Your Stolen Tax Return

I have just read the current GAO report on the IRS's ability to stop tax thieves from stealing tax returns from unsuspecting U.S. Citizens.    There is hardly a human being who dosn't know about this kind of theft and how it is growing.  It will not make anyone feel better to know that IRS's own internal controls are still not what they should be and employees continue to make mistake after mistake in processing cases that are not verified properly before the refund is checked out.

When I was in the IRS in 1990 we submitted a security review that said about the same things the GAO is saying now.  These are people who don't get it and don't want to get it.  They are managed by the same bunch of political- appointees (employees who are appointed by the Administration and can't be fired without their approval) who kept a lid on approvals of any group not meeting their rigid (Democratic) standards.  Groups are still waiting for those approvals to operate with tax exempt status, some of them for years.  Perhaps it is time to depoliticize the IRS and get them moving on their internal security controls.  Twenty-five years is a long time.

Who Thinks War with China?

Every once in awhile I see a small thing that makes me wonder if China is really thinking about war with the rest of us.  In today's Wall Street Journal there is a story [in the on-line version it is a video] that talks about the nibs of ball point pens - hardly your typical war instrument.  The point of the article was that China wants to build domestic industries for whole devices so the industries are self-sufficient and 100% Chinese, sometimes even a cost that does not make sense in a globalized environment talked about at Davos.  OK, we can all believe that is true.

However, when the maker of those pens was questioned about why he would go to so much trouble to make nibs when Japan could make them for the same money and they were good quality, he gave all the usual reasons except one:  "What if there is a war?"

So I asked myself how a large manufacturing company in China could have in his head that there might be a war and they might have reasons to think about that in the manufacturing of goods.  It doesn't seem logical that this thought just popped into his head without any previous discussion of it among his friends and government leaders.  Most people would just let it go as a misstatement or casual comment.  Somehow, I doubt that it was.  Too many people do not believe that China is a threat to anyone, particularly in the South China Sea.  By the time we get around to doing anything about their threats to the trade routes, it will be too late and they will be the only ones making ball point pen nibs that don't have to transit that area.  I'm kidding about the nibs, but not about the war.  In the long run, we better start thinking about it.  They want a fight.

Malicious Compliance

There is a certain number of people who will follow orders knowing the result will get the order giver in some hot water.  I first learned about this in the military where as a Lieutenant I knew next to nothing about the Air Force or leading a whole group of people who were of different minds about being led.

One morning we had a bomb threat, something more popular back then than now, at the gym on our base.  I got the 20 or so men together and said, "Don't let anyone in the containment area except the bomb squad."  When the Base Commander came, they denied him entry.  He ignored them and went in anyway, and some of us spent the afternoon passing pictures of the Base Commander around so everyone knew who he was and what his role was on the base.  The Chief Master Sergeant who worked for my boss told a secret about this.  Give them a little discretion and ask them to do their job.

I was reminded of this yesterday when I heard that a person in TSA commented about the Executive Order on immigration, "If you don't like the action, call President Trump."  I have seen a few of these guys around and they aren't trying to make government work, even though that was part of their job too;  they want to make a name for themselves as "independent thinkers" or just rebels with a cause.  In business we used to be able to fire these kinds of people, though it was a lot harder than I thought it would be.  Firing anyone in business gets to be a chore when HR is more concerned about getting sued than having a workforce that doesn't have to be watched every minute.  Try firing somebody in Government and you will learn a few things about documentation and second chances.  Being able to do a job, and having the good sense to do it well don't enter into the equation.  I have fired people in both environments and would prefer to never have to do it again.  It takes a little part of your life away from you.

Just from the people around here who worked for the President before he came into office, it is not hard to see that he was used to having a workforce around him who did their best to make his orders work out for the best, even to the point of making exceptions when they were the right thing to do.  Unfortunately, that isn't the way government works.  Some of those people are just trying to make a name for themselves and have no real dispute with the order.  They will hide behind their interpretation of what was said without trying to make it work.  He will find it difficult to rid himself of these kinds of people.

Making it Harder to Govern

Some politicians never leave office;  they continue to write, fund programs of their own design, and communicate with their political friends.  Most of them, like Jimmy Carter and his Habitat for Humanity support, or the regular dinners of the Bush seniors, are good things.  It is rare to see an outgoing Administration try to make it harder for anyone to govern after them, at least to the extent we have seen in the last couple of weeks.

Some of these are dangerous, like pardoning a terrorist or prisoners with life sentences, but none are as dangerous as sets of publications this week.  The first is the recently released history of the CIA which has been released way before its time, and seems likely to cause damage to CIA in ways that will not be easy to see for several years when people start putting two and two together and saying "ah ha" .  These are not the 50-year old records of what we did in World War II to beat the Germans.  We don't release this kind of stuff because Intelligence Agencies don't forget and have the records to back that up.  The CIA says it is complying with an executive order signed by President Clinton.  Why we would want to do that the day before this Administration ends is not beyond understanding.

The declassification of this and someone called the Procedures Approved by the Attorney General Pursuant to Executive Order 12333 are making public issues that shouldn't have been.  They are permanently declassifying matters of national security that should be settled and talked about in places that consider the security of agents of our government who have to work for a living.  They always have been.  Now, we get to see them debated in public because they were declassified for all to see and published the day before the outgoing President leaves.  President Clinton and President Obama never did understand classification of information the way the rest of government employees in Intellgence do.  Making something like this open source can't be undone.  The Russians and Chinese can see why we do certain things.  They can see what kind of restrictions our agents have to operate.  They can follow debates about this kind of thing as they go on in open discussions.  They will make governing and intelligence collection more difficult.  Fourty-two pages of every detail of every rule on what can be collected on US Persons in overseas locations.  For whatever reasons, they put their own personal approach to these issues when they make them public, without knowing what national security implications there are after they leave office.

What Putin Gets from Hacking

There was a good article yesterday in Cipher Brief by Steve Hall who, according to his bio, worked at CIA for a long time. He points to what Putin gets from trying to influence the U.S election.  His view is that Putin believes weakening the political system in the U.S strengthens Russia's position in the world;  discrediting the U.S intellgence services benefits his; and he gets more stature for the cyber programs run by Russia by doing it.  That seems like the likely reasons why they would go ahead with a program that was sure to be discovered.

However, what is hard to believe is that the Russians actually thought they would be caught and took the calculation of that risk into account.  Whichever intelligence service was into the Democratic National Committee first ( NSA still says "foreign actor" rather than Russia) had been there for a year and was discovered only when the GRU started to hack around in the same system.  If they were Russian, they were exposed by their own sister intelligence agency.  That shows a lack of coordination which is believable.  It happens now and again with any country with more than one  intelligence service.  But, my guess would be that there were more than one country's intelligence services in those files, and that we will never know how many actually got information from them, or which one passed the information to Wikileaks.

Chinese Lawyers

At a time when the Chairman decides he is the world's leader for global free trade and makes statements to Europes economic leaders in Davos, we might remember that China is anything but the world leader in contrary political opinions.  There is a piece in this week's Wall Street Journal on the treatment of lawyers representing human rights cases.  It is one thing to discourage lawyers from representing a particular type of client and another to torture a person to the point of insanity to make sure they never practice law or any other kind of profession again.

I wonder what makes a man represent a client when the consequences are so great to their personal well being.  "Dedicated to human rights" does not quite go far enough here.  The liberal left has said next to nothing about this, and I suspect it is because it is so horrible and not something anyone can do anything about, that they do nothing.  That would be exactly what the Chinese would like.

This is not fake news, though the Chinese would love to have us believe it was manufactured by some insurgent group trying to overthrow their government.  They are perfectly willing to use lawyers to defend their own people in U.S. Courts but are not willing to accept that lawyers can represent people who have different opinions of how the government should operate.  We should have known this was not going to go well when they put NGOs under control of the police forces.

The Chinese tried several times to float their own economic policies in South Asia, and the world seems to believe they will be successful now the the United States has backed out of the TPP.  They were soundly rejected each time by governments that are a lot smarter than we are about China, being so close and so small as most of them are.  They have to be quick or they will fall under China's sphere and it will be hard to get away from reliance on them.  They look out for themselves without poking a finger in the Dragon's eye, advice that would go well in the White House too.  A country that tortures its own lawyers for doing their job is one to be careful of.

Sedition or Not

I always keep my Black's Law Dictionary close when I am writing because it is easy to throw words around without thinking through what they mean.  Listening to CNN's Wolf Blitzer on how Obama might regain the Presidency right now,  and Madonna's speech on blowing up the White House made me wonder if either of them had ever heard the term.

"Sedition:  Communication or agreement which has as it s objective the stirring up of treason or certain lesser commotions, or defamation of the government.   Sedition is advocating, or with the knowledge of its contents knowingly publishing, selling, or distributing any document with advocates or, with knowledge of its purpose, knowingly becoming a member of any organization which advocates the overthrow or reformation of the existing form of government of this state by violence or unlawful means...."

Seditious libel.  A communication written with the intent to incite the people to change the government otherwise than by lawful means, or advocate the overthrow of the government by force or violence.

Both of these public figures get too much latitude in what they say as "free speech".  CNN has gone to far on this one and needs a visit from the Secret Service and the FBI.  If only we had an Attorney General who would take that view, but he hasn't been confirmed yet.

The New Left

In my third book, The New Cyberwar, I referenced some of the tactics of the Russians in the Ukraine, Crimea which they took without a fight, and in the Baltics.  The parallels with the New Left in the demononstrations going on in my neighborhood today are making me wonder if the people who ran the influence campaign in the U.S have stopped trying to disrupt the political process that we use to elect a President.

The Russians were quick to have their surrogates in Ukraine and the border areas in the Baltics see the signs that the Nazis were back in a big way, and all they had to do was look at their government leaders.  They had posters and billboards made that showed a shadow over the territory with a swastika covering the western part and the Russian flag covering the east.  The press loyal to the Russians interviewed women who were part of a traveling circus of people claiming to have sons killed in the combat, or had troubles of various ilks with the host government.  They were wives and mothers concerned about their government actions. Pictures of some of these women were shown in several towns, and each time they represented some other interest and used other names.

They bought press outlets (and are still buying some in Europe) to make sure they got the right messages out in the way the wanted.  They seized some and harassed others.  They picked reporters for their loyalty to the cause and not for their ability to report facts as they occurred.  Some fake news stories were circulated, including one indicating Jews were to be registered in the same towns the Nazi had killed thousands.  Local resistance was shouted down at public gatherings by an array of "concerned citizens" many of whom were not recognized by locals.

They criminalized the behavior of their adversaries.  People questioned the business dealings of banks and financial institutions that might be owned or have ties with the the national leaders.

They disrupted public meetings where their political opponents were speaking - even some in other countries, like Germany and France.  It was OK to disagree, as long as they followed the line of disagreement that was allowed.  They supported political candidates who favored their position and discredited any that didn't.

We have a host of people assembled in Washington D.C today who are representing different views about our political process.  Some of them are there because we allow free speech and tolerate different points of views.  Some of the professional agitators are there to satisfy somebody's agenda, but not their own.  They are paid to be unhappy.  We should be more concerned about who is paying them than what they are doing.  Too much of what we are seeing is close to what happened over the last few years in areas near Russia.

China wins in California

There was an article in the Wall Street Journal that shed some light on the high-speed train project in California - a project that was given $3.1 billion by the Federal Government.  There is a part of that story still missing.

As I reported last year, China was funding part of this "investment" to the tune of a few more hundreds of millions and the beneficiaries were Harry Reed and the governor of California:

While the rest of us have been focusing on other things, our government has favored a company formed from state-owned companies in China, teamed with a US partner, to build a high-speed railroad from the Los Angeles area, in California, to Las Vegas, in the middle of the desert in Nevada.     It has collapsed because the Chinese were not making progress with the build and the Federal officials must have thought it was not going to play well in an election year.  Nobody, until now, has raised an eyebrow over this deal, especially since we are starting to see the relationship of Chinese businesses and people connected to the election of local governments in the US.

The story came out in the Wall Street Journal June 10th 2016, but several news outlets are carrying similar stories (Las Vegas and the LA Times have details). China was to finance this operation, starting with $100 million to get it going.  This is a lot of money funneled into two states run by leaders in the Democratic Party.  The way this worked in Virginia (also a Democrat) was that US companies, owned by a Chinese businessman, were funding both the governor and the Clinton Foundation.  One of the Chinese who commented about this said it was important to influence local leaders because that was the path to influence at the top.  Somebody in our government gave that Chinese businessman permanent residence status in the US so his donations would not come from foreign sources.  Very clever, but highly illegal.

What we should be looking for is a similar arrangement with US businesses and Chinese leaders who are allowed to come to the US for permanent residence.  They are using this as a path to influence our government leaders.  The smoking gun is in Virginia, but a smoking cannon lies somewhere in the West.

What we have discovered since, of course, is that the Federal government has gotten involved and given billions to the people in California so they can study the problem to death and build nothing - again.  There is a lot of money involved here and the only people to benefit are the local Democratic parties of the respective governments.  The Chinese, of course, were betting that money would be well spent when Hillary Clinton got into the White House.  Too bad for them.

Now I wonder if the Russians really succeeded in influencing the U.S election to stop the Chinese from getting someone into office that they favored.

Another Political Pardon

Slight of hand produced a couple of pardons besides Chelsea Manning.  This is to avoid press coverage by announcing one before the other two, and doing it at the end of the day.  One of them was General James Cartwright and one of them was a terrorist, sparking an editorial in the Wall Street Journal today.  Perhaps that would have been another way to close Guantanamo - pardon all the people there and call it a day.

General Cartwright [see my earlier post on this ] for all the delays in getting his prosecution done while he continued to serve the President, is a story that deserves to be told one day by an enterprising reporter with enough time to investigate the case.  Cartwright may, as his lawyers have said, been covering for someone else who gave the information to the New York Times.  There are not very many people who he would have to cover for, so the list is short.  His sentence is now vacated and he is a free man, never having served a day of his sentence.  He is not going to talk about it, though a lot of people surely will one day.  Only David E. Sanger knows for sure and he is not going to give up a source that highly placed. We know the White House favored the New York Times for a long time, but that time is coming to an end, creating an opening for discovery.  

This is another case where highly sensitive national security information was disclosed for political purposes i.e to make the President look good at a time when he didn't, covered up, and then pardoned to avoid the embarrassments of having to deal with any of those things.  Valarie Jarrett was right about the scandals of the White House - there were none.

I don't blame the General for any of this.  If his former White House counsel is correct, he did his job, and although he may have taken a dive for somebody else, he got his reward for it by keeping quiet and not drawing attention to all the things that were disclosed to the New York Times.  That is how you avoid scandal, and protect the office.  But, somebody needs to tell that story and tell it all.  

Chinese Go Around Import Sanctions

There were several press reports [ for example this one from the Wall Street Journal ] about how China was avoiding import duties slapped on aluminum and steel that were coming into the U.S from China.  By the way if you want to see what $25 million of aluminum looks like on a dock, take a look at the picture in the Journal.  What the Chinese did was move their metals into other countries, then have them do something to the metal, like add a processing step like they did in Vietnam, or just transship it as they did in Mexico, to avoid the tariffs put on these metals.  Magically, they were no longer being imported from China.   After almost two years of this, our government finally got wise to how it was being done and seized a few tons of the stuff to prove their point.  I doubt that they seized any Mexican cars made from this stuff though.

I am kind of two minds on this.  One, this has been a long time coming.  We were allowing this stuff to be taken in with a wink - saying it wasn't really from China, when we knew it was.  That certainly benefitted U.S industries that use these metals and kept the price of goods down, but it also destroyed what was left of our metals processing in the U.S.  A sacrifice of a few, for the many.

I'm glad they started with Aluminum and said it needed to be a first step at righting this wrong.  But, I do admire the preparation of another land mine for the Trump Administration.  They will be the ones enforcing the tariffs on these metals and raising the price of goods produced in the United States.   Always better to leave that kind of unpleasantness for the next bunch coming in.  

McCain Gave Trump FIle to FBI

I first heard in the press reports that the file of stories compiled by a former MI-6 operator were being paid for by Republican and Democratic groups trying to identify any potential information that might be used against Donald Trump during the run up to the election in 2016.  We all previously heard that the Russians had hacked the Democratic National Committee and had been, in part, looking for information they might have about Donald Trump.  So, we might think about the possibility that some of the information the Russians had on the President elect was paid for by our own politicians who play games in the name of politics.  At least the Russians would know what information was accurate and what needed more investigation.

In yesterday's Guardian there is an article indicating Senator McCain gave the so-called Trump file  documents to the FBI, but how he might have come by them is more interesting than the story itself.  McCain can wrap himself in a flag on this one and claim he was just doing the country a favor by letting the FBI know what was going on, but he wasn't running against Mr.Trump.   Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham were and they are all involved in attacking Trump's nominees right now. Like the Democrats, they won't admit they lost and move on.

 There is an article in the Irish Times which indicates the person originally funding the report dropped out of the campaign when the Republican primary was over, but the contractor who worked for him got another client - a Democrat - who was willing to pay for the same type of information.  When we talk about fake news, we have to remember that governments make up fake news for their own purposes, and so do political candidates and their sponsors.  This kind of muck-raking, personal attack is the kind of thing that makes politics the lowest form of human endeavor.  No party comes out clean on this and they need to look at the mirror to see if they want do run their campaigns with the kinds of incredible stories that are part of it.

Clapper's Truth

James Clapper is the outgoing Director of National Intelligence and he has considerable insight into the cyber attacks by Russia on the U.S election.  This past week, he has been on the Hill almost every day briefing one Congressional Committee or another, mostly amid a broiling political struggle between our two major parties.  He has to walk a fine line, which gets narrower and narrower by the day.

At the Armed Services Committee hearing last week, he said something most of the leaders there were already familiar with, but routinely ignore:  People who live in glass houses shouldn't be casting stones.  We all know the meaning of that term, and his context was explained as "we all have these kinds of operations" which is known everywhere but also ignored.  You would think it is easier to tell the truth directly to these esteemed gentlemen and women now that he is leaving but it is never easy because they make it unpleasant for you and your organization, even if you are gone.  Professionals don't like that.

Certainly we do have these kinds of operations, he said without going into much detail which would compromise some of them, the kind that allow us to steal intelligence related material and use if for our analysis, or make it public if there is more value in that.

The more we talk about the Russian hacks of information around this election, the more damage is done to our own efforts to collect information and use it to guide policy making of our government officials.  It is disruptive to our own Intelligence operations.  Every Congressman feels compelled to bring up the most sensitive of information in these hearings about what we know, even if they don't say how we know it.  Every appointed government leader feels compelled to give a complete answer without discussing things that are State secrets, though they do that too.  There is a fine line of context in all of these discussions and it is impossible to separate them.  On this, there is too much of the "public's right to know".  The public doesn't have the right to know very much of this kind of thing and we shouldn't be talking about it in open sessions.

And, we shouldn't be talking about it to the public after closed sessions are over or sending the information to friendly press outlets before it ever is discussed there.  We need a restart - a reset - on the matter of classified information (State secrets) and how to protect it.  We seem to have discovered yesterday that Hillary Clinton was sending very highly classified material to people on a network she knew was being monitored.  We discovered there was an attachment to the classified report that said the Russians have files which may involve Donald Trump.  In my days in government, the Washington Post used to have an office to handle all the classified material they were getting in the mail.  Now, it appears it just goes to the press outlets by e-mail.  Do we have any secrets left to protect?  Our allies in the world may wonder.

Russian Methods

We should remember that in some of the techniques used by Russia in the Ukraine look a lot like what is happening now in the Senate confirmation hearings.  The Russians continuously harrassed politicians, bussed demonstrators from one city to another,  disrupted meetings, hacked government offices and generally made a nuisance out of themselves at every turn and undermine the integrity of the process in that country.  Sound famliar?  Maybe they haven't stopped.

China's State-Sponsored Theft of Nuclear Technology

Szuhsiung Ho, a Taiwan national-turned U.S citizen-was working for a state-owned company, China General Power Company, and as facilitator through his own company in the U.S to help make nuclear reactors and nuclear fuels.  This from the Justice Department statement, "According to documents filed in the case, beginning in 1997 and continuing through April 2016, Ho conspired with others to engage or participate in the development or production of special nuclear material in China, without specific authorization to do so from the U.S. Secretary of Energy, as required by law. Ho assisted CGNPC in procuring U.S.-based nuclear engineers to assist CGNPC and its subsidiaries with designing and manufacturing certain components for nuclear reactors more quickly by reducing the time and financial costs of research and development of nuclear technology. In particular, Ho sought technical assistance related to CGNPC’s Small Modular Reactor Program; CGNPC’s Advanced Fuel Assembly Program; CGNPC’s Fixed In-Core Detector System; and verification and validation of nuclear reactor-related computer codes.". 

As usual, the Justice Department is a little short on details and long on credit-taking for the wrap-up of another case of a foreign national becoming a U.S citizen and stealing our technology along the way.  An article in the Knoxville News says a little more about this case:  "Ho, his firm Energy Technology International, and Chinese nuclear power plant China General Nuclear Power were indicted in April in U.S. District Court on charges of a plot to lure nuclear experts in the U.S. into providing information to allow China to develop and produce nuclear material based on American technology and below the radar of the U.S. government."  

So, China is using a third party with U.S citizenship to facilitate stealing technology by hiring U.S experts in our country to help them.  These people were, in turn, traveling to China and helping them make "special nuclear material" for the Chinese enterprise.  So, from 1997, until sometime before this indictment was brought, we had nuclear experts flying back and forth to China and nobody in the U.S noticed anything going on.  It looks like there should be a whole lot more of these indictments than just this one.  

Our Department of Energy is not the most brilliant of organizations but you would think they would have someone looking into this a long way before 2016.  What do we have them for?  Their own website, even the section on national security, seems to emphasize the importance of global warming and the work done to minimize the damage.   Maybe they need to think about their other mission instead of helping the Chinese with theirs.   

Russians Planting Stories on Facebook

So, if we are wondering what the Russians might have been doing besides hacking emails of John Podesta, who deserved hacking for using simple passwords, we need only look to the story in Fox Business about the "elves of Lithuania ".  This is a cute story  because (1) it shows how the Russians can dominate the narratives of others for their own benefit and (2) what a small group of private individuals can do to expose them.  Normally, I would advise people who have never gone up against Russian hackers to avoid it because they play rough and they don't forget.  These guys seem to have survived that for now because they are dealing with the Russian government and not some criminal element.

These are people who happened to notice the number of stories on Facebook that paralleled Russian propaganda.  They thought it was odd that so many of their Facebook friends would find the Russian view so attractive and they started to look into it.  That grew into an effort to identify and eliminate some of those posts "especially the most extreme".  This takes some responsibility on the part of Facebook, and some for the private citizens who identify the material.

If a tiny little country like Lithuania can do it, why can't we?

Where Principle Meets Practical

We all want to believe we would stand up to an oppressive government that censors and blocks content from its own citizens, but there is a price to be paid for every step in the wrong direction.  The Chinese know, and follow that rule.

Apple pulled the New York Times app from its store in China [http://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-pulls-new-york-times-app-from-china-store-1483576379].  The Chinese do not like the New York Times and neither do I, but we have completely different reasons.  The Chinese don't like the reporting on China that the Times does - and they have done some really good reports on some high-ranking officials, including the current Chaiman of the Communist Party - and they don't seem willing to allow that content to seep into their country.  We can all remember the first use of the Great Cannon was to silence readers of the New York Times website, provided in Chinese.  This powerful tool can help them identify who is reading it, block it, change the content, or a number of other things inclined to stop readers from ever doing it again.  They have largely succeeded.

Apple could continue to allow it but the Chinese have "asked them" to bar it.  The Wall Street Journal article also mentions an on-going investigation of Apple's failure to exclude "pornographic" material from its systems, something that led to Google getting out of China.  Neither Apple nor the Chinese government have mentioned this yet.  The definition of pornographic is loose enough that a Victoria Secret catalog would qualify.  In Google's case, the Chinese were intent upon getting them to stop distributing the material anywhere, not just in China.  This keeps Chinese citizens from seeing it, while keeping everyone else from seeing it too.  They must not have teenagers in China or they would be more understanding.

China wants to dominate content on the Internet in ways we still have yet to discover, and they will go to great lengths to do it.  They have already established fake domains for a number of different sites that lure in people and control them.  This is what happens when they establish their own Internet and enforce the policy of that Internet on the rest of their users - Chinese or not.  They are requiring their software companies to develop software that supplies information about users of it and sends that information back to China.  Included in that is the serial number of hard drives, the location of devices, the WiFi connections being used and in the neighborhood, and much more.  Were it not for the University of Toronto Citizen Lab, we would probably not know of any of that.  I would almost guess they are banned in China.

Apple is finding the cost of doing business in China adds up to more than dollars and profit margins.  It requires them to give up principles as well.

The Multinational Hacker

While we are wondering about attribution, we need to wonder a little more about hackers.

I was sitting on a boat with Cliff Stoll talking about how he got involved with stopping German hackers trying to get into his university.  The story was documented in his book the Cuckoo's Egg.  Cliff is a character who was not well liked by the establishment, and an astronomer by trade.  It was hard to figure out what he was doing speaking at the same Baltimore Computer Security Conference I was.  He said it was because the hackers were not from the U.S and wanted to get into our computers that gave him motivation to fight almost everyone to get to the root of the hacking.  It took a year to do, and he needed a lot of help.  What he found in the end was that these guys were hacking for information that other people would pay them for.  Today, that sounds like an everyday occurrence.

There are still quite a few hackers who make a living stealing information that other people will buy.  They steal answering machine messages, e-mail, private notes and papers, location information, hotel registrations and anything of value to a divorce lawyer, blackmailer, or spy.  I should add that these folks are professionals who make money the old fashioned way and seldom get caught.  Occasionally, they work for governments, or governments make use of information they have collected.  Occasionally, they might work for criminals.  Some buyers will overlook the fact that the information was stolen or illegally obtained.  They have an interesting balance to maintain:  if they talk too much about their successes, they become targets of the people they are hacking.  If they don't talk enough about their successes, the die from lack of business that keeps them going.

As I said in my second book, there is a difference between these guys and government hackers.  Government hackers are employed by the governments who want to do other things like collect intelligence or prepare for war, should it come.  These hackers are generally very good and do not get caught.  If they are, they need plausible deniability i.e. "It wasn't me it was someone else".  The most striking example of this was the Chinese Army people hacking U.S industry targets because they broke all the rules.  They got caught, and left enough tracks to be unable to deny what had been done.  These are not professionals of the same caliber, and points to what happens when the military gets to run these kinds of operations.  Either that, or they wanted us to know that they were doing it.

Then, we have the so-called Patriotic hackers who, by all accounts, are so patriotic that they want to do something with their hacking skills to help their country.  They steal information and give it away, making it public or passing it to the right government offices without payment.  This group is either independently wealthy, living at home, or both.  Well, that is what some governments would like for us to believe.

All I am saying is that hackers are not as easily identified as some news outlets believe.  There are grey lines everywhere and no clear lines of employment like payment trails or contracts.  Both sides would find those cumbersome.  So, when we say that so-and-so hacked such-and-such it might not be so easy to say for sure if a government did it, a for-profit group did it, or somebody trying to help his country for some unknown reason.  Cliff would have found all of that irrelevant to his task - finding the hackers and stopping them from completing their work, strengthening defenses, and looking at the stars.  Sometimes the politics gets in the way of that.

The List of Docs on Election Hacking

Every once in awhile I get a note from a reader that is worth repeating in their own name.  This follows my reference to the DHS-FBI document that was sent out last week and shows next to nothing about hacking in Russia, or anything about the hacks on the Democratic National Committee.      Thanks to my friend Heidi Sebastian for this insightful response:

Subject: Full Summarized List Of All Government Docs In US Response To Russian Election Hacking

https://www.justsecurity.org/35889/full-list-govt-docs-response-russian-election-hacking/

These documents really don’t say much about the election, so the posturing regarding the election can be attributed to 1) White House spin and 2) the media’s wishful thinking and/or continued attempt to paint the incoming administration as the beneficiary of Russian meddling.

What they seem to have forgotten is:

A)      Foreign (and illegal) contributions to the Clinton campaign were acceptable (talk about a direct link that the media won’t acknowledge even if the campaign itself did!).  Some legal transactions with the Clinton campaign and Virginia's governor by Chinese officials here to specifically influence the election process.

B)      It’s totally fine that the US spent $350K of taxpayer money to influence the Israeli election - backing Benjamin Netanyahu's opponent : http://www.cnsnews.com/blog/michael-w-chapman/state-dept-350k-group-built-campaign-structure-used-against-election-israels  Hypocrisy is a key word here especially when it involves my tax money!

The biggest thing I dread for the next 4 years will be the intense hypocrisy of the media (see: http://legalinsurrection.com/2017/01/impeaching-trump-before-he-takes-office/) who turned a blind eye to all matter of issues over the past 8 years. The only thing that will be different this time is the reaction of the foreign leaders this administration has mistreated. Like these major players:
http://www.businessinsider.com/russian-embassy-obama-lame-duck-tweet-2016-12
http://legalinsurrection.com/2016/12/live-netanyahu-responds-to-kerry-speech/

Then, in an attempt to correct some problems with national security policy, they manage to do even better with this:

“The White House announced Thursday that it has amended a 2015 executive order on government response to malicious cyber activity in light of the Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election. The 2015 order established a “new, targeted authority” for the U.S. government to respond more effectively to cybersecurity threats, especially in situations where hackers operate “beyond the reach of existing authorities. The revised order now explicitly states that that any tampering, altering, or “misappropriation of information” with the purpose or effect of interfering with or undermining American elections or institutions through cyber means should warrant a U.S. government response.” see https://insidecybersecurity.com/daily-news/obama-response-russian-hacking-includes-revised-order-trump-enforce

This is opening Pandora’s Box. It’s one thing to do these things quietly, but another to make things like this public. You know, the whole glass house thing will get pretty ugly.

Yes it is Heidi.  Pretty ugly indeed.

The FBI-DHS Report

I have never seen such a sad report as the one issued by Homeland Security and the FBI about Russian hacking and the election.  It was supposed to be the explanation of how the government could surmise that the Russians did the hacking of the national elections, but it not only didn't turn out that way, it wasn't even a good report on Russian hacking of any kind.  It was mostly filler which was explaining what SANS publishers have been saying for years.  Figure out that exploits hackers are using and do the countermeasure required.  Not very amazing stuff.  What a farce this was.  If you can't say anything worthwhile, then don't say anything because all this report did was show the ignorance of the people who wrote it.

Expelling Diplomats and Spies

This kind of thing is always fun.  We expel some diplomats who may or may not be spies for someone.  They expel an equal number and the world goes back to normal.  It happens with some regularity, but we never see it.  Mostly.  Except in this Obama administration, when to look tough, it becomes public.  Then the Russians refuse to bite and we look stupid.  So, it turns out to not be so much fun after all.

About the only thing we learned that was new was the vacation homes being operated on the Maryland shore, and in Russia, for diplomats and spies.  That was new and interesting.  Since when do we allow these people to take vacations?  Somebody is really getting loose in their national security oversight.

The other side of this mess is the idea that these expulsions are being done to retaliate against something they knew in June.  It loses some of its impact to not take place sooner - maybe before the election.  Professing to wait so as not appear to be siding with one candidate after all the campaigning done by the President is a sure sign of hypocrisy.  I don't think they can say that with a straight face.