One of the most overlooked moments of the entire Russiagate saga has to be the dismissal, with prejudice, of the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) ludicrous lawsuit just last week.

It made national headlines in April 2018 when the DNC came before the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to allege that the Trump Campaign, Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, Wikileaks, Roger Stone, and a whole host of others were involved in an illegal conspiracy with the Russian government.

The lawsuit was filed at the absolute height of Russia Fever, and the press couldn’t get enough of the story at the time. Even the Democrats’ novel motion to be allowed to serve Wikileaks via Twitter made news.

Now, 15 months later, the news media are largely silent after Bill Clinton-appointed District Court Judge John Koeltl dismissed the lawsuit in some very harsh terms.

The entire “conspiracy” was ruled to be bunk. The DNC had tried to loop every vaguely Trump-connected person into the suit with a kitchen sink of laws: trade secrets, commercial torts, civil racketeering laws, and more. None of it stuck.

In short, nothing the DNC even claimed these people did was illegal. There was no crime. There was no tort. It’s as simple as that.

It’s important to understand that when ruling in this situation—on a motion to dismiss—courts have to “view the facts in the light most favorable” to the plaintiff. That is to say, they have to go ahead and assume that every remotely plausible assertion made by the plaintiff—in this case the DNC—is true.

The court accepted, for the purpose of ruling on the motion, everything the DNC alleged. It assumed the Russian government hacked the DNC’s computers exactly as the DNC claimed, and it assumed that Russian agents were in contact with Wikileaks, Roger Stone, and the others, exactly as the DNC said.

The judge still found nothing illegal—no conspiracy. In fact, Judge Koeltl wrote in his ruling that the very notion of such a conspiracy, in light of the DNC’s plain admission that the Russian government alone hacked its servers, “is entirely divorced from the facts actually alleged.”

The First Amendment broadly allows the publication of information, even if the source was originally obtained illegally. That’s why the American Civil Liberties Union and other First Amendment and journalism nonprofits filed briefs rejecting the DNC’s absurd legal theories.

In the case of the Trump Campaign’s associates, there wasn’t even any allegation that they published the ill-gotten DNC material—Wikileaks did that. The DNC argued that merely “welcoming” the leaked emails after the fact and drawing attention to them while being in contact with Russians—whether knowingly or, as Roger Stone and others have repeatedly claimed, unknowingly—made them part of a conspiracy.

That is categorically wrong, as the dismissal makes abundantly clear. It’s not illegal to be interested in dirt on opponents. It’s not even illegal to draw attention to it or to say how much you “love it.”

The Democrats’ Russiagate conspiracy theory was just dealt its greatest setback yet, and the ruling further delivers yet another complete exoneration of President Trump, his campaign, and his top associates. Because of the legal procedure involved, a federal judge considered the allegations based on the assumption that the most outlandish claims ever assembled by the DNC were 100 percent true—and the hoax still fell far too short to merit even civil liability.

What does this tell us? It tells us that what I’ve been arguing for the past three years is the reality of the law—there was never any “there” there. The entire Russiagate witch hunt was predicated on a fantasy—and even that turned out not to be illegal. The moment it became clear—and it must have been early on—that no one involved with Trump’s campaign either helped or ordered the Russians to hack the DNC should have been the end of the inquiry.

At least we now have a permanent record of the unprecedented presidential harassment that President Trump has been subjected to throughout his time in office.

(More at link...)

The mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, have rightly shocked the nation. In our understandable collective furor over the senseless loss of life, all the old political divides are being revisited, now in a climate of often frightening blame, anger and distrust — from gun control to the role of extremist ideologies to mental health to responsibilities of political leaders not to inflame tensions.

Such reexamination is a fine and good thing.

But what is not is a different sort of outrage, one that leverages the deaths of innocents to destroy the reputations and careers of others.

It was to be expected that the progressive media and political activists would go after President Trump and his effort to secure the border by blaming him directly for the deaths in El Paso — while not extending such flawed logic to other mass shooters in Dayton and, previously, in Washington, D.C. Both those shooters explicitly claimed fervent support for left-wing causes and particular progressive candidates, such as Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

No one knows exactly all the factors that trigger the unhinged to shoot the innocent. And in that void of knowledge, it makes no sense either to level charges that will lead to more violence or to damn as culpable those who have not called for violence.

What was really regrettable about the political manipulation of these crimes is the hunt for all sorts of political opponents who can be smeared by falsely attributing to them direct responsibility for the El Paso tragedy.

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) tweeted out the names of many Texas political donors to Trump — with the implicit aim of making their lives difficult. Former congressman Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) blames conservatives in general and Trump in particular for the killings — even as he simultaneously sends out pleas for donations to salvage his sputtering presidential campaign.

Protestors swarmed the house of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), screaming physical threats and claiming that he is responsible for the violence by his unwillingness immediately to champion new gun control laws.

We are now witnessing yet another boycott of politically incorrect companies — SoulCycle and Equinox — whose board chairman supposedly no longer warrants his companies’ patronage because he supports Trump.

The subtext of these twisted efforts is that Trump brought out from the woodwork toxic white supremacy that is now everywhere and is the root of violent extremism.

Fox News’s Tucker Carlson has recently questioned all these narratives and now he, too, is a target of the media and the online outrage industry, in calls for sponsor boycotts and his firing.

His sin? Carlson, over the past few months and especially the past few days, has voiced some inconvenient truths that earn outrage but not refutation:

• One, while white supremacy ideology always must be monitored and can trigger the unhinged — as the El Paso shooting may turn out to suggest — it is no longer a ubiquitous movement as it once was in the 20th century.

The days of the Klan and the American Nazi Party are mostly over. They are now fringe organizations. They and others like them are derided by the public, and uniformly condemned by conservatives. To suggest that white supremacy is some all-encompassing, 21st-century existential threat to our collective security, rather than fringe extremism to be carefully monitored, is simply untrue.

• Two, Carlson emphasized that in comparison to America’s real existential challenges — homelessness, drug epidemics, the threat of Chinese mercantilism, keeping a vibrant economy going — white supremacy simply does not register with the general public as a major threat. Certainly, in terms of annual fatal shootings, the staggering death tolls in Chicago and Baltimore suggest a national crisis that is ignored for largely political reasons.

Nonwhite immigrants still sense that reality when they risk their lives to immigrate to a white-majority America. The public knows that the media’s reporting of near-daily anti-Semitic bias is far more likely to emanate from the so-called squad in the House or an unhinged speech of Louis Farrakhan than from the old suspects of the past in bed sheets and swastika armbands. Yet, left-wing anti-Semites are still welcomed or at least tolerated by many in the progressive movement.

• Three, Carlson argued that the United States, while not perfect, is a good nation of good people who daily go about their business judging others by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Its Constitution and popular ethos have always been self-critical, and saw moral and ethical improvement as inevitable as the nation’s stunning technological and material advances. Compared to the alternatives abroad, a multiracial and multiethnic America works and constantly seeks to improve. And Carlson often points out that widening class differences have superseded race as the more worrisome divides in American society.

• Four, and most controversially, Carlson repeatedly has cited political opportunism as the fuel that powers these untruths. He has been unapologetic that those who falsely charge that white supremacy defines America, past and present, have clear agendas. Without such venomous charges, they cannot win popular support: “They promise some Americans reparations, they denounce others for their skin color. They call it ‘privilege.’ The entire country, they’ll tell you, is fundamentally racist and therefore, evil.”

The charge of “white supremacy” has now become the natural heir to the failed narratives of the past three years that Trump should be removed under the 25th Amendment, or that Robert Mueller would find him indictable on charges of collusion and obstruction, or that he is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors and, thus, impeachable. All reflect a lack of progressive confidence that they can vote Trump out of office in the next election, and instead seek to use extraordinary means to abort his presidency.

(More at link...)

The White House is reportedly planning an executive order that would give the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) a role in determining what gets censored on big tech platforms.

According to CNN, which obtained a draft copy of the order, the White House will ask the FCC to develop regulations aimed at clarifying the laws determining how social media companies are allowed to police speech on their platforms. The existence of the draft order was first revealed by Politico earlier this week.

The draft executive order is currently titled “Protecting Americans from Online Censorship.”

Via CNN:

The draft order, a summary of which was obtained by CNN, calls for the FCC to develop new regulations clarifying how and when the law protects social media websites when they decide to remove or suppress content on their platforms. Although still in its early stages and subject to change, the Trump administration’s draft order also calls for the Federal Trade Commission to take those new policies into account when it investigates or files lawsuits against misbehaving companies.

A White House spokesperson declined to comment on the draft order, but referred CNN to Trump’s remarks at a recent meeting with right-wing social media activists. During the meeting, Trump vowed to “explore all regulatory and legislative solutions to protect free speech.”

According to the summary seen by CNN, the draft executive order currently carries the title “Protecting Americans from Online Censorship.” It claims that the White House has received more than 15,000 anecdotal complaints of social media platforms censoring American political discourse, the summary indicates. The Trump administration, in the draft order, will offer to share the complaints it’s received with the FTC.

According to CNN’s report, the new FCC rules would change how Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is implemented. Section 230 currently grants tech companies broad immunity to censor content they consider ” lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.”
If CNN’s report is accurate, the FCC could limit the range of corporate censorship which is currently protected under the law.

(More at link...)

How is this for irony. Everyone talks about security exploits getting more sophisticated. Yet an up and coming threat to the digital world, aka the hair-pulling mischief universe, could not be more elementary: hiding, in a package, a low-cost, low-power computer designed for access attack and sending it off in the mail.

With millions of parcels en route to somewhere U.S., cyberattackers could take advantage of this seemingly innocent practice as an attack vector. The devices, tiny and lightweight, are attempts by criminals to hack into corporate or personal WiFi networks. Sleuths at IBM, in this day and age of e-commerce and package drops, call it warshipping.

"Once built, a warship device can perform wireless attacks simply by being shipped to someone and arriving on their desk or doorstep," according to SecurityIntelligence. "While in transit, the device does periodic basic wireless scans, similar to what a laptop does when looking for Wi-Fi hotspots. It transmits its location coordinates via GPS back to the C&C server."

IBM security researchers were in the news this week for testing these warshipping devices. What do these devices look like? Ather Fawaz sketched in the details for readers in Neowin.

"The device that needs to be deployed to the site is essentially made up of a single-board computer (SBC) that runs on a traditional cell-phone's rechargeable battery. Furthermore, with the off-shelf components, it costs just around $100 to make and looks more like a DIY project for a science exhibition at a school rather than a device that can be used to hack into networks."

IBM shows how shipping an exploitation device directly through the mail could allow attackers to hack into networks remotely with Charles Henderson, Global Managing Partner of IBM X- Force Red, at center-stage. That team has the ambitious title of "IBM X-Force Red" and their job is to uncover potential vulnerabilities in networks. In this instance, examining warshipping, "X-Force Red was able to infiltrate corporate networks undetected. Our aim in doing so was to help educate our customers about security blind spots."

Through package deliveries to the office mailroom—or an individual victim's front door—packages can behave as an infiltrator.

Zack Whittaker, security editor at TechCrunch:

"Once the warship locates a Wi-Fi network from the mail room or the recipient's desk, it listens for wireless data packets it can use to break into the network. The warship listens for a handshake—the process of authorizing a user to log onto the Wi-Fi network—then sends that scrambled data over the cellular network back to the attacker's servers...With access to the Wi-Fi network, the attacker can navigate through the company's network, seeking out vulnerable systems and exposed data."

Whittaker said the team was not releasing proof-of-concept code so as to not help attackers.

"Think of the volume of boxes moving through a corporate mailroom daily," said Henderson in SecurityIntelligence. "Or, consider the packages dropped off on the porch of a CEO's home, sitting within range of their home Wi-Fi."

Actually, Henderson added, the malicious package does not have to be that recognizable but, as a 3G-enabled, remotely controlled system, "can be tucked into the bottom of a packaging box or stuffed in a child's teddy bear (a device no bigger than the palm of your hand) and delivered right into the hands or desk of an intended victim."

"In this warshipping project, " wrote Henderson, "we were, unfortunately, able to establish a persistent network connection and gain full access to the target's systems."

(More at link...)

Quoted:

Quick little update: After video came out Judge had a phone call suggesting they may want to rethink their "battery" charge calling it an "inflection point", her lawyer is headed down Avenatti lane, he's not giving it up Alva is going to end up owing DJT a lot of money\uD83E\uDD23 https://t.co/3rp8zqIWPH pic.twitter.com/H3WdDx81qQ

Rosie memos  (@almostjingo) August 10, 2019