Russian President Vladimir Putin was personally involved in efforts to intervene in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, NBC News reported, citing two unnamed "senior U.S. intelligence officials."

New intelligence links Putin directly to the leaks from hacked Democratic National Committee emails, the officials told NBC News with "a high level of confidence."

A high-level intelligence source said the campaign began as a "vendetta" against Hillary Clinton, NBC News reported. The goal grew into an effort to expose corruption in U.S. politics and to undermine America's international credibility, according to NBC.

The NBC News report comes after last week's report from The Washington Post, also citing unnamed intelligence sources, which said the CIA believed that Russia not only interfered in the election, but did so with the intention of helping Donald Trump win. Although U.S. intelligence agencies agree Russia was behind several hacks during the campaign, including that of the DNC, the CIA is thus far the only agency reported to have reached the conclusion that the efforts were explicitly meant to benefit Trump.

On Oct. 7, the Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint statement on behalf of the U.S. Intelligence Community expressing confidence that the "Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations." The ODNI and FBI do not believe there is enough evidence to conclude the cyber attacks were intended to help Trump win, however.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/12/14/putin-...

Winning. 

“The majority of Russians doesn’t even believe in the doping affair, not to mention this interference in the American elections,” Kolesnikov said. And many who believe it appreciate “the image of Putin as a strong, cunning man.”

“This is a win-win strategy for the Russian president,” he said.

At least for now.  

Read more:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/the-kremlin-likes-the-hackin...

 

Read also 

aleppo and

the western media is pathetic...

 

And please note that Vladimir Putin s still numero uno on the Forbes index and Obama is at 48...

Speaking at the State Department on Thursday, US Secretary of State John Kerry refused to comment on "anonymous intelligence reports" alleging that Russian President Vladimir Putin was personally involved in hacking into US election in favor of president-elect Donald Trump.

Read more: https://sputniknews.com/us/201612151048619457-kerry-refuses-comment-russian-hacking/

 

Republican congressman Peter King of the House Intelligence Committee said that the intelligence community appears to be carrying out an anti-Donald Trump disinformation campaign, as the President-elect continues to raise questions about the timing of “Russian hacking” claims.

On Thursday, following NBC News reporting that “intelligence officials” have "a high level of confidence" that Russian President Vladimir Putin was personally involved, the President-elect again took to Twitter to question the timing of the claims as they were pushed out through a series of unnamed “sources” by large media entities. "If Russia, or some other entity, was hacking, why did the White House wait so long to act? Why did they only complain after Hillary lost?" Trump tweeted.

Read more: https://sputniknews.com/us/201612151048617441-house-intel-committee-russian-hacking/

Claims that Russia hacked the DNC may lead to a new “Cold War” that would be profitable to those interested in military intelligence budgets, says former National Security Agency technical director and NSA whistleblower William Binney.

“[The CIA] haven’t come out with the evidence to show the tracing of the data from the DNC server to, for example the Russians, or anybody else, or going from them to WikiLeaks, which is a high priority target for NSA, in terms of network monitoring,” Binney told RT.

He’s one of the group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity who signed a letter arguing that if the data was a hack, the NSA would have a trace of the hack. The letter was published by Consortium News on Thursday.

They argue “all points point to leaking, not hacking… leaking requires physically removing data – on a thumb drive, for example – the only way such data can be copied and removed, with no electronic trace of what has left the server, is via a physical storage device.”
Binney said why it is not a hack is the NSA basically has the collection of the entire network worldwide.

“If [the CIA] are going to allege something like that they should show the trace route, and the path it went and how, and through which path those packets went from the DNC to the Russians to WikiLeaks. They failed to do that,” Binney added.

He said it also wouldn’t be the CIA illustrating the trace route, it would be the NSA as it owns the network and citied a previous occasion when the NSA showed the trace route of a hack from China back to a specific building in China.

“If you did it then, why are not going to do it now when this is a very serious allegation?” Binney said.

read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-edge/370465-russia-hacking-claims-nsa-binney/

Schmidt also was crucially involved in helping in 2011 to plan the coup in Ukraine that Hillary’s State Department was then working on, and which culminated successfully in February 2014. (Here’s Hillary’s protégé Victoria Nuland overseeing the operation and selecting on 4 February 2014 who would be leading the country after the coup: “Yats”.) This ‘democratic revolution’ “featured civic self-organization aided by the use of Internet-based social media, neighborhood initiatives, and online news sites”, and this online operation (directed mainly at rallying Ukraine’s anti-Russians, called ‘pro-EU’ people) fits precisely the “tech camps” that started inside the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine on 1 March 2013, after Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt and Google’s and the U.S. State Department’s Jared Cohen, had deceived wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange into informing them, on 23 June 2011, how to foment massive public demonstrations online. As planned (and, of course, Assange had no fore-knowledge of any of this), the coup ended in a very bloody ‘false-flag’ operation on 20 February 2014, in which Right Sector paramilitaries who had been trained by the rabidly anti-Russian racist Dmitriy Yarosh, and who were dressed as state-security police, shot down upon the crowd and murdered both regular policemen and the protesters, so that the bloodshed would be blamed on the man Obama was trying to oust, the democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych (who was lots more popular among Ukrainians than any of the subsequent top leaders of Ukraine have been).

Then these Right Sector mercenaries massacred an untold number of Crimeans who had been peacefully demonstrating there in Kiev against the anti-government (called ‘Maidan’) demonstrators, and who fled back into their eight buses that had taken them there from Crimea, back now to Crimea. Yarosh’s people blocked the buses at the town of Korsun and murdered some and injured others. This terrified the people in Crimea, which had voted 75% for the very person that the Obama Administration had just overthrown. That massacre was a key precipitating-event for the plebiscite that was then held in Crimea on 16 March 2014, at which over 90% of the residents voted for Crimea to rejoin with Russia, of which it had been a part until the Soviet dictator in 1954 arbitrarily transferred Crimea to Ukraine.

Right Sector thugs (now in plain clothes) were also behind the subsequent 2 May 2014 massacre of the new regime’s peacefully demonstrating opponents inside the Trade Unions Building in Odessa— the event that sparked the breakaway of yet another region of Ukraine: Donbass.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama wanted to control Ukraine because it has the longest border with Russia of any European country and would be ideal for placing missiles aimed at Moscow just a five minutes flight-time away. This was part of a plan that was started actually by U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush on the night of 24 February 1990 and which both Bill Clinton and Bush’s son advanced, as did Obama and as will Hillary — presumably to the plan’s ultimate conclusion, war against Russia.

It’s a massive, decades-long, team-effort, on the part of America’s billionaires and their allied billionaires around the world; and, if Clinton wins, then it will be culminated. Eric Schmidt is key to her success in it, and will probably benefit hugely from it, if the conquest can be carried out by non-nuclear means or by ‘bluffing’ (which, of course, is being carefully gamed-out). But, just in case it goes nuclear, the people who are on the inside have already invested in nuclear bunkers for themselves and their friends and their friends’ friends. They are prepared for the worst, but hope for the best (for themselves, at least).

read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2016/11/09/a-hillary-win-will-be-googles-win-of...

Russian hackers are not the source behind the recent WikiLeaks release of leaked secret data on German-US intelligence cooperation and a parliamentary inquiry into it, Der Spiegel reports, citing unnamed security officials who have indicated it’s an inside job. 

READ MORE: WikiLeaks calls on Obama to submit proof of Russian hacking for verification 

The respective German officials are “confident” that the documents published by WikiLeaks were not obtained through a cyberattack last year on the Parliament (Bundestag), allegedly committed by Russian hackers. “Contrary to various media reports, there is absolutely no indication that the documents were stolen during a cyberattack on the Bundestag in the year 2015,” Der Spiegel writes, citing its own source. Back then, the intruders seized some 16 GB of information.

read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/370648-germany-wikileaks-russian-hackers/

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

MEMORAMDUM

Allegation of Hacking Election are Basless

A New York Times report on Monday alluding to “overwhelming circumstantial evidence” leading the CIA to believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin “deployed computer hackers with the goal of tipping the election to Donald J. Trump” is, sadly, evidence-free. This is no surprise, because harder evidence of a technical nature points to an inside leak, not hacking – by Russians or anyone else.

Monday’s Washington Post reports that Sen. James Lankford, R-Oklahoma, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has joined other senators in calling for a bipartisan investigation of suspected cyber-intrusion by Russia. Reading our short memo could save the Senate from endemic partisanship, expense and unnecessary delay.

In what follows, we draw on decades of senior-level experience – with emphasis on cyber-intelligence and security – to cut through uninformed, largely partisan fog. Far from hiding behind anonymity, we are proud to speak out with the hope of gaining an audience appropriate to what we merit – given our long labors in government and other areas of technology. And corny though it may sound these days, our ethos as intelligence professionals remains, simply, to tell it like it is – without fear or favor.

We have gone through the various claims about hacking. For us, it is child’s play to dismiss them. The email disclosures in question are the result of a leak, not a hack. Here’s the difference between leaking and hacking:

Leak: When someone physically takes data out of an organization and gives it to some other person or organization, as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning did.

Hack: When someone in a remote location electronically penetrates operating systems, firewalls or any other cyber-protection system and then extracts data.

All signs point to leaking, not hacking. If hacking were involved, the National Security Agency would know it – and know both sender and recipient.

In short, since leaking requires physically removing data – on a thumb drive, for example – the only way such data can be copied and removed, with no electronic trace of what has left the server, is via a physical storage device.

Awesome Technical Capabilities

Again, NSA is able to identify both the sender and recipient when hacking is involved. Thanks largely to the material released by Edward Snowden, we can provide a full picture of NSA’s extensive domestic data-collection network including Upstream programs like Fairview, Stormbrew and Blarney. These include at least 30 companies in the U.S. operating the fiber networks that carry the Public Switched Telephone Network as well as the World Wide Web. This gives NSA unparalleled access to data flowing within the U.S. and data going out to the rest of the world, as well as data transiting the U.S.

In other words, any data that is passed from the servers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) or of Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC) – or any other server in the U.S. – is collected by the NSA. These data transfers carry destination addresses in what are called packets, which enable the transfer to be traced and followed through the network.

Packets: Emails being passed across the World Wide Web are broken down into smaller segments called packets. These packets are passed into the network to be delivered to a recipient. This means the packets need to be reassembled at the receiving end.

To accomplish this, all the packets that form a message are assigned an identifying number that enables the receiving end to collect them for reassembly. Moreover, each packet carries the originator and ultimate receiver Internet protocol number (either IPV4 or IPV6) that enables the network to route data.

When email packets leave the U.S., the other “Five Eyes” countries (the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) and the seven or eight additional countries participating with the U.S. in bulk-collection of everything on the planet would also have a record of where those email packets went after leaving the U.S.

These collection resources are extensive [see attached NSA slides 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]; they include hundreds of trace route programs that trace the path of packets going across the network and tens of thousands of hardware and software implants in switches and servers that manage the network. Any emails being extracted from one server going to another would be, at least in part, recognizable and traceable by all these resources.

The bottom line is that the NSA would know where and how any “hacked” emails from the DNC, HRC or any other servers were routed through the network. This process can sometimes require a closer look into the routing to sort out intermediate clients, but in the end sender and recipient can be traced across the network.

The various ways in which usually anonymous spokespeople for U.S. intelligence agencies are equivocating – saying things like “our best guess” or “our opinion” or “our estimate” etc. – shows that the emails alleged to have been “hacked” cannot be traced across the network. Given NSA’s extensive trace capability, we conclude that DNC and HRC servers alleged to have been hacked were, in fact, not hacked.

The evidence that should be there is absent; otherwise, it would surely be brought forward, since this could be done without any danger to sources and methods. Thus, we conclude that the emails were leaked by an insider – as was the case with Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. Such an insider could be anyone in a government department or agency with access to NSA databases, or perhaps someone within the DNC.

As for the comments to the media as to what the CIA believes, the reality is that CIA is almost totally dependent on NSA for ground truth in the communications arena. Thus, it remains something of a mystery why the media is being fed strange stories about hacking that have no basis in fact. In sum, given what we know of NSA’s existing capabilities, it beggars belief that NSA would be unable to identify anyone – Russian or not – attempting to interfere in a U.S. election by hacking.

For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS):

William Binney, former Technical Director, World Geopolitical & Military Analysis, NSA; co-founder, SIGINT Automation Research Center (ret.)

Mike Gravel, former Adjutant, top secret control officer, Communications Intelligence Service; special agent of the Counter Intelligence Corps and former United States Senator

Larry Johnson, former CIA Intelligence Officer & former State Department Counter-Terrorism Official

Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst (ret.)

Elizabeth Murray, Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Middle East, CIA (ret.)

Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA (ret.)

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2016/12/18/us-intel-vets-dispute-russia-hacking...

Never in living memory has the West been plunged into the kind of hysteria and madness that currently engulfs its political and media establishments.

Just pause to consider where we are for a moment. We have lame-duck US president, in the shape of Barack Obama, threatening Russia with retaliation for alleged Russian cyber-hacking and interference in the US elections, while at the same time the man who is about to replace him in the White House in just a few weeks, Donald Trump, has been refuting those allegations.

Read more: https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201612191048739772-russia-hysteria-west-decline/

It may be wishful thinking, but it’s just possible that Vladimir Putin has done us a great favor. He has alerted us to the true threat of cyberwarfare in a way that — again, just possibly — might prompt us to view it as a serious national danger and begin to take effective countermeasures. 

Of course, Americans are aware of the hazards of cyberattacks. Every few weeks, it seems, we’re confronted with a high-profile hacking that, typically, involves the theft of massive amounts of personal or corporate data. A recent example is Yahoo’s disclosure that in 2013 it was hacked and lost data on about 1 billion users.

But the standard response to these breaches has been subdued. We see cyberattacks “as mostly annoyances — inconvenient, maybe even a little disruptive, but nothing we can’t live with,” says Jeffrey Eisenach of the American Enterprise Institute. This complacency is not entirely misplaced. 

So far, cyberattacks have not endangered our economy or way of life. The breaches mainly represent a new form of crime whose costs are exasperating but manageable. The truth is that most cyberattacks fail. 

read more:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/vladimir-putin-may-have-done-us-...
Do yourself a favor.... Please, stop blaming Vladimir Putin for something he not Russia has done. Wake up! So far the biggest (if not ALL) release of information from Wikileaks or Snowden come FROM INSIDE INFORMATION COPIED ON DVDs, CDs, USB sticks or computers. Same with the Clinton emails. There is an inside leak in the DNC and that is as far as this hysteria should go... 
Anything else is crap.

White House finalizes measures to punish Russia for election interference
The Obama administration is close to announcing a series of measures to punish Russia for meddling in the 2016 presidential election, including economic sanctions and diplomatic censure, according to U.S. officials.
Idiots...

An Italian orchestra conductor who told children at a Disney Christmas concert in Rome that Santa isn't real has been fired and organizers have distanced themselves from his remarks.

At the end of a stage performance of Disney's "Frozen" in Rome's Auditorium Parco della Musica earlier this week, conductor Giacomo Loprieno took the stage and said "Santa Claus doesn't exist," local media reported.

Read more: https://sputniknews.com/society/201612311049168717-sacked-italian-conductor-santa/

 

Of course Santa Claus exists... If he did not who would be delivering all the shitty plastic presents around the world? The world capitalism buying cheap goods made in China? No way...

 

In an article for The Guardian, baby-faced Owen Jones, explains :

 

Allegations of Russian interference in the US elections are undoubtedly alarming, but there’s a double standard at play. Meddling in foreign democracies only becomes a problem when the US is on the receiving end. The US has interfered with impunity in the internal affairs of so many other countries. The day that all such interference is seen for what it is – a democratic outrage, unworthy of any great nation – will be a great day indeed.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/05/americans-spot-ele...

Here there is a certain truth in Jones' conclusion, though in the article Jones tends to gloss over the covert and overt roles played by the Americans in Syria and in Iraq to achieve "regime change" — as if all the troubles in Syria were due to the Russians.

ISIL came up from the failure of the US policies which favour the extremism of Saudi Arabia against Iran.

The one thing that most of the pundits in their media towers and the Republican who did not want Trump, as well as the miffed Democrats who got their pants pulled down by a moribund (according to Hillary) Wikileaks, is that Wikileaks had far less influence on the result than these "analysts" wished so they could blame the Ruskies. The Ruskies DID NOT HAVE TO DO ANYTHING (except laugh) — and they actually did nothing that could influence the result. The "leaks" about Clinton's emails had to come from within the US, in the same manner as 99 per cent of information dump from Wikileaks come from: USBs, computers, CDs... NOTHING TO DO WITH HACKING — read : from the horses mouths... (even if there was a bit of hacking).

BUT more influence on the result rests with Rupert Murdoch who discreetly steered the American public away from voting for Clinton, especially in key States where there was some "college of voters" for grab. This Rupert influence was also small beer compared to the religious votes. Jesus Christ won the Presidential election for Trump. 

Should you follow the religious press (like I did and do — I am an atheist), you would be able to see that a silent majority of Christians VOTED FOR TRUMP (grudgingly mind you). Here one must link this religious "voting" to the discreet influence RUPERT MURDOCH (God) has on some of the people who publish religious crap with a religious zeal and a creationist outlook. 

I woud hear Uncle Rupe LAUGHING HIS HEAD OFF... if he was not so modest.

 

See toon at top...

Both Clapper and Admiral Michael Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, expressed concerns about intelligence analysts’ morale after Trump’s perceived disparagement of their work, with Rogers suggesting some may quit.

Clapper said that Russia “has clearly assumed an even more aggressive cyber posture,” and described the cyber-assault on the 2016 election as “multifaceted”.

“Hacking was only one part of it,” he said. “It also entailed classical propaganda, disinformation and fake news.”

Yet neither Clapper nor Rogers offered new evidence for their October conclusion of Russian interference. Clapper promised to release an unclassified report early next week, prepared by the NSA, CIA and FBI, providing additional information for the intelligence agencies’ conclusion that Russia deliberately hacked the Democratic National Committee in order to aid Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/05/russia-election-hacki...

read also:

jesus christ had far more influence on the american elections...

 

The fake news syndrome is as old as humans themselves... Jesus Christ, Rupert Murdoch, Santa Claus, Hillary Clinton's misdemeanaours — including her own emails, her disdain for Gaddafi's death and her duplicitous role in the destruction of Libya and Syria — and the crooked college electoral system in the USA had far more to do with the result of the election than a few nutty comments flying around about the internet. For the CIA boffins to get their knickers into knots when the CIA sold the biggest furphy of Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction to the world, one cannot trust Clapper who seems to be a fully-fledged Democrat supporter of the Hillary camp in this silly affair.

see also: 

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/31847

Reverse psychology played a role in the election of Donald Trump. The MMMM liberal media were playing the cards that Trump was a crooked business man, a user, a misogynist, a white supremacist, a racist, a tax evader, and anything else short of a rapist — and without a clue about government. And Donald indulge them by adding to the sauce with ridiculous ideas. In contrast, the MMMM liberal media painted Hillary as if she was a close relative to Saint Theresa as well as playing the card "our first woman president" who knew the ropes of government. 

Guess what? There were times when the media loading crap on Trump was obviously done maliciously. Some people saw through that. Donald was complely dark to Hillary's white soul as painted by the MMMM. This strirred that weird thing we call reverse psychology in some people's mind. And Donald did the best grimaces on TV. He was "more entertaining" with his gross stupid ideas that Hillary with her discreet lies.

All this created an equal soup of bitterness and resentment of voters for both candidates "who could not be trusted". In the end what won Trump the election is the "College of voters" which despite Hillary's win of the "popular vote" handed her the defeat.

As Donald said many times, the system is crook and the polls were wrong in term of the State by State college of electors. He was right.

Amongst all this crap, the Russians "hacking or not hacking" had zero influence on the result.