Computing Cybercrime Costs

The US Goverment Accountability Office has published a report on the cost of crime, and how those are computed.  I looked at that report as measure of how we are reporting the costs of cybercrime, which the FBI says costs hundreds of millions of dollars a year - numbers which are reported differently by different news agencies.  Forbes says that number will be $2 Trillion by 2019.  CNET says the FBI reports costs of $67B for computer crime.  There are several other estimates that are higher and lower than these numbers.  The Press is all over the map because, as the GAO shows for crime in general, the numbers are computed differently.

The GAO does not help this very much by their proposal to include as direct costs such things as incarceration of criminals, defense attorneys for criminals, costs of police investigations, recidivism, costs of potential bias (or in this case understanding of the nature of the crime), and last, but not least, the uncertainty of cost estimates.  These are assumed to already include the cost of buying security devices and software to improve oversight of security functions.  To me, these are costs of prevention of crime, and not the cost of crime per se.

Next GAO is looking at the unreported crime as part of the cost of crime.  This is something nobody can measure since unreported crime is not documented anywhere.  Any guess as to the amount, like the number of people who don’t report being scammed by “the IRS wants you to call” routine is just a guess.  Second, much of cybercrime is committed in places where prosecution is not possible, or very difficult- like Russia.  Identity theft is an international crime now with brokers of numbers, buyers and sellers of identities, and sophisticated banking operations to siphon big money from those schemes.  

GAO needs to re-examine this whole area for a more accurate separation of crime prevention and crime cost.  Crime costs should come from the failure of crime prevention.  They should be computed as the value of goods and services lost as a result of the crime committed.  Tell me Experian is not having costs associated with the loss of data, their customers will not have losses due to identity theft,  or law enforcement will not have costs running down the people who stole the data.  Nobody is putting those numbers together to get a total cost of a cyber event like this one.  No wonder the cost estimates are all over the map.  GAO needs to do better than this report to help anyone make decisions about how to compute costs of a crime.

North Korea’s Threat to Shoot Down Aircraft

Yes, it has happened before and you can read the whole story of North Korea shooting down a US aircraft in international waters.  The long, but detailed report by the National Security Agency is still somewhat redacted but has the entire story laid out, including the intelligence services conflicts over aircraft assignments, the delay in reporting the aircraft missing, and many more nuances of the missions to collect intelligence of different types close to the hostile North Korea.  It was certainly as dangerous in 1969 as it is now.

I read what I could find on that incident which was said to put Richard Nixon’s finger on the nuclear button.  There is little from official sources on that aspect, but the National Security Archives has some articles on it.  What I wanted to know was why he didn’t carry out that strike after considering it.  The Archives describes it this way:

• The early recognition that military strikes against North Korea, regardless of the provocation, carried serious risks of inciting retaliation by Pyongyang and the threat of escalation.

• The growth in the list of available options from limited strikes on selected North Korean airfields to, by the fall of 1969, at least two dozen plans, which targeted the full spectrum of North Korea’s military forces, and covered a wide range of scenarios to provide flexibility to the president in confronting future North Korean provocations.

• The emphasis on the need to neutralize North Korea’s air power, in any response to a provocation greater than the downing of the U.S. reconnaissance plane, in order to minimize the risks of retaliation and escalation. To this end the JCS drew up a plan codenamed FRESH STORM to take out Pyongyang’s military air power, but warned that carrying it out would carry some risk of sparking a major war on the Korean peninsula.

So, if this story sounds familiar, it is because history repeats itself now and again.  However, one item of note is the aircraft being flown over international airspace were slow EC 121s, not modern bombers.  Even the B-1 that flew with Japanese fighter escorts is not a modern bomber, being built in 1998.  Does anyone think that modern bombers are going to fly into North Korea and strike them?  They don’t have to do that anymore.                             

China Pressures Social Media

There is a good article today in the Wall Street Journal that shows the difference between China and the rest of the world in social media.  China expects its social media platforms to enforce government censorship rules, which are vague and broad at the same time.  They have fined some of the biggest to make the point that social media platforms are not doing a good job of policing their sites.

Imagine, if you will, we pass laws in the other countries with social media that insist Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (among others) must enforce censorship of their sites to remove content that pertains to religions not approved by the government, any criticism of the central government, any suggestion that another approach to government might be better, any hint of sexual content, links to banned websites, and a whole host of other content related issues.  Even such innocuous things as a candle or a chair on the beach have to be removed.  Let’s make it more complicated by forcing each social media platform to develop its own lists of banned thoughts.  Be careful.  If the list is not long enough there will be fines.  If the list is too long, there is no penalty.

So, my post are reviewed by Google without any explanation of what cannot be said.  Some will be removed and I will not know which those are until after that is done.  After a warning or two, I may be taken off Blogger.  Facebook filters my rants about my favorite political issues.  Twitter squelches my brief criticism of the government’s handling of health care.  This is Big Brother come to life.

The Chinese like to think it is harmony.  Big Brother is a benevolent censor who keeps bad thoughts from people’s brains producing harmony and peace.  That isn’t how I remember the story, and it isn’t how any of us want to live.

Perhaps the best thing we could do for the world is to undo the censorship in China.  Find ways around it and put money into solutions that allow unmonitored communications.  Who would think such an idea would be of concern to any country?

Cyberinsurance

Last week, the Wall Street Journal ran a series of articles on Cyber issues of various types and insurance was one of them.  I didn’t comment on these articles because they didn’t seem to be very good, but they did remind me of some things that we went through in the 1980s with the same types of issues.

At that time, I knew Dr. Bob Edwards who was working for Loyds of London doing bank certifications.  The certifications were required before a bank could get insurance.  Bob spent his days going around looking at how banks ran their infrastructure and found more than a small number of chinks in the armor of some major banks.  He had the power to close the doors of the bank if they failed.  These were things that you would not think someone with responsibility for money would do.  They would just “know better” because banks have to be more careful than the other industries because they have money.  Yet, they didn’t always do what they should have been doing.  These days, we have cyber criminals going after the SWIFT infrastructure and major deposits of individuals using malware that gets into on-line banking apps on smart phones.

Equifax et al may have startled some people because of the volume of records that were taken and the length of time it took to report the loss.  Losing the security clearance records of military and government officials was a similar thing.  In both cases, the losses were preventable, but managers who oversaw the operations functions of IT did not do basic things that were required to make records they had in their possession safe.  IRS got hacked twice in the same year, over basically the same problems.

Policy is not very good in either the commercial or government circles that led to these losses.  The long line of issues for industries holding records of millions of individuals cannot be laid on Equifax alone.  What was the industry doing to get its act together?  New York is talking about having agencies attest to the Cybersecurity of a firm in order to “close loopholes” identified by the Equifax case.  That industry is asking for more government regulation because it hasn’t done enough to strengthen or standardize its own practices.  They have no enforcement mechanisms and have relied on self-regulation and reporting.  We know how well that works.

Audits are not doing what they should to discover and fix basic oversight of patching, security education and administration of internal security functions for the enterprise.  The enterprise is more than just the holders of the data, who contract to put it into third parties who have to have the same standards of care.  This applies to government and commercial industries alike.  Self regulation does not work.  What Loyds knew 30 years ago, still applies today.  It takes oversight by an external audit function to expose and fix the kinds of problems that lead to these losses.  There are mounds of excuses for the losses; there are coverups; there are post-mortums with blame assigned to nobody in particular.  But nobody gets decertified - because there is no certification to begin with.

We used to know who the bad actors were in industrial security.  The same companies always had the same problems time after time.  It would take strong oversight and audits to get them back on track.  It is mostly a management issue.  Leaders take a view that security is not that important and emphasize operations over other concerns.  Those people eveually had an audit that would declare them “unsatisfactory” and they could not get government contracts issued to them until those deficiencies were corrected.  Then, their audit frequency and depth increased.

We need to have certication programs for commercial and government businesses that rely on external audit for oversight.  Until we get it, we will continue to have managers decide what is good for the security of data they don’t even own.  If I could have done something to protect my data in Equifax or OPM, I would have.  We can’t.  Someone has to.

North Korea’s New Threat

North Korea’s new threat is no joke.  They have threatened to explode a hydrogen bomb over the Pacific Ocean.  In my last book, I described the EMP effects of bomb like that and the circle is 700 miles wide.  That is a lot of ocean, and even as big at that ocean is, trying to find a place that would not disrupt some land mass might take some doing.  Second, they are going to kill a lot of fish and irradiate the water around it.  The tidal wave will be big enough to think about a long way from where it goes off.

This might be seen as progress from the last threat to blow up Los Angeles or drop a bomb in the water off the West Coast.  With the irrational government, progress is something measured by psychological profiles and not international standards of behavior.  By that standard, the North has tuned down it rhetoric, even if it is hard to see it that way.

Some day we will have to take the North at its word.  That kind of threat demands some mitigation and that is not going to come from the sanctions the UN has decided to levy.  Regime change is the only thing that can cure this kind of problem.

China’s Credit Rating Lowered

When most of us check our credit rating, it will go up or down a little every couple of months.  That always seems like a mystery given the FICO formula for computing such a thing.  But, for governments, the equivalent is the rating by ratings institutions not related to Equifax, Transunion, or Experion.  Countries get their rating from Standard and Poors, Moodys, and Fitch Ratings.  Standard and Poors became the last of the three to lower China’s rating by making it drop from A+ to AA-,  a mystical rating that makes all countries sound pretty good.  The Guardian has an article that shows the ratings for most countries and describes how they are labeled by the three agencies. There are a few, like Libya, that are not rated.  That would not be good if you were selling national bonds.

China’s went down in the S&P, which would be big news if the other two had not already lowered the rating - Fitch lowered it in 2013.  S&P was the last to lower it, and one might ask what took them so long?  It seems that China’s debt is going up relative to its output of goods and services, which by S&P standards has reached a level that forces a downgrade.  They do see the situation getting better in the near term, but longer term debt will continue to rise.  But, if China is like us, they will look at the number and say, “maybe we need to do more to get that back up”.  It is corporate debt that is the problem.  To make their quotas, they have had to borrow more, and they are not selling more to compensate for that.  Since so many companies are state-owned, that reflects on the government ratings.  This is where being a state-owned company causes China some difficulty.  If they cut back on loans, they risk failure of some state-owned businesses.  They prefer to prop them up, something that should also figure into their credit rating.  Their debt is national debt, not just corporate debt.  The Chinese like to say that they are “just like us” in business.  Maybe not so much.

Brazen Industrial Espionage

I did Infustrial Security for 10 years and only have a couple of cases that compare to the one described in the Wall Street Journal today.  The Brazenness of the Chinese “ who have stopped doing industrial thefts on the US” to hear them talk.  This story indicates they have not stopped.  Big surprise to anyone who follows their tactics.

A man walked into the facility and tried to gain access to a computer system.  He had computers, storage devices, a USB drive, and other paraphernalia that indicated he was up to no good.  I did see a similar case many years ago, where a Russian entered a facility by saying he “wanted to check his email” and needed a network connection to do it.  They let him in too.  It is one thing to be friendly, and quite another to be foolish.

Oh, Brother the Hypocracy

There is a certain amount of hypocracy in foreign relations making "friends" of people who will never be friends, and trying to put the best face on government actions that are totally transparent.  But, I had to laugh when I read the comments by the Chinese on the Lattice deal that was nixed by President Trump.  " We hope that certain countries can look at Chinese companies’ overseas acquisitions objectively and fairly, and provide fair treatment to this kind of normal commercial activity,” said Gao Feng, the ministry spokesman." This from a country that has a long, long list of limits on foreign investment in its own country.  This from a country that has tied down even Apple with restrictions on music and movies, and dictates which companies will have Chinese leadership, whether a buyer wants it or not.  Then, when reciprocal actions are taken by "certain countries" they cry foul.  Oh Brother, the hypocracy of these comments can't be matched.  

China's Casualties in North Korea

The first episode of Ken Burns' story of the Vietnam War was on last night, and it talked about the early history of the war.  Part of that was a look back at the involvement of China in Korea, where the whole back and forth of the Korean War was covered in the context of Vietnam, Russia, and China.  Then, kind of as an aside, Burns mentions that the Chinese lost one million men to keep North Korea, and almost took away the South at the same time.  For the Chinese, the 50's are like yesterday.

There were very few families in the US that were not affected by Vietnam, but there were only 58,000 casualties.  It seemed like more when almost every High School class had one or two.  Now imagine a million lost people, most of them killed in suicidal attacks right in the face of powerful weapons.  My uncle had been there and told us about the atrocities committed by the Chinese as they moved south through the country.  I have never seen most of those incidents mentioned in history books, but he was there and I believe him.  

Even in a country of a billion people, a million casualities is a lot.  These were students and family men in almost every part of China.  They must remember this, and certainly do not want to face the same situation again, this time with nuclear weapons.  Mao was a different kind of leader than the ones since.  Let's hope they have more sense than political goals that throw away the lives of their own people.

China Whimps on North Korea Again

Saying it had made "great sacrifices " to try to influence North Korea, they are beginning to sound like they have no power to influence the North.  The world knows better.  Oil was the issue with sanctions yesterday, and China would not agree to cutting them off.  If they do like they did on coal, China will sell all they agree to sell in the first couple of months of the year, then ignore the quotas for the rest of the year.  This allows the North to "stock up" without any real pain.  Tell me the Chinese do not like what the North is doing.

Lately, they picked on the South over THAAD, saying the radar is picking up Chinese secrets.  Yes, it is a powerful radar, but you have to wonder what kinds of secrets they are trying to protect from a missile defense radar.  They are good radars, but not that good.  What is China hiding that would cause this much smoke being raised?

Facebook and the Russians

Facebook has managed to give the appearance of cooperating with the Federal government investigation of Russian involvement in the US national election.  First, the election was last November, so this isn't exactly hot news.  Second, the methodology for collecting the payments was flawed and understated the actual number of ads being placed.  The FSB and GRU are not stupid enough to associate the ads with Russia IPs, unless they are really slipping in their abilities.

Second, besides not looking very hard, Facebook is a little late in admitting the use of their platform for blatant interference in public policy issues in the US.  They don't like the thought of having to police their ads for this kind of ad.  How rediculous is that?

Rearm Japan

There are very few countries that the Chinese are nervous about, but Japan is one of them.  While China has given North Korea the means and diplomatic cover to build nuclear weapons and missiles, there is nothing to keep the rest of the world from arming Japan.  The Chinese did not have good experiences fighting Japan.  Japan held Chinese territory until after WWII, territory they lost in combat.  We build up Japan with offensive and defensive missiles and let nature take it's course.

Citizen Lab Looks at Censorship in Chinese Games

As I have said often, Chinese censorship knows no bounds.  If anything, this look by The Citizen Lab shows the lengths the Chinese will go to filter what any person sees on the Internet.  [There are links to the paper and the slides used in the presentation and I recommend both].

They found lists of keywords were not centrally managed, are left intentionally vague, and enforced on the companies making or distributing the games.  Some of the keywords make sense for children - obscene language and sexual material are not hard to see as a benefit.  Some are clearly political, as the general rules show [page 14 of the slide presentation]  Since enforcement is by each game maker, keyword lists are more likely to be inconsistent and overly restrictive.

Sometimes I wish he background chatter in on-line games was censored a little more than it is - everywhere in the world.  You can, and should, report these folks to the on-line vendors running these sites. But the Chinese take this to a whole new level.    How do we report "spreading rumors, disrupting social order and stability" which the Chinese require?

Kaspersky Products Banned in Govt Systems

This may not be news after Senator Marco Rubio's public display during an Intelligence Community hearing this year, but Kaspersky products are being banned from government systems.  I always asked why a Russian company was allowed to sell anti-virus in the U.S.  But, we should not be thinking only about Kapersky, since the Chinese are bigger in the anti-virus business than any of the Russian companies, having over 300 products for sale on the world market.  They are also big in joint ventures with US anti-virus makers.  One source I cited in my last book told me they were more than anxious to help her company write the software for their anti-virus.  The security staff objected, but got overruled, in what was a classic case of profit over national security.  

It is not hard to figure out why the Chinese and Russians are in this business.  It gives them access to a lot of computers through direct installs of software, updates in products, and threat databases.  All that, and the the client does it willingly.  

President Nixes Chinese Deal for Lattice

I'm sure there were no surprises when the White House announced the President had said there would be no deal between Canyon Bridge Capital Partners and the chip maker Lattice Semiconductor Corp. A Reuters article says " Portland, Oregon-based Lattice makes chips known as field-programmable gate arrays, which allow companies to put their own software on silicon chips for different uses."  

The Wall Street Journal article mentions a couple of things of note.  First, Congress is writing a bill to strengthen CFIUS which is woefully behind in running down these kinds of deals and putting a stop to them.  In 2015-2016, China was on a tear to get US chip making companies and bought 6 related to various types.  Second, there was an inference in the discussions that Canyon Bridge may have tried to obscure its Chinese government control.  Just in case anyone wondered, there are no "independent" companies in China.  They look like any other global company, but there is always some government control.    They want to look like they are independent of government control.  

It was sad to see Lattice CEO Darin Billerbeck backing he deal right up to the end, even inferring the decisions hinged on the current Administration's unwillingness to do any deals with China.  Really?  When did they stop being our biggest trading partner?  

Watch now for joint ventures or licensing agreements between the two.  The Chinese are not going to give up just because we don't approve of a deal.  And, it appears, they have a company leadership willing to help them.  

FBI Looking at Sputnik and RT

According to press reports today, the FBI is looking into Russian news services and asking if they should register as agents of a foreign power.  This takes away any pretext of the news services being independent news organizations, in case anyone might think they were.  At least part of the story involves Andrew Feinberg, who was fired by Sputnik and took emails with him that showed how influence from someone was driving what kinds of questions he was expected to ask at the White House.  They wanted to keep certain stories alive, and make sure the Russian narratives were being sustained.  

Of course, we have to wonder if the Chinese news services are next, or is this just a Russian thing left over from the National election where the Russians have been blamed for anything and everything.
The Chinese issue guidance every day to their news organizations on what to report, how to word certain articles, and what is prohibited coverage.  That sounds like the same thing the Russians are being cited for.  I did notice that the news services who were ready to do interviews after my testimony on the Hill were almost all Chinese.

Russian Games More than Advertised

There was a good article yesterday in the Financial Times about the Russian Wargames in Belarus, but the news generated by the German Defense Minister made more headlines than the games themselves.   Reuters is saying she announced at a press conference that the Russians were putting 100,000 troops in the area, causing the Russians to feign surprise at that number.  The Germans can count, and obviously have the capability to see that far with little help.  It's not like you can hide that many troops.  The FT article says there is quite a bit of armor, planes and artillery in that mix, right between Belarus and Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland.  The Ukraine can show you what happens when there are war games just across the border and the staging of troops who don't go home when it is over.  Unlike the Ukraine, Belarus would be gone, swallowed up without so much as a peep.  This would not be a fight.

As for those other countries on the boundary, the Russians better think twice about going in that direction.  These are strong people who work hard and are family focused.  They respect the Russians but they don't fear them.

Facebook Plays Down Russian Campaign

Nobody should be surprised by the socially disruptive campaign announced by Facebook yesterday.  This is the Russian stock in trade for sowing division in countries all over the world.  Pay for extremists to make false claims, extend the bounds of what is acceptable discourse, fight off contrary views, and bring discontent wherever they can.  In the Ukraine they had gigantic billboard letting everyone know the Kiev government was "Nazi" showing the swastika in place of its name.  Those things were not cheap.  The BBC says they spent a few hundred thousand on this kind of thing and laid it to the Internet Research Agency, which usually spends a good deal more than this kind of piddly sum.  In 2015, the New York Times did a long story on this organization which I would encourage anyone who likes this subject to read again.  This sounds like a Russian Intelligence operation.

Facebook says it did an "extensive search" to determine if ads sponsored on social media were paid for by entities that were using Russian IPs, or US IPs that were providing Russian language support.  That is a good way to do what Facebook would want - limit the number of accounts of any Russian involvement.  Mark Zuckerberg is not one to criticize anyone who tries to undermine the current administration.  In order to find any foreign involvement,  he would have had to uncover the Chinese efforts to do similar things [see previous post ], the Iranians who are right behind them, and any number of other businesses and government entities that did the same thing.  It was a lot more than $100,000 and Facebook knows it.  Let's give the Russians a little credit here.  They are not so naive as to allow this money to be traced to its source, and Facebook was not looking for the source of most of it.  This Russian involvement is the only one that fits their narrative that the Trump Administration was cooperating with the Russians to keep Hillary Clinton from office.

Poland

There was a good interview yesterday with Mateusz Jakub Morawieck, the Deputy Premeir of Poland.  His main these was after Russia went into Georgia for a lesson in power projection, they laid the ground work for the Ukraine.  Next will be Poland.  At the time of the Georgia invasion and fight, such that it was, that seemed like something that should not have happened.    That scary thought does not seem so impossible now, does it?  

That Creepy Feeling

My niece once said a man she saw on the street made her feel creepy, a word not usually associated with just anyone or anything, but descriptive none-the-less.  We know that feeling, and it has come to me now in reading about a remote hijacking flaw in some Intel chipsets which are said to go back to 2010.  Intel lays this to a "mistake" in coding that allows a null to be put in the password entry and bypasses the authentication feature.  As one of the comments in the article from Ars Techica said, "They had this for 7 years and nobody noticed?"

I got a chill on the back of my neck in reading that a couple of months ago, even though we were yet to find out how it might be exploited.  The articles say the potential is for 8000 computers to be exploited, 2000 of them in the US.  That doesn't seem like very many, but the important thing might be in where they are, not how many there are.

My chill was caused by a little known fact that Intel opened its Chinese chipset manufacturing facility in China in 2010.  I always thought it was a bad idea to allow the Chinese to make computer chips for US computers.  Now, I want to know if those chipsets were made in China, and if that "mistake" in coding came at the hands of a government representative in the Intel facility.  I will never get answers to those questions, but somebody could, if they wanted to.

Removing Kim Jong Un

An article in today's Wall Street Journal has a curious title, since there is nothing about removing Kim as the problem in North Korea.  There is all kinds of political and economic options available to the world to rid themselves of Kim, but there is no mention of the more obvious option, really removing him.

Certainly in the halls of Beijing there have been discussions about what to do with this leader who does not pay attention to the only trading partner that counts, China.  When I was first researching trade between the two, I seem to remember China being about 60% of trade with the North.  Now, according to this opinion piece, they are 93%.  In other words, just about the country that keeps them going is China.  China could remove him and nobody in the world would even flinch.  Most of the world's leaders would smile.  But, China is not going to do that, because as those same leaders are finding out, China likes having a crazy man leading this nation on a path that allows them to observe the reactions to different types of threats that the United States has to deal with.  It keeps them from being the aggressor while they build up the South China Sea and get ready to strengthen that position.   They like that part.

China could invite the Great Leader to visit and make him a guest forever.  If we really believed their feint drama after the latest bomb test, we could believe they would do something like that.  They know how to do it.

Still, it is curious that in all the discussions about what to do with Kim Jong Un, the obvious solution is not mentioned.  It reminds me of the day when gentleman ran the diplomatic corps of the world and were hesitant about saying anything that was not politically correct.  We want to believe that is still true today.  Maybe they don't mention it because at the beginning of World War I, there were small numbers of people who thought the ruling leadership could be removed, but the consequences of removal were worse than the firing of one bullet.  Some of the world's worst despots were not removed that way.  They lived out their lives in some country that accepted them and gave them sanctuary, but took them out of power.  That is what needs to happen here.

China Feins Anger at North Korea

The Chinese almost jumped at the chance to let BBC tell the story of their reaction to North Korea's bomb test on the opening day of an international conference hosted by China.  BBC tells it the way a propaganda outlet of the Chinese government would tell it - OMG, they are testing a bomb! We are so surprised and shocked.  Oh Please, do we really believe the Chinese, who have had their businesses supporting the devolpment of the bomb and the missiles to carry them?  It is incredible that they now act surprised.  I don't believe a word coming out of Beijing these days.  They look more and more like the Russians.

Increasing Pressure on China

There are, according to some current reports like this one that say the allies in the South China Sea are about to increase navigation patrols there.  With China militarizing some of these islands (while blaming the U.S for the buildup of military in the area) there is an ever increasing chance that one or the other will blink or shoot.  My bet is on the latter.

Too many radars attached to guns and missiles make a very unstable situation.  None of the countries will back down and the U.S. Is in a state of defense after not doing much over the last eight years.  The increasing ops tempo has proven the strain of reduced forces and an uncertain mission, leading to pressures on crews that have produced mistakes.  The Chinese were quick to indicate those ships are a navigation hazard for that very reason.  They never miss a trick do they?

Putin Sides with China

Almost all the news outlets carried the comments of Vladimir Putin about North Korea.  He sounded like he had been contemplating this kind of thing for a long time and was getting into the discussion to help the parties settle their potential problems with each other.  He said, 

"The region's problems should only be settled through a direct dialogue of all the parties concerned without any preconditions. Provocations, pressure and militarist and insulting rhetoric are a dead-end road," he added.

North Korea has conducted a flurry of missile tests in recent weeks amid escalating international unease, prompting Putin to weigh in on Friday and warn that the ongoing geopolitical dispute is "balancing on the brink of a large-scale conflict."

Now, just in case anyone was wondering where this came from, it is almost exactly the same language the Chinese foreign policy is based upon.  The Chinese have been calling for the United States to meet with the North Koreans without any preconditions, for months now.  It was a lecture when it first started.  Then it became a drumbeat of persuasive remarks saying the two sides should get together.  This essentially lets China off the hook for creating the situation to begin with.  Now that it has gone too far, they have tried getting some help in the form of their biggest ally, Russia, which uses almost the same words to describe a solution.  

The United States is not buying this product, and while the Russians are busy with stirring up trouble in the national elections and feeding press stories to create more political instability to keep that going, the Russians are just playing China's game without a semblance of independent thought.  There are 36 agreements between the two countries, signed in the last few years,  for cooperation in different areas.  I would have thought that would have meant Russia would be a partner, not a puppet.  Perhaps not.