Sometimes It Pays Not To Update

This article is from July 19th, so I am sure most of the problems mentioned have been corrected by now, but I love the irony.

On July 19th, Digital Trends reported:

Nearly every flight in the U.S. is grounded right now following a CrowdStrike system update error that’s affecting everything from travel to mobile ordering at Starbucks — but not Southwest Airlines flights. Southwest is still flying high, unaffected by the outage that’s plaguing the world today, and that’s apparently because it’s using Windows 3.1.

Yes, Windows 3.1 — an operating system that is 32 years old. Southwest, along with UPS and FedEx, haven’t had any issues with the CrowdStrike outage. In responses to CNN, Delta, American, Spirit, Frontier, United, and Allegiant all said they were having issues, but Southwest told the outlet that its operations are going off without a hitch.

Some are attributing that to Windows 3.1. Major portions of Southwest’s systems are reportedly built on Windows 95 and Windows 3.1, which is something the company has come under fire for in the past several years. It should go without saying that Southwest needs to update its system, but in this case, the ancient operating system seems to be doing the airline some favors to avoid a complete Y2K-level apocalypse.

Computers are either wonderful or awful. There seems to be no in-between!

Who Took The Emails?

On Tuesday The Epoch Times posted an article titled, “900-Page Senate Russia Report Includes No Evidence for How Emails Were Taken From DNC.” The article provides a detailed account of the Senate investigation and what was NOT concluded. Please follow the link to read the entire article–it is very detailed.

The most important point in the article is the conclusion:

While details about what happened with the DNC emails have been scant, details about what didn’t happen have recently emerged. On May 7, the HPSCI released the transcripts of the interviews it conducted as part of the investigation for the Russian active measures report. The transcript of the interview of Shawn Henry showed that CrowdStrike “did not have concrete evidence that data was exfiltrated from the DNC.”

“We have indicators that data was exfiltrated. We did not have concrete evidence that data was exfiltrated from the DNC, but we have indicators that it was exfiltrated,” Henry told lawmakers on Dec. 5, 2017.

When asked about the date on which the indicators occurred, Henry referred to the separate exfiltration event on April 22, 2016, which occurred a month before the emails were allegedly stolen.

Later in the interview, when asked specifically about the emails, Henry said it was possible for the alleged hackers to view and copy the content of the emails in addition to taking screenshots. The monitoring activity he described is unlikely to have yielded the raw email files published by WikiLeaks and was different from the allegation by the special counsel, who claimed that the emails were taken during a separate breach.

A source with the HPSCI told The Epoch Times that the committee relied on sources other than CrowdStrike to conclude that Russians stole the DNC emails, but couldn’t provide further details because they were classified. The evidence for the theft of the emails was as strong as the evidence of the attribution of the overall hacking campaign to Russia, the source said.

The release of Henry’s transcript prompted CrowdStrike to issue on June 5 the fourth significant update in as many years to its DNC incident response blog post. The update, running at more than 2,400 words, consisted of a Q&A and a timeline of events surrounding CrowdStrike’s remediation work.

The CrowdStrike timeline extensively references the Mueller report, but doesn’t include the crucial May 25 to June 1, 2016, time frame the special counsel provided for the alleged hacking of the DNC mail server.

The Q&A features an apparent misinterpretation of Henry’s testimony, claiming, contrary to what Henry told lawmakers, that CrowdStrike has evidence that data was exfiltrated from the DNC but omitting Henry’s qualification that the evidence was circumstantial. Regardless, the statement, as expected, included no dates and didn’t use the word “emails.”

I still believe, and will continue to believe unless shown proof that I am wrong, that the hacking of the DNC emails is connected to the death of Seth Rich. I don’t know whether that is being looked into or not, but it should be.

 

What The Transcripts Tell Us

Just the News posted an article yesterday listing the top six revelations from House Russia probe’s newly declassified witness interviews. Please follow the link to the article to read the details, but here is the list of the six revelations:

  1. No Collusion: The U.S. intelligence community never had any evidence of collusion between Russia and the 2016 Trump presidential campaign.
  2. FBI didn’t have a case: Former Deputy Director of the FBI Andrew McCabe admitted during his testimony that the agency knew from the start that Trump associate George Papadopoulos wasn’t in contact with Moscow, thereby undermining the agency’s entire basis for opening Crossfire Hurricane, i.e., the Russia investigation. “Papadopoulos, didn’t particularly indicate that he was the person that was interacting with the Russians,” McCabe told the House Intelligence panel.
  3. Podesta and Clinton knew about funding for Steele Dossier: John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, testified that he and Clinton were aware in general terms that the campaign was paying for opposition research to link Donald Trump to Russia, but he said neither of them knew specifically who had been hired to conduct the effort.
  4. Clapper, Comey, and McCabe provide conflicting narratives: Clapper testified that he did not brief then-President Obama on former Michael Flynn’s conversation with the Russian ambassador in January 2017. However, both former FBI Director Comey and McCabe say otherwise.
  5. CrowdStrike says evidence of DNC hack was “not conclusive”: The president of CrowdStrike, a data security company retained by the DNC after it was hacked, testified to the House panel that there were “indications” of a hack into the DNC servers, but not concrete, irrefutable evidence.
  6. DNC lawyer ordered to tip off the CIA: Michael Sussmann, a Perkins Coie lawyer who represented both the Clinton campaign and the DNC in their response to presumed Russian hacking, testified that in February 2017, he went to the CIA, on behalf of a client whom he did not name, in an attempt to tip them off about the Trump organization’s ties to Russia.

The more we learn, the more this looks like a coup.

As The Truth Comes Out Many Previous Statements Are Now Becoming ‘Inoperative’

The Gateway Pundit posted an article today about Crowdstrike. Crowdstrike was the firm that claimed to have examined the Democrat National Committee computers and claimed that the computers had been hacked by Russians and the information relayed to Wikileaks. There have always been a few problems with this story. First of all, a number of computer experts have stated that the speed at which the information was copied from the computers indicates an inside job with a data stick rather than a hack. Secondly, the FBI was never actually allowed to examine the computers. Thirdly, Crowdstrike has links to both Democrat politics and Ukraine. The article reminds us that in the infamous telephone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Zelinsky, President Trump specifically asked President Zelinsky to look into Crowdstrike.

Here are a few highlights from the article:

Pelley (Scott Pelley), from 60 Minutes, used former anti-Trump Ambassador Bill Taylor, from the sham impeachment fiasco, as his expert witness on the Ukraine. Taylor claims he knew of no connection between Crowdstrike and the Ukraine. Pelley then shared the following in his report [emphasis added]:

Robert Johnston dealt directly with the FBI as an investigator of the DNC hack for CrowdStrike, a leading cyber security company hired by the Democrats. He told us the FBI didn’t physically examine the DNC servers because CrowdStrike gave the bureau copies of the data from the servers.

If there is a server or a computer system of any kind that’s involved in the incident you can take an exact bit for bit digital copy of what’s on that system. Now that digital copy is just as good as having the real thing,” Johnston said.

“As far as you know, the FBI got what it needed and what it wanted?” Pelley asked Johnston.

“Exactly and evidence of that is you don’t hear the FBI complaining,” Johnston said.

The article continues:

We reported that Crowdstike is related to the Ukraine and this is through Ukrainian billionaire and longtime contributor to the Clinton Foundation Victor Pinchuk. We also know Crowdstrike is connected to James Clapper and the Atlantic Group:

Pinchuk serves on the International Advisory Board of a Washington-based think tank called the Atlantic Council. This group is “connected to Ukrainian interests through its “Ukraine in Europe Initiative,” which is designed to galvanize international support for an independent Ukraine within secure borders whose people will determine their own future.” Also serving on the International Advisory Board of the Atlantic Council is James Clapper, who served as Obama’s Director of National Intelligence. Funnily enough, Bongino discovered that the Chief Technology Officer of “the only company that investigated the hacking of the DNC’s servers and quickly determined it was the Russians, is a nonresident senior fellow in cybersecurity” at the Atlantic Council. His name is Dmitri Alperovitch (owner of CrowdStrike).”

We also know that in July 2015 Google invested $100 million into Crowdstrike

There are some problems with the story that the media has told so far:

There are many holes with the ‘Russia hacked the DNC emails’ claim, much of what has already been posted here at TGP.

Several individuals previously shared they have sources who claim that the DNC servers were never examined by Crowdstrike

Please follow the link to The Gateway Pundit to read the rest of the story. It may be that some people who have told a false story for the past three years are about to be confronted by evidence of the truth that contradicts what they are saying.

Complicated, But Important

Yesterday The Conservative Treehouse posted an article about the ongoing case of Sharyl Attkisson, a CBS journalist who was spied on by the government as she investigated the Fast and Furious scandal and later Benghazi.. I strongly suggest that you follow the link to the article as it includes a lot of detail about the case.

The article reports:

According to a recent court filing [Source Here] a person who was engaged in the “wrongful activity” has come forward to provide Ms. Attkisson with details about the operation.  As a result of those whistle-blower revelations Attkisson is able to name specific individuals who were running the operation

…Former DOJ Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein is named as the person who was in charge of the operation; and the former head of the FBI DC field office, Shawn Henry is also outlined.

Mr. Henry is the head of Crowdstrike, a contractor for the government and a politically connected data security and forensic company.  Those who have followed the aspects related to the FBI use of the NSA database to illegally monitor U.S. persons; and those who followed the DNC cover story of Russia “hacking”; will be familiar with Crowdstrike.

According to the updated lawsuit (full pdf below) Rod Rosenstein, as the U.S. Attorney for Maryland, was in charge of the Obama 2011 and 2012 operation to monitor journalists specific to Ms. Attkissons reporting on Fast-n-Furious and Benghazi.

The article concludes:

This is the same time-frame when DNI James Clapper falsely denied to congress about the U.S. government -through the NSA- collecting metadata on all U.S. electronic communication.  This is the same time-frame where CIA Director John Brennan was monitoring the computer networks of congressional intelligence oversight staff.

When you overlay the new information from the Attkisson lawsuit, what emerges is the picture of an intentional effort by the Obama administration to weaponize the ability to collect electronic information on domestic political opposition.  It’s one long continuum.

This is not acceptable government behavior in a representative republic. It remains to be seen what will be done about it.

The Unraveling Continues

The Conservative Treehouse posted an article today with the following headline, “DOJ Admits FBI Never Saw Crowdstrike Report on DNC Russian Hacking Claim…”

The article explains:

The foundation for the Russian election interference narrative is built on the claim of Russians hacking the servers of the Democrat National Committee (DNC), and subsequently releasing damaging emails that showed the DNC worked to help Hillary Clinton and eliminate Bernie Sanders.

Despite the Russian ‘hacking’ claim the DOJ previously admitted the DNC would not let FBI investigators review the DNC server.  Instead the DNC provided the FBI with analysis of a technical review done through a cyber-security contract with Crowdstrike.

The narrative around the DNC hack claim was always sketchy; many people believe the DNC email data was downloaded onto a flash drive and leaked.  In a court filing (full pdf below) the scale of sketchy has increased exponentially.

Suspecting they could prove the Russian hacking claim was false, lawyers representing Roger Stone requested the full Crowdstrike report on the DNC hack.  When the DOJ responded to the Stone motion they made a rather significant admission.  Not only did the FBI not review the DNC server, the FBI/DOJ never even saw the Crowdstrike report.

To put it more simply:

This means the FBI and DOJ, and all of the downstream claims by the intelligence apparatus; including the December 2016 Joint Analysis Report and January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, all the way to the Weissmann/Mueller report and the continued claims therein; were based on the official intelligence agencies of the U.S. government and the U.S. Department of Justice taking the word of a hired contractor for the Democrat party….. despite their inability to examine the server and/or actually see an unredacted technical forensic report from the investigating contractor.

Consider the fact that we would know none of this if Hillary Clinton had been elected. What else was hidden? Will the rest of the information actually come out?

I Don’t Have Enough Imagination To Come Up With This

The following appeared in The Daily Caller yesterday:

This is real. I am not kidding.

The article notes:

Hillary Clinton, who used a private email server as secretary of state, will speak at a cyber defense summit later in 2019, it was announced Thursday.

FireEye, a cybersecurity company based in California, announced Clinton will give the keynote speech at its annual summit in Washington, D.C., in October.

The article continues:

The FBI investigated Clinton for mishandling classified information, but she was not charged in the probe.

James Comey, who served as FBI director during the investigation, called Clinton’s use of the server “extremely careless.” He said it made more vulnerable to cyber attack by foreign powers, though investigators did not find evidence that the server was hacked.

Clinton has also asserted the hacks of her campaign chairman’s emails and that of the Democratic National Committee led to her defeat at the hands of Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

The Russian government allegedly hacked into the DNC’s computer systems and released nearly 20,000 emails through WikiLeaks. The same Russian intelligence operation also stole John Podesta’s emails through an unsophisticated spear-phishing attack.

I would like to note that the FBI was never allowed to examine the DNC’s computer systems to confirm how John Podesta’s emails were accessed–it was done by an organization called CrowdStrike, considered an ally of the Democrat Party. There has always been speculation that the Podesta emails were leaked by a Democrat. Julian Assange of Wikileaks has stated on numerous occasions that he did not get the emails from the Russians.

At any rate, would you attend a cyber security conference with Hillary Clinton as the featured speaker?

 

The Pieces Are Beginning To Fit Together

Townhall posted an article today that explains a lot of the pieces in the Special Prosecutor story and how those who supported Hillary Clinton for President worked together inside the government to create problems for President Trump.

The article reminds us:

On December 29, 2016, the Obama Administration – with three weeks remaining in its term – issued harsh sanctions against Russia over supposed election interference. Two compounds in the United States were closed and 35 Russian diplomats were ordered to leave the country.

In the two years since that was done, it has become obvious that the basis for the sanctions was questionable at best. So what was this all about?

The story begins with the emails showing that the Democratic primary election was rigged for Hillary Clinton. There are still questions as to whether those emails were ‘phished’ or hacked. The scandal was significant enough to cause the resignation of DNC chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz on the eve of the Democratic convention.

The article points out:

The FBI never bothered to test the computers for a hack.  That task was left to CrowdStrike, a private contractor whose CTO and co-founder, Dmitri Alperovitch, is a Russian ex-patriot and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a think tank with an anti-Russian agenda.

The Atlantic Council is funded by Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk, a $10 million donor to the Clinton Foundation.  The fix was in.  CrowdStrike dutifully reported that the Russians were behind the hack.

Lat year The Nation, a progressive publication, got a group of unaffiliated computer experts to test CrowdStrike’s hypothesis and they concluded that the email files were removed from the computer at a speed that makes an off-site download from Russia impossible.  

The saga continued:

Trump protested by stating the obvious: the federal government has “no idea” who was behind the hacks.

The FBI and CIA called him a liar, issuing a “Joint Statement” that suggested 17 intelligence agencies agree that it was the Russians. Hillary Clinton took advantage of this “intelligence assessment” in the October debate to portray Trump as Putin’s stooge.

She said, “We have 17, 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyber-attacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin. And they are designed to influence our election. I find that deeply disturbing.”

The media’s fact checkers excoriated Trump for lying. It was the ultimate campaign dirty trick: a joint operation by the intelligence agencies and the media against a political candidate.

The article concludes:

The machinations that followed, the secret memos and special counsel, the prosecution of Flynn anyway for what happened in his conversation, the whole sordid mess, is a cover-up.

In the inverse logic of Russian collusion, the investigation itself supplies credibility to the collusion narrative. Any attempt to end the investigation is obstruction of justice.

One person has the constitutional responsibility end this nonsense. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who himself was duped into recusing himself by since discredited intelligence, should bow to recent disclosures of impropriety and say enough is enough.

His Inspector General will be issuing a report to him sometime soon. Maybe then he will lift his recusal and start the prosecutions. People should go to jail for this.

This is a scenario generally reserved for third-world countries. It is distressing to know that we have people in government who are so unpatriotic as to engage in this sort of shenanigans. Hopefully there will be an influx of politicians into our jail cells in the near future.

A Timeline That Raises More Questions Than Answers

On Saturday, Diana West posted a chronology on her blog of the history of the hacking into the Democratic National Committee (DNC). It is a rather long article, and I suggest that you follow the link to read the entire article. However, there are a few things that are noteworthy that can be mentioned in passing.

When The Washington Post reported that the DNC had been hacked by Russians, they claimed that the source of the information that it was the Russians who did the hacking was “committee officials and security experts who responded to the breach.” 

The article reminds us:

These “security experts” are with CrowdStrike, a private cyber security firm hired and paid by the DNC.

While reading the following chronology, it is important to bear in mind that the FBI has never examined the DNC computer network because the DNC prohibited the FBI from doing so. Also, that the FBI, under former Director Comey, not to mention President Obama and the “Intelligence Community,” thought this was perfectly ok.

That’s just odd. Since when does any organization have the right to tell the FBI how to conduct an investigation?

The article continues through a timeline of events:

December 14, 2016: Former UK Amb. to Uzbekistan and Wikileaks associate Craig Murray tells the Daily Mail that he flew to Washington in September 2016 to receive emails from one of Wikileaks’ sources. Both the DNC emails and the Podesta emails, Murray said, came from inside leaks, not hacks. “He said the leakers were motivated by ‘disgust at the corruption of the Clinton Foundation and the tilting of the primary election playing field against Bernie Sanders.’ “

December 22, 2016: The Washington Post reports CrowdStrike links Russian hacking of the DNC to Russian hacking of the Ukrainian military. Said CrowdStrike’s Alperovitch: ‘The fact that [these hackers] would be tracking and helping the Russian military kill Ukrainian army personnel in eastern Ukraine and also intervening in the U.S. election is quite chilling.” 

This new Russian hacking claim will be widely and loudly debunked by British, Ukrainian and other sources. 

The article ends with some references to tweets involving Seth Rich, who was murdered in Washington in July of 2016. There are some serious questions as to whether or not the murder of Seth Rich is related to the corruption in the Democratic primary elections of 2016, or if he was the source of the leaked material that was so damaging to the Hillary Clinton campaign.

I have no idea if we will ever find out the truth of the ‘hacking’ of the DNC or the murder of Seth Rich. I do hope, however, that the corruption of the Democratic Party during the primary season leading up to the 2016 presidential election will be dealt with by those within the party who may have some small amount of moral fiber. If not, it is a safe bet to say that the Democratic Party will continue to lose voters until they clean up their act.