RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) notified the election officials of 21 states that hackers targeted their systems last year. DHS had previously told The Associated Press (AP) that more than 20 states were targeted by hackers believed to be Russian agents before the 2016 elections. Many of the states did not know until Friday that their systems were targeted.

“It is completely unacceptable that it has taken DHS over a year to inform our office of Russian scanning of our systems, despite our repeated requests for information,” California Secretary of State Alex Padilla (D) said in a statement. “The practice of withholding critical information from elections officials is a detriment to the security of our elections and our democracy.”

State election offices in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin verified to the AP that they were among those targeted. Among these, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin are considered swing states.

The DHS did not specify the identity of the hackers, but in most cases, the states were told their systems were not breached. In most of the states, the targeting involved preparatory activity, like scanning computer systems. Targets included voter registration systems but not vote tallying software.

Only Illinois reported that hackers had succeeded in breaching its voter systems. Other states reported that their cybersecurity efforts turned back efforts to get to crucial information.

Election officials in three states did tie the attacks to Russia.

The Wisconsin Election Commission said the state’s systems were targeted by “Russian government cyber actors.” Alaska Elections Division Director Josie Bahnke alleged that computers in Russia were scanning election systems.

“There are constant attempts by bad actors to hack our systems,” Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate (R), said in a statement. “But we continue to deflect those attempts.”

A spokesman for the Colorado secretary of state was hesitant to label the cyber attack attempts. “It’s not an attack. I wouldn’t call it a probe. It’s not a breach, it’s not a penetration,” Trevor Timmons said. “It’s really reconnaissance by a bad guy to try and figure out how we would break into your computer.”

DHS admitted that state and local officials should be informed about cybersecurity risks to election systems. “We are working with them to refine our processes for sharing this information while protecting the integrity of investigations and the confidentiality of system owners,” the agency said.

As North Korea demonstrates America’s vulnerability to ballistic missiles, and as President Trump pledges “many billions of dollars” for “the anti-missile,” establishment Republicans are poised to use missile defense talk today in the same way they did in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s commitment to it: profit politically from rhetoric, funnel money to the best-connected contractors, and accomplish nothing. https://amgreatness.com/2017/09/12/establishment-gop-puts-cronies-over-country-on-missile-defense2/

Since Reagan restored missile defense to the nation’s agenda 34 years ago, Republicans have led the spending of some 80 billion dollars on its behalf. But they have acquiesced as the U.S government has crafted each and every program according to one overarching policy: to put no barrier to missiles from China or Russia reaching Americans.

Accordingly, our so-called National Missile Defense is but a hamstrung token. Using the same logic with respect to technology, we are depriving the equipment we build for defense against threats such as North Korea and Iran from all capacity defend against China and Russia. In practice, this means that it is less capable of doing anything. Today, malnourished North Korea is on the cusp of overwhelming every defense we’ve got, in Alaska and California, as well as in the Western Pacific.

Republicans banked votes, contractors banked the money, and America’s vulnerabilities deepened. Unless President Trump changes basic policy, the cycle repeats.

A $30 Billion Boondoggle
The Establishment Republicans’ intellectual guide, the Wall Street Journal, has just pointed the way. In an obituary (September 2-3) and an editorial (September 6), it celebrated George A. Keyworth, the White House science adviser from 1981 until 1984, as “the Godfather of Missile defense.” In fact, no one was more responsible than Keyworth for turning President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative into a research program that produced zero anti-missile weapons—by design. The so-called Fletcher Panel that he created defined SDI by precluding building defensive devices, restricting its mandate to long-term research. He staffed it exclusively with delegates from the national labs and their contractors. They divvied up some $30 billion to fund their favorite hobby horses.

Some—Edward Teller’s and Lowell Wood’s X-ray laser and free-electron laser—were patent scientific frauds that discredited the initiative. But steering programs to the right people got Keyworth a seat on Hewlett-Packard’s board of directors. Hence from the very first, SDI was a typical U.S-government program: soaring rhetoric that covered a feeding trough for well-connected interest groups. One of its former directors, asked what SDI had produced, waved a report titled, “What We Got for $30 Billion.” An expensive missile-swatter.

The Journal also says, “to the extent that the North Korean nuclear threat is at all containable,” it is because SDI “eventually gave us systems like THAAD.” Thus does the Journal show the Republican Establishment’s nonchalant ignorance. The combination of interceptor missile and radar called Theater High Altitude Defense was a U.S. Army program. All it owes to SDI and its Missile Defense Agency successor are limitations, such as depriving the interceptor of a warhead and requiring it to crash directly onto the oncoming warhead. This added layers of technical complexity—e.g. exquisite reductions in vibrations—and added to the cost of nearly $1 billion per battery. Expense, and hence scarcity, is one reason why even North Korea can overwhelm it quantitatively.

THAAD’s effective range is set by how soon after the offensive missile takes off the interceptor may be launched. The reason why the interceptor, whose physical range is just over 500 miles, has an effective range of only 120 miles is the policy (in the spirit of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty) that requires our interceptors to be programmed and launched only by radar/fire control systems co-located with the interceptor. The THAAD warning radar is not equipped to program and fire interceptors. (Just now, Navy Aegis ships networked with one another are being given a partial exemption).

Blinded By Partisanship
More fundamentally, all U.S interceptors continue to be hampered by their radars’ inability to look over the earth’s curvature to see missiles being launched by China and Russia (or Iran, or North Korea’s interior). Already a generation ago a network of infrared satellites was being designed that would have made it possible see all such launches as they happened and to launch interceptors with plenty of time to stop them at maximum range. But the SDI office and its successor canceled that. It would have displeased Russia and China. Thanks, SDI!

Over the weekend North Korea conducted its six, and most powerful, nuclear test to date. Reports indicate that the impoverished nation is preparing to launch yet another Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), this time potentially on a standard trajectory. A highly provocative move without regard to overflight of neighboring countries airspace. North Korea’s accelerated nuclear and ballistic missile developments have many in Washington showing more bipartisan interest in missile defense playing a significant role in defending the American homeland.

However, over the past three decades, the path toward a truly robust homeland missile defense system has been precarious. Political support over five presidential administrations wavered, while historical funding for the Missile Defense Agency averaged less than 2% of the overall defense budget. As Washington considers its options for addressing a threat which has evolved more rapidly than expected, it should carefully consider lessons learned from decades of less than adequate support for homeland missile defense. The Trump administration must avoid the mistake of his predecessors and fully commit to investment in expanded missile defense capabilities

The Reagan Administration

In the early 1980’s, fear that the Soviet Union had achieved a nuclear first strike capability led the Joint Chiefs of Staff to recommend developing plans for ballistic missile defense capabilities. On March 23, 1983, President Ronald Reagan delivered an address to the nation outlining an ambitious new plan for ballistic missile defense called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). During the speech, President Reagan called for a defensive capability that would render nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” In 1984, the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) was established to begin Research and Development (R&D) efforts to create several programs such as Brilliant Pebbles, a non-nuclear, space-based, boost phase anti-missile system. Ultimately, many of the most ambitious SDI technologies were set aside due to political pressure and U.S. obligations to limit testing and development of BMD technology. While the Reagan Administration argued that it could test and develop BMD systems under a “broad interpretation” of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty many in Congress, led by Senator Sam Nunn, argued such an interpretation violated the spirit of the treaty.

The Bush 41 Administration

During the January 29th, 1991, State of the Union Address, President George H.W. Bush citing the success of the Patriot missile defense system during the Gulf War, mandated the “SDI program be refocused on providing protection from limited ballistic missile strikes, whatever their source.” This directive led to the development of Global Protection Against Limited Strikes (GPALS), aimed at stopping small ballistic missile attacks on America and thwarting limited strikes against U.S. troops with the use of theater ballistic missiles. GPALS represented a new Post-Cold War mentality in the United States that focused more on limited theater ballistic missile strikes rather than a large-scale Soviet ICBM strike.

The Clinton Administration

The GPALS concept would ultimately be canceled in 1993 by President Bill Clinton. Rather than taking a global approach to a range of ballistic missile threats, President Clinton’s 1993 Bottom-Up Review concluded that, while the threat from “Third World” countries could not be excluded, the missile threat from Russia and China had diminished. Secretary of Defense Les Aspen ultimately recommended that “a robust theater missile defense effort plus a limited national missile defense technology program is the best and most cost- effective approach” for the overall U.S. ballistic missile defense program.

A major casino operator in Las Vegas is matching employee donations to phony civil rights groups, including HAMAS-linked CAIR and the pro-Antifa hate group Southern Poverty Law Center, in order to fight “hate” in the United States.

In response to terrorist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Barcelona, Spain, MGM Resorts International CEO James Murren denounced “hate speech and hate-based actions.” The huge publicly-traded gambling concern, is reportedly the largest casino operator on the Las Vegas Strip and has a global workforce of 77,000. According to WND, Murren “was a lifelong Republican before he endorsed Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.”

Fed by the establishment media’s exploitation of the tragic death caused by a reputed neo-Nazi at a misnamed “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, and after years of relative indifference to the terroristic and racist violence from the Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street movements, suddenly Murren wants to fight “hate” by giving money to groups that exist solely to generate “hate.”

CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, is an Islamist group linked to international terrorism that favors the imposition of Sharia law on America and undermines the Global War on Terror at every opportunity.

The fabulously wealthy Southern Poverty Law Center is an extreme left-wing group that smears those who dare to express skepticism about Islam and Muslim organizations as bigots and “Islamophobes.” The mainstream-conservative Family Research Council was attacked by a would-be mass murderer who relied on SPLC research that described FRC as a hate group. Another would-be mass murderer shot and nearly killed House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) after accessing SPLC research materials.

Islam expert Robert Spencer was targeted by the SPLC. His educational website Jihad Watch was accused of “extreme hostility toward Muslims” by the SPLC which led to online payment service PayPal suspending the site as an alleged hate group. PayPal reversed its decision after public backlash.

Liberty Counsel sued charity watchdog Guidestar for posting what it calls SPLC’s “false and defamatory” hate designations on its pages for various mainstream organizations.

But according to MGM’s Murren, CAIR and the SPLC stand against what politically correct left-wingers deem “hate,” so they deserve to be celebrated and funded.

“The events in Charlotttesville and Barcelona can easily cause us to feel overcome by hatred and gutted by violence, leaving open questions about our future – as a nation, a global society and even a human race,” MGM CEO James Murren wrote in a letter to the company’s employees that was published in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “The protection of human dignity, demonstrated in the form of tolerance and respect for all people is the core of our identity.”

A 28-year-old Ypsilanti, Michigan, man is due in federal court Tuesday on gun-related charges that may be part of a larger terrorism case, yet secrecy surrounds the matter.

Yousef Mohammad Ramadan was stopped on August 15 at the Detroit airport as he and his entire family were scheduled to board a flight to Jordan. According to court documents, he told ICE officials and a FBI agent he intended to move to Bethlehem in the Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank.

He was subsequently arrested on gun charges.

The Detroit News reports:

The FBI’s counterterrorism team blocked an Ypsilanti man from flying to the Middle East and arrested him Friday after discovering a weapons arsenal in a storage unit, the latest national security-related case in Metro Detroit.

Yousef Mohammad Ramadan, 28, has not been charged with a terror-related crime and an FBI spokesman declined to comment, leaving it unclear why the FBI’s counterterrorism team and the head of the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s national security unit are involved in the case, whether investigators had thwarted a terror attack or stopped a man from traveling overseas to commit terror.

The case is shrouded in secrecy. The U.S. Attorney’s Office quietly brought Ramadan into federal court Saturday for a rare weekend arraignment that happened when federal court was closed to the public. The arraignment, which was not posted on the court’s calendar, ended with a federal magistrate judge ordering Ramadan be held temporarily without bond.

Ramadan has been charged with knowingly possessing a firearm with an obliterated serial number, a five-year felony.

More details about the case are expected to be revealed when Ramadan appears for a detention hearing Tuesday in federal court. He’s being held in the Wayne County Jail.

The case is being handled by the counterterrorism division of the FBI Detroit field office, and the U.S. attorney there is handling the case with a high degree of secrecy. An FBI affidavit indicates that, under questioning, Ramadan repeatedly lied about which guns he had and where they were being kept.

Court documents filed in the case indicate there may be additional sealed materials yet to be made public, or possible sealed indictments.

One of the key topics at the federal court hearing later today will undoubtedly be whether Ramadan remains in custody. Federal authorities may also present additional evidence related to other charges.

The Muslim Brotherhood has penetrated every one of our national security agencies, including our intelligence agencies, according to retired Navy admiral James “Ace” Lyons, former commander of the U.S. Pacific fleet. Adm. Lyons made this startling declaration Jan. 16, 2015 during a conference sponsored by the Center for Security Policy, a conservative Washington, D.C. think-tank.

In the two years since, no action has been taken to reverse this dangerous situation. Empowerment of individuals of questionable loyalties within our intelligence community continues unabated, as does a counterfactual view of Islam and thwarting of terrorist investigations. Our government routinely targets and cashiers productive, legitimate counter-terrorism experts and fails to label terrorist organizations as such. U.S. intelligence failures and feckless politicization have gone on for years, rendering our protections against terrorism ineffectual and putting our country at grave risk.

Post-9/11 Infiltration of the FBI

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 paradoxically led to major infiltration, according to Paul Sperry, author of Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington. After 9/11, the FBI sought to rapidly hire more Arabic-speaking translators, Perry writes in his 2005 book. Arabic-speaking Jews applied, many of them retired linguists formerly with Israeli radio and the Israeli army, but only one was ever hired. Then-FBI director Robert Mueller, who had mandated Muslim sensitivity classes for agents, confirmed that the hires were blocked by misgivings over “dual loyalty” and concerns for Arab Muslims who might be offended to work with Jews.

Further, Mueller onerously screened Jewish applicants but expedited Arab Muslim candidates, hiring some without full background checks. One Pakistani woman earned a top-secret clearance despite a prior FBI investigation of her father’s Taliban and al-Qaeda ties. Once hired, she proselytized, led prayer groups, and lobbied for separate bathrooms for Muslim translators. Six months later, the FBI discovered its radio frequencies leaked to Pakistan. Even more astonishing, the woman’s sons were later hired to translate classified material.

Sperry’s book details how Mueller allowed thousands of potential terrorists to apply by seeking translators from CAIR, ISNA, and the American Muslim Council, an organization founded by convicted terrorist Abdurahman Alamoudi.

Indeed, some Arab Muslim translators who were hired went on to warn individuals under government investigation, failed to translate large sections of surveillance log conversations, and created a backlog by translating slowly. Translators also accepted gifts from foreign targets and had romantic ties to terrorists.

An al-Qaeda leader warned American Muslims that they’re headed for “concentration camps” unless they pick up arms and fight, quoting late American al-Qaeda recruiter Anwar al-Awlaki stating that “surely your situation is becoming similar to that of the embattled Muslim community of Spain after the fall of Grenada.”

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb leader Abu Musab Abdel Wadoud, aka Algerian Abdelmalek Droukdel, made the comments in this week’s new issue of the English-language Inspire magazine from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which included a lengthy how-to on attacking the train system with a homemade derailment tool placed on the tracks.

“How many lone jihad operations have had the impact of changing policies, bringing about the fall of political parties or even governments in some of the strongest and most influential countries of the world! This is why the martyrdomseeker

and Inghimasi (storm trooper) instills more fear in the hearts of the enemy than other fighters,” Wadoud said in a Q&A. “It is due to the positive results of lone jihad operations that we invite the sons of our Ummah [Muslim community] to adopt this new method of jihad and hold on to it firmly.”

He said that though the United States “is impossible to invade for a power outside the American Continent since it is surrounded by 6000 kilometers of the Atlantic Ocean,” lone jihad operations are “uncostly in terms of lives and expenses for Muslims, its impact on the enemy is significant and almost disproportional.”

“There is little doubt that this type of jihad enrages the disbelievers even more when a revert from their own race or nationality carries out such an operation… someone who had once been part of their community before Allah guided him to Islam and jihad,” Wadoud continued. “This is enraging for the enemies of Islam because it proves that Islam transcends their narrow nationalism and a Muslim’s loyalty is to his religion and not to his homeland. This aspect is harder for them to digest than the operation itself, so let us reflect on it. This is one of the weak spots in which there is enragement of the disbelievers.”

“Due to the edge that a Muslim living in the West enjoys, many scholars and leaders of jihad have encouraged carrying out martyrdom operations in the West. The reward and station of such an individual is no less than the reward of those who migrate to the theaters of jihad.”

Wadoud discussed how “crime rates in America are much higher than other nations, and it comes as no surprise that most crimes are of a racist nature.”

“And this is something that Obama on the eve of his departure from the White House himself admitted frankly,” he added. “The inescapable result of Trump’s victory and the coming to power of his likes in Western countries means that the room for co-existence in the West is being eroded with every passing day. And this does not affect Muslims alone, but all races other than the ‘white race’ (as they love to portray themselves). With the permission of Allah, this trend will prove to be in the interest of Muslims, since it will awaken the conscience of the Ummah and make it cognizant of the reality of Western Crusader savagery.” CONTINUE AT SITE

The mad scramble to signal virtue can operate contrary to the virtue under consideration. Being opposed to racism is virtuous. Seeking to proclaim this quality to the world by booting neo-Nazis off the Internet is not. Those on the activist left may not always be wrong about everything, but it’s a useful working assumption that they are.

It would be incredibly stupid to plan violence or other criminal activity on Facebook. Now take a look at the neo-Nazis. Do they strike you as overly burdened with intelligence? When the Third Reich fanboys frolic on the Daily Stormer, it’s extremely helpful to law-enforcement agencies and the rest of us. Anyone can access the site and learn what these idiots are thinking, hoping, planning. They’re so stupid that they actually think using a pseudonym in Internet comments makes it hard to learn who they are. It doesn’t. Forcing them off the Internet is a way of forcing them to get smart: If they start organizing via text messages on burner cell phones, they’ll be much more difficult to track.

Yet Google, Apple, Twitter, and much of rest of the tech world have allowed themselves to be prodded by lefty activists into booting white-power idiots off their platforms. What will be the consequences of that? More resentment and whining about being treated unfairly by the lads with the 88 tattoos. (H is the eighth letter: 88 means “Heil Hitler.”) That need not concern us overmuch except that the more outraged they get, the more paranoid they get — and the more paranoid they get, the more violent they’re likely to get.

So Richard Spencer’s l’il stormtroopers should be allowed access to every Internet platform, social-media app, and hotel ballroom they seek out. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. The more clips of their meetings show up on the Internet to be ridiculed by Stephen Colbert, the better. If those meetings are held in dank secret basements rather than at the Holiday Inn on Route 5, we won’t know what is going on in them.

And it’s better to know. Anti-terrorism squads should be watching everything the neo-Nazis say and do. Undercover agents should infiltrate them, keep close tabs on them, and sow internal discord among them.

To the Left, all white supremacists look the same. Indeed, to the Left, Ronald Reagan wanted to blow up the world and George W. Bush was the Hitler of Crawford, Texas. But within the brownshirts there is apparently much heated discussion about the finer points of hate. Michael German, a former FBI agent who infiltrated neo-Nazi groups in the 1990s, told the Wall Street Journal that back then, various organizations despised each other so much that anyone who belonged to one group was blackballed by the others.