A couple of days ago it was a back and forth about whether Cambridge Analytica used malware for a data breach or it was simply an extension of Facebook's heavy data collection business, and how that intersects with the differences in data protection laws in Europe versus the United States. Now it looks like they are a straight up criminal enterprise, using bribery and honeypots with prostitutes. Doesn't even take any connection with the Russians for the excrement to be colliding with the ventilator on CA's part, and this surely doesn't rule out dubious connections with various governments like the Russians. Until reading about this I had not considered even remotely the possibility of a British extradition request for Steve Bannon, he was a VP on CAs board among other things before more officially switching to working with Trump.
Because you seemed to have missed the unending stream of scandals that are getting pretty hard to keep track of at this point both due to their depth and number. I guess if you don't want a fully functioning US Federal government for whatever reason it looks pretty good, but there big gaping holes in multiple key federal agencies functions, and those holes have only been growing bigger this week. Neither the political appointee level nor the career civil servant level seem particularly healthy. The diplomatic situation is utterly abysmal, and makes the Bush years look good in comparison. I guess the economy seems to be doing well, but that only works until it doesn't.
Will the Trump supporters only realize that there's something wrong with him knocking down the pillars and the walls after the ceiling falls down on our head? Because it will be too late then.
Idiomatic speech is difficult, isn't it? Harder than translating and transliterating proper nouns, and it should be a lot harder than not outing yourself as a troll by hurling an epithet at the language that you are using. I hope for your sake that you aren't getting paid for posting this nonsense, because you'll need to find another job if you are.
Calling Putin a viceroy is pretty rich though, I hadn't heard that one before.
Not really helping your case that you are calling the language that you are currently using Barbarian. That's some amateur hour propaganda, right there.
Really. Really? You think that America went out of its way to avoid ISIS in Syria? You taint the rest of your post by starting off with that, makes it hard to take you at all seriously.
America was reluctant to get involved in Syria in general, because the factions that it wanted to back, the so called "moderate rebels", were basically nonexistent as actual fighting forces on the ground, which was revealed particularly embarrassingly a couple years ago. Not because the US wanted to stay out of the way of ISIS, America only majorly got involved in the war itself at all because of ISIS and its rapid early expansion, particularly into Iraq. The only other faction in Syria that America really has anything close to a good relationship at all with is the Kurds, which itself is a very complicated relationship, given that some of the Kurdish groups are basically old school communists and the Turks, ostensible NATO allies of the US, have been waging their own war against the Kurds on the Turkey-Syria border.
The US clearly wanted Assad to lose, if for no other reason than he's allied with Russia and Iran and has been a thorn in Israel's side due to the Syrian relationship with Hezbollah. But the US spinned its wheels for so long under Obama, not even getting started about Trump, because it didn't know anyone around who it actually wanted to win that had a remote chance of doing so. The typical US allies of the region, Sunni led countries like Turkey, have been less restrained their support for Assad's enemies.
It is sort of curious how hard you are arguing for the Assad side, is it support for him in particular or is it because the Russians or Iranians are fighting on his side? Assuming for the sake of argument that he didn't use sarin gas, its hard to argue that the Syrian government hasn't engaged in plenty of other war crimes. Take your pick of what you would find acceptable from Amnesty International's 2017/2018 report if you don't believe me or think I have an unacceptable US bias, since that doesn't let the US allied side of the war off the hook.
The thing about chemical weapons in general is that they are not particularly effective as weapons of war, they are too uncontrollable and tend to go where the wind takes them, regular explosives are better for destroying military targets. Chemical weapons are weapons of terror, and their use should be viewed through that lens. See the Russian poisoning of the ex-spy in Britain with a Soviet era nerve agent in the past couple of weeks if you want an example of that. Or is that too sore of a topic, as well?
There were some oddities earlier in the Syrian war where ISIS and the Assad government seemed to go out of their way to not conflict with each other, but ostensibly they were on opposite sides of the war the whole way through, and the other jihadists more aligned with the Al-Qaeda groups were definitely fighting against Assad the whole time. Usually, the jihadists commonly referred to are radical Sunnis, and Assad's an Alawite which is more closely related to the Shiites (hence his alliance with Iran), and those two groups are at each others throats in Syria much like the post Reformation religious wars in Europe between Protestants and Catholics.
Russia's supported the Assad government and fought on their behalf, and the Russian closeness with the Syrian government goes back at least to the Soviet Era. Apologia for Assad isn't really acceptable though, he's waged a brutal campaign in his fight for survival and is almost surely one of the worst war criminals around right now. Part of the problem is that at least some of his opponents would have the same penchant for slaughter or even genocide if they won, which is part of the reason why Syria is such a hellhole and quagmire.
As for why Assad would use chemical weapons, there is a twisted bit of dictator and civil war logic that makes it make sense: it ensures that his underlings and army cannot surrender. If he was about to lose, there's a chance that Assad himself could hop on a plane and escape to Iran or Russia, but very few of the people fighting for him would have that option, and thus they and their ethnic groups would be subject to almost guaranteed brutal reprisals for what they've done. That's also one of the big downsides of the brutality of the ISIS types, they make many of their enemies fight to the death because they know no quarter will be given, and ISIS will go after their friends and family regardless.
It's easier to understand once you realize that they went to the loan sharks, aka private equity. They loaded it up with tons of debt in the 2008 for their leveraged buyout, there was $17.9 billion in debt from that alone. Doesn't take all much compounding interest and fees to get that up over $20 billion in a decade, that's a hole that's pretty damn hard for even a great business to dig itself out of without resorting to bankruptcy.
In the loan sharks' defense, the company was probably already walking dead before they showed up, which is typically the case with those sorts of deals. The vultures usually don't go after healthy specimens, and companies usually won't saddle themselves with such ridiculous debts and fees unless they can't get public funding elsewhere.
The Russians in this case don't look like they were running a criminal conspiracy to make money, but instead to run psyops and disinformation to mess with our operation of governance by directly trying to manipulate the electorate towards their desired end,
Who's to say they couldn't do both? If you're buying stolen social security numbers and personal information in order to set up fake accounts in the US, why not make use of that credit history and banking info too?
This indictment just lays the groundwork for conspiracy charges. I doubt the DOJ thinks that jit's going to take any of these Russians into custody, but now a criminal conspiracy has been established.
Doing that to make money could bring down more heat on them than they might have wanted, it looks pretty clear they were intent on covering their tracks as much as they could, and said as much in one of the captured communications that they found out that the FBI was on their tail. This really seems like more the sort of thing they were spending money for psychological warfare, not expecting immediate monetary return on their investment.
This very much is a criminal conspiracy, a lot of these Russians are charged with such in this indictment, and looks like a smaller portion of a larger conspiracy at the very least on the Russian side. It's just that RICO is for very particular types of racketeering oriented criminal conspiracies, as opposed to a hostile foreign government running a criminal conspiracy aimed at psychological warfare to alter the US political system more to their liking.
Making that distinction makes it even more serious than more mundane forms of organized crime, as black psyops and propaganda is a very hostile act for a nation to be engaged in. From what I've gleaned when the US engages in such activity itself it is more typically in concert with active kinetic warfare, the kind with guns and bombs. Contrast say with more above the board or "white" propaganda, which you see out of outlets like RT, which does not try to conceal that it is government sponsored.
Nah, reading through the laws it doesn't look like it is RICO, this is just a more bog standard criminal conspiracy. RICO is about targeting rackets aimed at making money, and it looks like it was designed to specifically target mafia style organized crime making money through stuff like loan sharking, illegal gambling, drug running, and such.
The Russians in this case don't look like they were running a criminal conspiracy to make money, but instead to run psyops and disinformation to mess with our operation of governance by directly trying to manipulate the electorate towards their desired end, and failing that just sowing discord. They may have done some of the sort of stuff that criminal organizations subject to RICO would use, like the ID theft and fraud, but the picture painted by this indictment is not one of racketeering.
IMO, this is worse than racketeering. There are countries that hate the US to this day because we did similar sorts of things to them decades ago.
I hate to break it to you, but at least 4 Americans have been indicted as part of the special counsel investigation: George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, and Mike Flynn. 2 of those have pled guilty for lesser crimes of lying to the feds, Papadopoulous and Flynn, and it looks like Gates is about to make a plea deal too. Flynn definitely was part of the Executive Branch as the National Security Advisor, however short that tenure was, and Gates maintained his connection with the Trump administration well past the firing of Manafort during the campaign, and Gates worked for the inaugural committee.
This batch of indictments looks like it is mostly aimed at Russian nationals who were running a ground level propaganda conspiracy, but it looks like at least one American was caught too in assisting some of the petty crimes involved in running that, in particular ID theft from one Richard Pinedo.
Today's batch of indictments is already pretty interesting, and this was a much more ground level operation running within American borders than I was expecting. It was far more extensive than some random Eastern Europeans posting memes just to stir the pot. And this doesn't say that there wasn't any more Americans in the know about this stuff, just that they were not rounded up the storm of indictments around this particular criminal conspiracy. Do note that these indictments do not include anything about hacking into the DNC and Podesta's emails, so I'd expect there's plenty more to come.
They want to part out the vital functions of a modern government, and let their donor class pocket as much of money as they can get on the back end. Don't be fooled into thinking that there is a genuine ideology motivating this, only a few of these guys are true believers, and quite a few of those are genuine radicals.
Deficits are a good thing for them, if it helps them loot and destroy the government sooner. It's hard to effectively eliminate the necessary government operations and programs with a wide base of popular support unless you create a crisis first.
Uh, you do realize that Page publicly admitted to his role in the original spy ring last year, right? The one operating out of New York with Russian government officials and a Russian banker. The one from this story was about the original break up of the ring, and here's one about Page's role revealed last year.
Page was not indicted, he was listed in the court documents as an unnamed male that the Russian spies were talking about and Page had given them some unspecified documents from the energy sector.
What this all means is that he was at least an early stage Russian intelligence asset, which probably falls well short of capital-T Treason but definitely crosses the line of very suspicious individual with plenty of probable cause for US counterintelligence to watch closely to make sure they aren't spying on behalf of their handlers. Why bother with counterintelligence at all if you are going to ignore the people being actively and successfully recruited by spy rings of hostile governments?
If Page got closer to the capital-T Treason in the meantime, then we should wait and see what special prosecutor Mueller finds and whether he indicts Page. That is if Trump doesn't fire Mueller and burn down the DOJ first.
IANAL, but it seems like this might be the key bit of sleight of hand of the memo.
What is alleged is by the memo basically is that Steele is biased against Trump. But him biased against Trump, or that he was employed in opposition research against Trump, does not imply that Steele broke American Law or that his info was gotten by unconstitutional means. Nor does it imply that he was necessarily maliciously engaging in a slander campaign by fabricating allegations against Trump, either. But the memo doesn't show those details, just impugns his personal motivations and accuses that he should have also been considered unreliable because he was in contact with media sources, too.
But if you think like Trump and his ardent followers, then making this leap in judgement is actually perfectly natural. If Steele hates Trump and is working against Trump, then of course he would lie and cheat and slander to bring down Trump, that's what Trump himself would do! That's what Trump did to become a political force, by lying and slandering on Obama's birth certificate implying it somehow was fake.
But there are clear omissions, and you can see the mirrors and smoke on the stage. Namely that this was a renewal down the line of a surveillance warrant on Page that had been approved and reapproved prior to the existence of Steele's dossier and his role in this investigation. So even if Steele was treated as a reliable source when he shouldn't have been, he was only one of the later chains of evidence for renewing a warrant against Page that already had a strong enough evidence to previously get and renew it. If that earlier evidence was shoddy, this memo would be the obvious place to make that accusation.
And remember, in the bigger picture of US law the standard for evidence for obtaining a warrant is inherently far lower than the standard for a guilty conviction in a court of law. It's "probable cause" for a regular search warrant, not "beyond a reasonable doubt".
Slashdot Mirror
That escalated quickly.
A couple of days ago it was a back and forth about whether Cambridge Analytica used malware for a data breach or it was simply an extension of Facebook's heavy data collection business, and how that intersects with the differences in data protection laws in Europe versus the United States. Now it looks like they are a straight up criminal enterprise, using bribery and honeypots with prostitutes. Doesn't even take any connection with the Russians for the excrement to be colliding with the ventilator on CA's part, and this surely doesn't rule out dubious connections with various governments like the Russians. Until reading about this I had not considered even remotely the possibility of a British extradition request for Steve Bannon, he was a VP on CAs board among other things before more officially switching to working with Trump.
How far away are you sitting?
Because you seemed to have missed the unending stream of scandals that are getting pretty hard to keep track of at this point both due to their depth and number. I guess if you don't want a fully functioning US Federal government for whatever reason it looks pretty good, but there big gaping holes in multiple key federal agencies functions, and those holes have only been growing bigger this week. Neither the political appointee level nor the career civil servant level seem particularly healthy. The diplomatic situation is utterly abysmal, and makes the Bush years look good in comparison. I guess the economy seems to be doing well, but that only works until it doesn't.
Will the Trump supporters only realize that there's something wrong with him knocking down the pillars and the walls after the ceiling falls down on our head? Because it will be too late then.
Idiomatic speech is difficult, isn't it? Harder than translating and transliterating proper nouns, and it should be a lot harder than not outing yourself as a troll by hurling an epithet at the language that you are using. I hope for your sake that you aren't getting paid for posting this nonsense, because you'll need to find another job if you are.
Calling Putin a viceroy is pretty rich though, I hadn't heard that one before.
Not really helping your case that you are calling the language that you are currently using Barbarian. That's some amateur hour propaganda, right there.
Really. Really? You think that America went out of its way to avoid ISIS in Syria? You taint the rest of your post by starting off with that, makes it hard to take you at all seriously.
America was reluctant to get involved in Syria in general, because the factions that it wanted to back, the so called "moderate rebels", were basically nonexistent as actual fighting forces on the ground, which was revealed particularly embarrassingly a couple years ago. Not because the US wanted to stay out of the way of ISIS, America only majorly got involved in the war itself at all because of ISIS and its rapid early expansion, particularly into Iraq. The only other faction in Syria that America really has anything close to a good relationship at all with is the Kurds, which itself is a very complicated relationship, given that some of the Kurdish groups are basically old school communists and the Turks, ostensible NATO allies of the US, have been waging their own war against the Kurds on the Turkey-Syria border.
The US clearly wanted Assad to lose, if for no other reason than he's allied with Russia and Iran and has been a thorn in Israel's side due to the Syrian relationship with Hezbollah. But the US spinned its wheels for so long under Obama, not even getting started about Trump, because it didn't know anyone around who it actually wanted to win that had a remote chance of doing so. The typical US allies of the region, Sunni led countries like Turkey, have been less restrained their support for Assad's enemies.
It is sort of curious how hard you are arguing for the Assad side, is it support for him in particular or is it because the Russians or Iranians are fighting on his side? Assuming for the sake of argument that he didn't use sarin gas, its hard to argue that the Syrian government hasn't engaged in plenty of other war crimes. Take your pick of what you would find acceptable from Amnesty International's 2017/2018 report if you don't believe me or think I have an unacceptable US bias, since that doesn't let the US allied side of the war off the hook.
The thing about chemical weapons in general is that they are not particularly effective as weapons of war, they are too uncontrollable and tend to go where the wind takes them, regular explosives are better for destroying military targets. Chemical weapons are weapons of terror, and their use should be viewed through that lens. See the Russian poisoning of the ex-spy in Britain with a Soviet era nerve agent in the past couple of weeks if you want an example of that. Or is that too sore of a topic, as well?
There were some oddities earlier in the Syrian war where ISIS and the Assad government seemed to go out of their way to not conflict with each other, but ostensibly they were on opposite sides of the war the whole way through, and the other jihadists more aligned with the Al-Qaeda groups were definitely fighting against Assad the whole time. Usually, the jihadists commonly referred to are radical Sunnis, and Assad's an Alawite which is more closely related to the Shiites (hence his alliance with Iran), and those two groups are at each others throats in Syria much like the post Reformation religious wars in Europe between Protestants and Catholics.
Russia's supported the Assad government and fought on their behalf, and the Russian closeness with the Syrian government goes back at least to the Soviet Era. Apologia for Assad isn't really acceptable though, he's waged a brutal campaign in his fight for survival and is almost surely one of the worst war criminals around right now. Part of the problem is that at least some of his opponents would have the same penchant for slaughter or even genocide if they won, which is part of the reason why Syria is such a hellhole and quagmire.
As for why Assad would use chemical weapons, there is a twisted bit of dictator and civil war logic that makes it make sense: it ensures that his underlings and army cannot surrender. If he was about to lose, there's a chance that Assad himself could hop on a plane and escape to Iran or Russia, but very few of the people fighting for him would have that option, and thus they and their ethnic groups would be subject to almost guaranteed brutal reprisals for what they've done. That's also one of the big downsides of the brutality of the ISIS types, they make many of their enemies fight to the death because they know no quarter will be given, and ISIS will go after their friends and family regardless.
It's easier to understand once you realize that they went to the loan sharks, aka private equity. They loaded it up with tons of debt in the 2008 for their leveraged buyout, there was $17.9 billion in debt from that alone. Doesn't take all much compounding interest and fees to get that up over $20 billion in a decade, that's a hole that's pretty damn hard for even a great business to dig itself out of without resorting to bankruptcy.
In the loan sharks' defense, the company was probably already walking dead before they showed up, which is typically the case with those sorts of deals. The vultures usually don't go after healthy specimens, and companies usually won't saddle themselves with such ridiculous debts and fees unless they can't get public funding elsewhere.
Who's to say they couldn't do both? If you're buying stolen social security numbers and personal information in order to set up fake accounts in the US, why not make use of that credit history and banking info too?
This indictment just lays the groundwork for conspiracy charges. I doubt the DOJ thinks that jit's going to take any of these Russians into custody, but now a criminal conspiracy has been established.
Doing that to make money could bring down more heat on them than they might have wanted, it looks pretty clear they were intent on covering their tracks as much as they could, and said as much in one of the captured communications that they found out that the FBI was on their tail. This really seems like more the sort of thing they were spending money for psychological warfare, not expecting immediate monetary return on their investment.
This very much is a criminal conspiracy, a lot of these Russians are charged with such in this indictment, and looks like a smaller portion of a larger conspiracy at the very least on the Russian side. It's just that RICO is for very particular types of racketeering oriented criminal conspiracies, as opposed to a hostile foreign government running a criminal conspiracy aimed at psychological warfare to alter the US political system more to their liking.
Making that distinction makes it even more serious than more mundane forms of organized crime, as black psyops and propaganda is a very hostile act for a nation to be engaged in. From what I've gleaned when the US engages in such activity itself it is more typically in concert with active kinetic warfare, the kind with guns and bombs. Contrast say with more above the board or "white" propaganda, which you see out of outlets like RT, which does not try to conceal that it is government sponsored.
Nah, reading through the laws it doesn't look like it is RICO, this is just a more bog standard criminal conspiracy. RICO is about targeting rackets aimed at making money, and it looks like it was designed to specifically target mafia style organized crime making money through stuff like loan sharking, illegal gambling, drug running, and such.
The Russians in this case don't look like they were running a criminal conspiracy to make money, but instead to run psyops and disinformation to mess with our operation of governance by directly trying to manipulate the electorate towards their desired end, and failing that just sowing discord. They may have done some of the sort of stuff that criminal organizations subject to RICO would use, like the ID theft and fraud, but the picture painted by this indictment is not one of racketeering.
IMO, this is worse than racketeering. There are countries that hate the US to this day because we did similar sorts of things to them decades ago.
I hate to break it to you, but at least 4 Americans have been indicted as part of the special counsel investigation: George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, and Mike Flynn. 2 of those have pled guilty for lesser crimes of lying to the feds, Papadopoulous and Flynn, and it looks like Gates is about to make a plea deal too. Flynn definitely was part of the Executive Branch as the National Security Advisor, however short that tenure was, and Gates maintained his connection with the Trump administration well past the firing of Manafort during the campaign, and Gates worked for the inaugural committee.
This batch of indictments looks like it is mostly aimed at Russian nationals who were running a ground level propaganda conspiracy, but it looks like at least one American was caught too in assisting some of the petty crimes involved in running that, in particular ID theft from one Richard Pinedo.
Today's batch of indictments is already pretty interesting, and this was a much more ground level operation running within American borders than I was expecting. It was far more extensive than some random Eastern Europeans posting memes just to stir the pot. And this doesn't say that there wasn't any more Americans in the know about this stuff, just that they were not rounded up the storm of indictments around this particular criminal conspiracy. Do note that these indictments do not include anything about hacking into the DNC and Podesta's emails, so I'd expect there's plenty more to come.
They want to part out the vital functions of a modern government, and let their donor class pocket as much of money as they can get on the back end. Don't be fooled into thinking that there is a genuine ideology motivating this, only a few of these guys are true believers, and quite a few of those are genuine radicals.
Deficits are a good thing for them, if it helps them loot and destroy the government sooner. It's hard to effectively eliminate the necessary government operations and programs with a wide base of popular support unless you create a crisis first.
Uh, you do realize that Page publicly admitted to his role in the original spy ring last year, right? The one operating out of New York with Russian government officials and a Russian banker. The one from this story was about the original break up of the ring, and here's one about Page's role revealed last year.
Page was not indicted, he was listed in the court documents as an unnamed male that the Russian spies were talking about and Page had given them some unspecified documents from the energy sector.
What this all means is that he was at least an early stage Russian intelligence asset, which probably falls well short of capital-T Treason but definitely crosses the line of very suspicious individual with plenty of probable cause for US counterintelligence to watch closely to make sure they aren't spying on behalf of their handlers. Why bother with counterintelligence at all if you are going to ignore the people being actively and successfully recruited by spy rings of hostile governments?
If Page got closer to the capital-T Treason in the meantime, then we should wait and see what special prosecutor Mueller finds and whether he indicts Page. That is if Trump doesn't fire Mueller and burn down the DOJ first.
IANAL, but it seems like this might be the key bit of sleight of hand of the memo.
What is alleged is by the memo basically is that Steele is biased against Trump. But him biased against Trump, or that he was employed in opposition research against Trump, does not imply that Steele broke American Law or that his info was gotten by unconstitutional means. Nor does it imply that he was necessarily maliciously engaging in a slander campaign by fabricating allegations against Trump, either. But the memo doesn't show those details, just impugns his personal motivations and accuses that he should have also been considered unreliable because he was in contact with media sources, too.
But if you think like Trump and his ardent followers, then making this leap in judgement is actually perfectly natural. If Steele hates Trump and is working against Trump, then of course he would lie and cheat and slander to bring down Trump, that's what Trump himself would do! That's what Trump did to become a political force, by lying and slandering on Obama's birth certificate implying it somehow was fake.
But there are clear omissions, and you can see the mirrors and smoke on the stage. Namely that this was a renewal down the line of a surveillance warrant on Page that had been approved and reapproved prior to the existence of Steele's dossier and his role in this investigation. So even if Steele was treated as a reliable source when he shouldn't have been, he was only one of the later chains of evidence for renewing a warrant against Page that already had a strong enough evidence to previously get and renew it. If that earlier evidence was shoddy, this memo would be the obvious place to make that accusation.
And remember, in the bigger picture of US law the standard for evidence for obtaining a warrant is inherently far lower than the standard for a guilty conviction in a court of law. It's "probable cause" for a regular search warrant, not "beyond a reasonable doubt".