the landmark 2008 Holy Land Foundation trial, which established the Islamic Society of North America as a Muslim Brotherhood organization and financial supporter of the terrorist organization Hamas, Brennan has continued to meet with ISNA officials and participate in ISNA events. At ISNA’s annual conference in 2009, for example, Brennan delivered the keynote address.

It gets worse. One of the FBI’s former top experts on Islam says Brennan converted to Islam years ago in Saudi Arabia. FBI veteran John Guandolo says Brennan remains a closeted Muslim, having been recruited by the Saudis as part of a counter-intelligence operation.

In a speech delivered Aug. 9, 2009, to the Center for Strategic and International Studies that is archived on the White House website, Brennan said using “a legitimate term, ‘jihad’ – meaning to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal” – to describe terrorists “risks reinforcing the idea that the United States is somehow at war with Islam itself.”

In 2010, when Brennan was serving as Obama’s Homeland Security chief, He said that having 20 percent of terrorists released by the U.S. return to terrorist attacks “isn’t that bad,” since the recidivism rate for inmates in the U.S. prison system is higher.”The statement prompted Sen. John McCain to assert Brennan had “lost touch with reality.”

Brennan clearly has had his own agenda for minimizing Muslim extremist activities as well as his personal vendetta against Trump. He’s a reborn Muslim and possible Saudi plant in addition to being a liar. In March of 2014, he told Associated Press that the CIA was not involved in hacking Senate computers. But by July 2014 he publicly apologized to the Senate Intelligence Committee leaders for CIA hacking into Senate computers. Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton said “It is not at all clear to me, just viewing this from the outside, that this hacking into the DNC and the RNC was not a false flag operation,” he said. “We just don’t know.

Sign Our Petition www.ChargeHillaryClinton.com

Back in 2010, Brennan was being called upon to resign. After Brennan addressed a New York University Assembly, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., called for Brennan’s departure. Graham told Fox News that Brennan had “lost my confidence.” Then Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., added his perspective. “I strongly believe that John Brennan ought to resign immediately or be fired because of his incompetence and inability to do his job,” he told Fox. “Any homeland security adviser who can’t tell the difference between a terrorist and a shoplifter doesn’t belong in office.” Then McCain, the Republican from Arizona, joined in. “When you impugn people’s patriotism and integrity and make statements that compare people going back into the fight in Afghanistan or Yemen or other places with criminals who go back to a life of crime in the United States, you’ve lost touch with reality,” he said. (5) http://www.wnd.com/2010/02/12528

Brennan showed incredible disrespect for Trump during the first weeks of his presidency. As reported by The Washington Times “Members of President Trump’s inner circle charged Sunday that former CIA director John O. Brennan is trying to undermine the relationship between the new administration and the intelligence community on his way out the door.”

Mr. Trump made his first official visit to the CIA on Saturday in order to show his support for and clear the air with the intelligence community, following a series of damaging leaks during the presidential transition period. He said reports of a feud between his campaign and the intelligence services were the product of “dishonest” media reporting. “I love you, I respect you, there’s nobody I respect more,” Mr. Trump told several hundred cheering workers who came in the Langley complex on a Saturday. “We’re going to start winning again, and you’re going to be leading the charge.”

“Former CIA Director Brennan is deeply saddened and angered at Donald Trump’s despicable display of self-aggrandizement in front of the CIA’s Memorial Wall of Agency heroes,” Nick Shapiro, Mr. Brennan’s former deputy chief of staff, said in a statement. “Brennan says that Trump should be ashamed of himself.”

“Is this the leaker of Fake News?” Trump tweeted. White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus reinforced those suspicions on Sunday. “I think that Brennan has a lot of things that he should answer for with regard to these leaked documents,” Mr. Priebus said. “I think perhaps he’s bitter.”(6)

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jan/22/reince-priebus-ex-cia-chief-john-brennan-is-bitter/

Russian active measures hope to topple democracies through the pursuit of five complementary objectives: One, undermine citizen confidence in democratic governance; two, foment, exacerbate divisive political fissures; three, erode trust between citizens and elected officials and their institutions; four, popularize Russian policy agendas within foreign populations; and five, create general distrust or confusion over information sources by blurring the lines between fact and fiction — a very pertinent issue today in our country. John Brennan has enabled at least four of these objectives

John Brennan should be charged with treason. Why hasn’t Attorney General Jeff Sessions convened a grand jury?

from Roger Stone – Stone Cold Truth https://stonecoldtruth.com/meet-the-leaker-who-tried-to-take-down-donald-trump/ from Roger Stone https://rogerstone12.tumblr.com/post/162099727688

[ariaanna27]

MEET THE LEAKER WHO TRIED TO TAKE DOWN DONALD TRUMP

(By Roger Stone) The extraordinary effort by leakers inside US Intelligence Agencies to create a false narrative accusing Donald Trump and his associates of colluding with the Russian State has been orchestrated by former CIA Chief Brennan. Brennan even took the incredible step of putting out a statement denying he is the leaker, a move so ham- handed it virtually guarantees he is the ring-leader. Who is this man and how did he come to serve both Bush and Obama and thus the Deep State.

John Brennan, CIA chief during the Obama-administration starting in 2013 until 2017. Previously he held the position of Homeland Security Advisor from 2009- 2013. This is a man who has subverted justice and is responsible for planting the seeds of the Russian collusion story designed to undermine the administration of Donald Trump. Well for starters he was a supporter of Hillary Clinton and wanted to retain his position as CIA director under her administration,

Brennan despised Trump for his “Muslim ban.” Brennan himself is almost certainly a believed to be a Muslim convert. Two former CIA employees stationed at the CIA Station in Riyadh told the Stone Cold Truth that their suspicion Brennan had converted to Wahhabism, the most radical form of Islam had been confirmed by things they both saw and heard. Former CIA field operations officer Gene Coyle said Brennan was “known as the greatest sycophant in the history of the CIA, and a supporter of Hillary Clinton before the election. I find it hard to put any real credence in anything that the man says.” (1)http://nypost.com/2017/05/26/how-team-obama-tried-to-hack-the-election/

The origins of the Trump -Russia collision started when John Brennan used phony and uncorroborated intel provided by Estonian spies to British, intel purporting to show a link between the Kremlin and members of Trump’s campaign. (2) April 19, 2017, 12:04 am THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR https://spectator.org/confirmed-john-brennan-colluded-with-foreign-spies-to-defeat-trump/ The BBC’s Paul Wood reported last year that the intelligence agency of an unnamed Baltic State had tipped Brennan off in April 2016 to a conversation purporting to show that the Kremlin was funneling cash into the Trump campaign. Obama’s intel czar James Clapper discounted the report testifying that “we could not corroborate the sourcing.” That should have put an end to the whole thing. Brennan didn’t think so and despite having no corroboration for the Estonian intel, Brennan attached the report to an official report to President Obama. He also included the unverified allegations in a briefing he gave to Hill Democrats known as the “Gang of Eight” practically guaranteeing that it would be leaked, which it was.

According to National Review, the Russian collusion scandal is manufactured. “Throughout our consideration of the “collusion with Russia” narrative, we have taken pains to stress that the probe is a counterintelligence investigation, not a criminal investigation. It is a salient distinction for two reasons. First, the subject of the investigation is the foreign power (in this case, Russia), not those Americans whom the foreign power may seek to trick, co-opt, or recruit. If those Americans were suspected of criminal wrongdoing, they would be made the subject of a criminal investigation; counterintelligence investigations are not conducted for the purpose of building prosecutable court cases. Second, counterintelligence investigations are classified. The presumption is that the information they uncover will never see the light of day.

There are several good reasons for this. The one of most relevance here is to prevent the smearing of Americans. Purely for political gain, officials of the prior administration and Democrats on Capitol Hill are publicizing an investigation that should never be public. It may be called a “counterintelligence investigation,” but the objective is to undermine Trump, not Russia. In a criminal investigation, agents and prosecutors fully expect that their work will eventually become public when arrests are made. Yet even in a criminal investigation, government officials are not supposed to speak publicly about suspicions or uncharged conduct. Due process dictates that they withhold comment unless and until they file a formal charge in court. It is a grave ethical breach to smear a person who is presumed innocent and whom the FBI and Justice Department lack sufficient evidence to charge with a crime.” (3) by Andrew C. McCarthy May 24, 2017, 1:04 PM @ANDREWCMCCARTHY NATIONAL REVIEW

Brennan answered questions posed by members of the House Intelligence Committee this past recently and by his answers, he clearly showed a disconnect with his reasoning in the Trump collision matters. When Rep. Trey Gowdy asked whether he saw any evidence that Trump officials colluded with the Kremlin, Brennan said: “I don’t know.” “I don’t know whether such collusion existed.” Yet in the same response, Brennan said that there was a sufficient basis of information and intelligence that required further investigation by the Bureau (FBI) to determine whether or not US persons were actively conspiring, colluding with Russian officials.”(4) http://nypost.com/2017/05/26/how-team-obama-tried-to-hack-the-election/

Get Your Comey “Nut Job” Shirt!!!

Brennan refused sworn into office on a Bible, as the tradition goes in America, but on an original draft of the Constitution sans the Bill of Rights. He was swearing to uphold the Constitution not on a complete copy, but on one that omitted the documents that most clearly limit State powers, such as the First Amendment and Second Amendment, which prohibit the federal government from abridging freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion and the individual freedom to bear arms. This is also an act intended to appease his Muslim brothers.

In his 1980 graduate thesis at the University of Texas at Austin, Brennan denied the existence of “absolute human rights” and argued in favor of censorship on the part of the Egyptian dictatorship. “Since the press can play such an influential role in determining the perceptions of the masses, I am in favor of some degree of government censorship. Inflammatory articles can provoke mass opposition and possible violence, especially in developing political systems.”

Not surprising with that background, an obscure November 2012 Wikileaks email dump points to Brennan as the person behind the “witch hunt” of journalists who reported unflattering Obama administration leaks.

In his confirmation hearing to become CIA director, Brennan refused to answer direct questions by Sen. Rand Paul about the Obama administration’s use of lethal drone attacks on U.S. citizens on U.S. territory. He would only say the U.S. “has not carried out such attacks” and “has no intentions of doing so.” The Obama administration did, however, conduct such attacks on U.S. citizens abroad.

In November he warned Donald Trump that scrapping the nuclear deal with Iran would be “the height of folly” and “disastrous.” Brennan also started claiming the Russians would hack the election at almost the same time as Clinton Campaign Chief John Podesta coined the phony storyline to distract from his own extensive and lucrative dealings with the circle around Putin not to mention then pay-day realized by Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Brennan admitted in 2016 to support the Communist Party presidential candidate – a hard line, unrepentant Stalinist named Gus Hall – in the 1976 presidential election. Neither was Brennan penitent about casting that vote. Brennan even chortled at his good luck after no Senator in his confirmation hearings to be Director of Central Intelligence asked him directly if he had been a member of the US Communist Party at that time, Brennan has long been cozy with the Muslim Brotherhood. Despite evidence presented (and later upheld) in federal court during the landmark 2008 Holy Land Foundation trial, which established the Islamic Society of North America as a Muslim Brotherhood organization and financial supporter of the terrorist organization Hamas, Brennan has continued to meet with ISNA officials and participate in ISNA events. At ISNA’s annual conference in 2009, for example, Brennan delivered the keynote address.

It gets worse. One of the FBI’s former top experts on Islam says Brennan converted to Islam years ago in Saudi Arabia. FBI veteran John Guandolo says Brennan remains a closeted Muslim, having been recruited by the Saudis as part of a counter-intelligence operation.

In a speech delivered Aug. 9, 2009, to the Center for Strategic and International Studies that is archived on the White House website, Brennan said using “a legitimate term, ‘jihad’ – meaning to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal” – to describe terrorists “risks reinforcing the idea that the United States is somehow at war with Islam itself.”

In 2010, when Brennan was serving as Obama’s Homeland Security chief, He said that having 20 percent of terrorists released by the U.S. return to terrorist attacks “isn’t that bad,” since the recidivism rate for inmates in the U.S. prison system is higher.”The statement prompted Sen. John McCain to assert Brennan had “lost touch with reality.”

Brennan clearly has had his own agenda for minimizing Muslim extremist activities as well as his personal vendetta against Trump. He’s a reborn Muslim and possible Saudi plant in addition to being a liar. In March of 2014, he told Associated Press that the CIA was not involved in hacking Senate computers. But by July 2014 he publicly apologized to the Senate Intelligence Committee leaders for CIA hacking into Senate computers. Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton said “It is not at all clear to me, just viewing this from the outside, that this hacking into the DNC and the RNC was not a false flag operation,” he said. “We just don’t know.

Sign Our Petition www.ChargeHillaryClinton.com

Back in 2010, Brennan was being called upon to resign. After Brennan addressed a New York University Assembly, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., called for Brennan’s departure. Graham told Fox News that Brennan had “lost my confidence.” Then Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., added his perspective. “I strongly believe that John Brennan ought to resign immediately or be fired because of his incompetence and inability to do his job,” he told Fox. “Any homeland security adviser who can’t tell the difference between a terrorist and a shoplifter doesn’t belong in office.” Then McCain, the Republican from Arizona, joined in. “When you impugn people’s patriotism and integrity and make statements that compare people going back into the fight in Afghanistan or Yemen or other places with criminals who go back to a life of crime in the United States, you’ve lost touch with reality,” he said. (5) http://www.wnd.com/2010/02/12528

Brennan showed incredible disrespect for Trump during the first weeks of his presidency. As reported by The Washington Times “Members of President Trump’s inner circle charged Sunday that former CIA director John O. Brennan is trying to undermine the relationship between the new administration and the intelligence community on his way out the door.”

Mr. Trump made his first official visit to the CIA on Saturday in order to show his support for and clear the air with the intelligence community, following a series of damaging leaks during the presidential transition period. He said reports of a feud between his campaign and the intelligence services were the product of “dishonest” media reporting. “I love you, I respect you, there’s nobody I respect more,” Mr. Trump told several hundred cheering workers who came in the Langley complex on a Saturday. “We’re going to start winning again, and you’re going to be leading the charge.”

“Former CIA Director Brennan is deeply saddened and angered at Donald Trump’s despicable display of self-aggrandizement in front of the CIA’s Memorial Wall of Agency heroes,” Nick Shapiro, Mr. Brennan’s former deputy chief of staff, said in a statement. “Brennan says that Trump should be ashamed of himself.”

“Is this the leaker of Fake News?” Trump tweeted. White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus reinforced those suspicions on Sunday. “I think that Brennan has a lot of things that he should answer for with regard to these leaked documents,” Mr. Priebus said. “I think perhaps he’s bitter.”(6)

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jan/22/reince-priebus-ex-cia-chief-john-brennan-is-bitter/

Russian active measures hope to topple democracies through the pursuit of five complementary objectives: One, undermine citizen confidence in democratic governance; two, foment, exacerbate divisive political fissures; three, erode trust between citizens and elected officials and their institutions; four, popularize Russian policy agendas within foreign populations; and five, create general distrust or confusion over information sources by blurring the lines between fact and fiction — a very pertinent issue today in our country. John Brennan has enabled at least four of these objectives

John Brennan should be charged with treason. Why hasn’t Attorney General Jeff Sessions convened a grand jury?

from Roger Stone – Stone Cold Truth https://stonecoldtruth.com/meet-the-leaker-who-tried-to-take-down-donald-trump/

from Roger Stone https://rogerstone1.wordpress.com/2017/06/21/meet-the-leaker-who-tried-to-take-down-donald-trump/

[jennifersnyderca90]

A Shakeup in Russia’s Top Cybercrime Unit

A chief criticism I heard from readers of my book, Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime, was that it dealt primarily with petty crooks involved in petty crimes, while ignoring more substantive security issues like government surveillance and cyber war. But now it appears that the chief antagonist of Spam Nation is at the dead center of an international scandal involving the hacking of U.S. state electoral boards in Arizona and Illinois, the sacking of Russia’s top cybercrime investigators, and the slow but steady leak of unflattering data on some of Russia’s most powerful politicians.

Sergey Mikhaylov

In a major shakeup that could have lasting implications for transnational cybercrime investigations, it’s emerged that Russian authorities last month arrested Sergey Mikhaylov — the deputy chief of the country’s top anti-cybercrime unit — as well as Ruslan Stoyanov, a senior employee at Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab. 

In a statement released to media, Kaspersky said the charges against Stoyanov predate his employment at the company beginning in 2012. Prior to Kaspersky, Stoyanov served as deputy director at a cybercrime investigation firm called Indrik, and before that as a major in the Russian Ministry of Interior’s Moscow Cyber Crime Unit.

In a move straight out of a Russian spy novel, Mikhaylov reportedly was arrested while in the middle of a meeting, escorted out of the room with a bag thrown over his head. Both men are being tried for treason. As a result, the government’s case against them is classified, and it’s unclear exactly what they are alleged to have done.

However, many Russian media outlets now report that the men are suspected of leaking information to Western investigators about Russian cyber intelligence operations, and of funneling personal and often embarrassing data on Russia’s political elite to a popular blog called Humpty Dumpty (Шалтай-Болтай).

According to information obtained by KrebsOnSecurity, the arrests may very well be tied to a long-running grudge held by Pavel Vrublevsky, a Russian businessman who for years paid most of the world’s top spammers and virus writers to pump malware and hundreds of billions of junk emails into U.S. inboxes.

The Twitter page of the blog Shaltay Boltay (Humpty Dumpty).

In September 2016, Arlington, Va.-based security firm ThreatConnect published a report that included Internet addresses that were used as staging grounds in the U.S. state election board hacks [full disclosure: ThreatConnect has been an advertiser on this blog]. That report was based in part on an August 2016 alert from the FBI (PDF), and noted that most of the Internet addresses were assigned to a Russian hosting firm called King-Servers[dot]com.

King-Servers is owned by a 26-year-old Russian named Vladimir Fomenko. As I observed in this month’s The Download on the DNC Hack, Fomenko issued a statement in response to being implicated in the ThreatConnect and FBI reports. Fomenko’s statement — written in Russian — said he did not know the identity of the hackers who used his network to attack U.S. election-related targets, but that those same hackers still owed his company USD $290 in unpaid server bills.

A English-language translation of that statement was simultaneously published on ChronoPay.com, Vrublevsky’s payment processing company.

“The analysis of the internal data allows King Servers to confidently refute any conclusions about the involvement of the Russian special services in this attack,” Fomenko said in his statement, which credits ChronoPay for the translation. “The company also reported that the attackers still owe the company $US290 for rental services and King Servers send an invoice for the payment to Donald Trump & Vladimir Putin, as well as the company reserves the right to send it to any other person who will be accused by mass media of this attack.”

ChronoPay founder and owner Pavel Vrublevsky.

I mentioned Vrublevsky in that story because I knew Fomenko (a.k.a. “Die$el“) and he were longtime associates; both were prominent members of Crutop[dot]nu, a cybercrime forum that Vrublevsky (a.k.a. “Redeye“) owned and operated for years. In addition, I recognized Vrublevsky’s voice and dark humor in the statement, and thought it was interesting that Vrublevsky was inserting himself into all the alleged election-hacking drama.

That story also noted how common it was for Russian intelligence services to recruit Russian hackers who were already in prison — by commuting their sentences in exchange for helping the government hack foreign adversaries. In 2013, Vrublevsky was convicted of hiring his most-trusted spammer and malware writer to attack one of ChronoPay’s chief competitors, but he was inexplicably released a year earlier than his two-and-a-half year sentence required.

Meanwhile, the malware author that Vrublevsky hired to launch the attack which later landed them both in jail told The New York Times last month that he’d also been approached while in prison by someone offering to commute his sentence if he agreed to hack for the Russian government, but that he’d refused and was forced to serve out his entire sentence.

My book Spam Nation identified most of the world’s top spammers and virus writers by name, and I couldn’t have done that had someone in Russian law enforcement not leaked to me and to the FBI tens of thousands of email messages and documents stolen from ChronoPay’s offices.

To this day I don’t know the source of those stolen documents and emails. They included spreadsheets chock full of bank account details tied to some of the world’s most active cybercriminals, and to a vast network of shell corporations created by Vrublevsky and ChronoPay to help launder the proceeds from his pharmacy, spam and fake antivirus operations.

Fast-forward to this past week: Multiple Russian media outlets covering the treason case mention that King-Servers and its owner Fomenko rented the servers from a Dutch company controlled by Vrublevsky.

Both Fomenko and Vrublevsky deny this, but the accusations got me looking more deeply through my huge cache of leaked ChronoPay emails for any mention of Mikhaylov or Stoyanov — the cybercrime investigators arrested in Russia last week and charged with treason. I also looked because in phone interviews in 2011 Vrublevsky told me he suspected both men were responsible for leaking his company’s emails to me, to the FBI, and to Kimberly Zenz, a senior threat analyst who works for the security firm iDefense (now owned by Verisign).

In that conversation, Vrublevsky said he was convinced that Mikhaylov was taking information gathered by Russian government cybercrime investigators and feeding it to U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies and to Zenz. Vrublevsky told me then that if ever he could prove for certain Mikhaylov was involved in leaking incriminating data on ChronoPay, he would have someone “tear him a new asshole.”

As it happens, an email that Vrublevsky wrote to a ChronoPay employee in 2010 eerily presages the arrests of Mikhaylov and Stoyanov, voicing Vrublevsky’s suspicion that the two men were closely involved in leaking ChronoPay emails and documents that were seized by Mikhaylov’s own division — the Information Security Center (CDC) of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). A copy of that email is shown in Russian in the screen shot below. A translated version of the message text is available here (PDF).

A copy of an email Vrublevsky sent to a ChronoPay co-worker about his suspicions that Mikhaylov and Stoyanov were leaking government secrets.

In it, Vrublevsky claims Zenz was dating a Russian man who worked with Stoyanov at Indrik — the company that both men worked at before joining Kaspersky — and that Stoyanov was feeding her privileged information about important Russian hackers.

“Looks like Sergey and Ruslan were looking for various ‘scapegoats’ who were easy to track down and who had a lot of criminal evidence collected against them, and then reported them to iDefense through Kimberly,” Vrublevsky wrote to a ChronoPay subordinate in an email dated Sept. 11, 2010. “This was done so that iDefense could get some publicity for themselves by turning this into a global news story. Then the matter was reported by US intelligence to Russia, and then got on Sergey’s desk who made a big deal out of it and then solved the case brilliantly, gaining favors with his bosses. iDefense at the same time was getting huge grants to fight Russian cyberthreats.”

Based on how long Vrublevsky has been trying to sell this narrative, it seems he may have finally found a buyer.

Verisign’s Zenz said she did date a Russian man who worked with Stoyanov, but otherwise called Vrublevsky’s accusations a fabrication. Zenz said she’s uncertain if Vrublevsky has enough political clout to somehow influence the filing of a treason case against the two men, but that she suspects the case has more to do with ongoing and very public recent infighting within the Russian FSB.

“It is hard for me imagine how Vrublevsky would be so powerful as to go after the people that investigated him on his own,” Zenz told KrebsOnSecurity. “Perhaps the infighting going on right now among the security forces already weakened Mikhaylov enough that Vrublevsky was able to go after him. Leaking communications or information to the US is a very extreme thing to have done. However, if it really did happen, then Mikhaylov would be very weak, which could explain how Vrublevsky would be able to go after him.”

Nevertheless, Zenz said, the Russian government’s treason case against Mikhaylov and Stoyanov is likely to have a chilling effect on the sharing of cyber threat information among researchers and security companies, and will almost certainly create problems for Kaspersky’s image abroad.

“This really weakens the relationship between Kaspersky and the FSB,” Zenz said. “It pushes Kaspersky to formalize relations and avoid the informal cooperation upon which cybercrime investigations often rely, in Russia and globally. It is also likely to have a chilling effect on such cooperation in Russia. This makes people ask, “If I share information on an attack or malware, can I be charged with treason?’”

Vrublevsky declined to comment for this story. King Servers’ Fomenko could not be immediately reached for comment.

from https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/01/a-shakeup-in-russias-top-cybercrime-unit/

[amberdscott2]

A Shakeup in Russia’s Top Cybercrime Unit

A chief criticism I heard from readers of my book, Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime, was that it dealt primarily with petty crooks involved in petty crimes, while ignoring more substantive security issues like government surveillance and cyber war. But now it appears that the chief antagonist of Spam Nation is at the dead center of an international scandal involving the hacking of U.S. state electoral boards in Arizona and Illinois, the sacking of Russia’s top cybercrime investigators, and the slow but steady leak of unflattering data on some of Russia’s most powerful politicians.

Sergey Mikhaylov

In a major shakeup that could have lasting implications for transnational cybercrime investigations, it’s emerged that Russian authorities last month arrested Sergey Mikhaylov — the deputy chief of the country’s top anti-cybercrime unit — as well as Ruslan Stoyanov, a senior employee at Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab. 

In a statement released to media, Kaspersky said the charges against Stoyanov predate his employment at the company beginning in 2012. Prior to Kaspersky, Stoyanov served as deputy director at a cybercrime investigation firm called Indrik, and before that as a major in the Russian Ministry of Interior’s Moscow Cyber Crime Unit.

In a move straight out of a Russian spy novel, Mikhaylov reportedly was arrested while in the middle of a meeting, escorted out of the room with a bag thrown over his head. Both men are being tried for treason. As a result, the government’s case against them is classified, and it’s unclear exactly what they are alleged to have done.

However, many Russian media outlets now report that the men are suspected of leaking information to Western investigators about Russian cyber intelligence operations, and of funneling personal and often embarrassing data on Russia’s political elite to a popular blog called Humpty Dumpty (Шалтай-Болтай).

According to information obtained by KrebsOnSecurity, the arrests may very well be tied to a long-running grudge held by Pavel Vrublevsky, a Russian businessman who for years paid most of the world’s top spammers and virus writers to pump malware and hundreds of billions of junk emails into U.S. inboxes.

The Twitter page of the blog Shaltay Boltay (Humpty Dumpty).

In September 2016, Arlington, Va.-based security firm ThreatConnect published a report that included Internet addresses that were used as staging grounds in the U.S. state election board hacks [full disclosure: ThreatConnect has been an advertiser on this blog]. That report was based in part on an August 2016 alert from the FBI (PDF), and noted that most of the Internet addresses were assigned to a Russian hosting firm called King-Servers[dot]com.

King-Servers is owned by a 26-year-old Russian named Vladimir Fomenko. As I observed in this month’s The Download on the DNC Hack, Fomenko issued a statement in response to being implicated in the ThreatConnect and FBI reports. Fomenko’s statement — written in Russian — said he did not know the identity of the hackers who used his network to attack U.S. election-related targets, but that those same hackers still owed his company USD $290 in unpaid server bills.

A English-language translation of that statement was simultaneously published on ChronoPay.com, Vrublevsky’s payment processing company.

“The analysis of the internal data allows King Servers to confidently refute any conclusions about the involvement of the Russian special services in this attack,” Fomenko said in his statement, which credits ChronoPay for the translation. “The company also reported that the attackers still owe the company $US290 for rental services and King Servers send an invoice for the payment to Donald Trump & Vladimir Putin, as well as the company reserves the right to send it to any other person who will be accused by mass media of this attack.”

ChronoPay founder and owner Pavel Vrublevsky.

I mentioned Vrublevsky in that story because I knew Fomenko (a.k.a. “Die$el“) and he were longtime associates; both were prominent members of Crutop[dot]nu, a cybercrime forum that Vrublevsky (a.k.a. “Redeye“) owned and operated for years. In addition, I recognized Vrublevsky’s voice and dark humor in the statement, and thought it was interesting that Vrublevsky was inserting himself into all the alleged election-hacking drama.

That story also noted how common it was for Russian intelligence services to recruit Russian hackers who were already in prison — by commuting their sentences in exchange for helping the government hack foreign adversaries. In 2013, Vrublevsky was convicted of hiring his most-trusted spammer and malware writer to attack one of ChronoPay’s chief competitors, but he was inexplicably released a year earlier than his two-and-a-half year sentence required.

Meanwhile, the malware author that Vrublevsky hired to launch the attack which later landed them both in jail told The New York Times last month that he’d also been approached while in prison by someone offering to commute his sentence if he agreed to hack for the Russian government, but that he’d refused and was forced to serve out his entire sentence.

My book Spam Nation identified most of the world’s top spammers and virus writers by name, and I couldn’t have done that had someone in Russian law enforcement not leaked to me and to the FBI tens of thousands of email messages and documents stolen from ChronoPay’s offices.

To this day I don’t know the source of those stolen documents and emails. They included spreadsheets chock full of bank account details tied to some of the world’s most active cybercriminals, and to a vast network of shell corporations created by Vrublevsky and ChronoPay to help launder the proceeds from his pharmacy, spam and fake antivirus operations.

Fast-forward to this past week: Multiple Russian media outlets covering the treason case mention that King-Servers and its owner Fomenko rented the servers from a Dutch company controlled by Vrublevsky.

Both Fomenko and Vrublevsky deny this, but the accusations got me looking more deeply through my huge cache of leaked ChronoPay emails for any mention of Mikhaylov or Stoyanov — the cybercrime investigators arrested in Russia last week and charged with treason. I also looked because in phone interviews in 2011 Vrublevsky told me he suspected both men were responsible for leaking his company’s emails to me, to the FBI, and to Kimberly Zenz, a senior threat analyst who works for the security firm iDefense (now owned by Verisign).

In that conversation, Vrublevsky said he was convinced that Mikhaylov was taking information gathered by Russian government cybercrime investigators and feeding it to U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies and to Zenz. Vrublevsky told me then that if ever he could prove for certain Mikhaylov was involved in leaking incriminating data on ChronoPay, he would have someone “tear him a new asshole.”

As it happens, an email that Vrublevsky wrote to a ChronoPay employee in 2010 eerily presages the arrests of Mikhaylov and Stoyanov, voicing Vrublevsky’s suspicion that the two men were closely involved in leaking ChronoPay emails and documents that were seized by Mikhaylov’s own division — the Information Security Center (CDC) of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). A copy of that email is shown in Russian in the screen shot below. A translated version of the message text is available here (PDF).

A copy of an email Vrublevsky sent to a ChronoPay co-worker about his suspicions that Mikhaylov and Stoyanov were leaking government secrets.

In it, Vrublevsky claims Zenz was dating a Russian man who worked with Stoyanov at Indrik — the company that both men worked at before joining Kaspersky — and that Stoyanov was feeding her privileged information about important Russian hackers.

“Looks like Sergey and Ruslan were looking for various ‘scapegoats’ who were easy to track down and who had a lot of criminal evidence collected against them, and then reported them to iDefense through Kimberly,” Vrublevsky wrote to a ChronoPay subordinate in an email dated Sept. 11, 2010. “This was done so that iDefense could get some publicity for themselves by turning this into a global news story. Then the matter was reported by US intelligence to Russia, and then got on Sergey’s desk who made a big deal out of it and then solved the case brilliantly, gaining favors with his bosses. iDefense at the same time was getting huge grants to fight Russian cyberthreats.”

Based on how long Vrublevsky has been trying to sell this narrative, it seems he may have finally found a buyer.

Verisign’s Zenz said she did date a Russian man who worked with Stoyanov, but otherwise called Vrublevsky’s accusations a fabrication. Zenz said she’s uncertain if Vrublevsky has enough political clout to somehow influence the filing of a treason case against the two men, but that she suspects the case has more to do with ongoing and very public recent infighting within the Russian FSB.

“It is hard for me imagine how Vrublevsky would be so powerful as to go after the people that investigated him on his own,” Zenz told KrebsOnSecurity. “Perhaps the infighting going on right now among the security forces already weakened Mikhaylov enough that Vrublevsky was able to go after him. Leaking communications or information to the US is a very extreme thing to have done. However, if it really did happen, then Mikhaylov would be very weak, which could explain how Vrublevsky would be able to go after him.”

Nevertheless, Zenz said, the Russian government’s treason case against Mikhaylov and Stoyanov is likely to have a chilling effect on the sharing of cyber threat information among researchers and security companies, and will almost certainly create problems for Kaspersky’s image abroad.

“This really weakens the relationship between Kaspersky and the FSB,” Zenz said. “It pushes Kaspersky to formalize relations and avoid the informal cooperation upon which cybercrime investigations often rely, in Russia and globally. It is also likely to have a chilling effect on such cooperation in Russia. This makes people ask, “If I share information on an attack or malware, can I be charged with treason?’”

Vrublevsky declined to comment for this story. King Servers’ Fomenko could not be immediately reached for comment.

from Amber Scott Technology News https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/01/a-shakeup-in-russias-top-cybercrime-unit/