Friday, December 25, 2020

 

Israel & the SolarWinds/SUNBURST Hack

It's interesting how quickly the mainstream media settled in on the unproven and disputed claim that Russia is behind the SolarWinds/SUNBURST hack of US government computer systems. The hack is believed to have begun as early as March 2020 and was first detected by private cybersecurity firms.

Russia is one likely suspect but there are a number of other countries that might have the means and motive for such a cyberattack. However, most accounts only mention Russia and, rarely, China and do not mention the possibility of a cyber false flag attack.

Israel, which has a long history* of espionage and related attacks against US targets, is, to my knowledge, never mentioned as a suspect country. I don't have any evidence that Israel was behind the SUNBURST attack but here are some interesting coincidences not widely reported. They don't all have an obvious tie to Israel.

1. In April 2019, SolarWinds bought an Israeli IT firm called Samanage. Globes described the puchase: "This is the first time it [SolarWinds] has bought an Israeli company. It is expected to set up it[s] first development center in Israel on the basis of Samanage." Samanage was founded by an Israeli cyberwarfare unit alumnus, Doron Gordon. Here's what Gordon said in a 2016 interview:

The Israeli entrepreneurial culture originates from a military-based education instead of a formal collegiate path that is commonly found in Western societies.

My passion for technology started in elementary school and significantly accelerated during my service with the Israel Defense Forces in an elite computer unit. After completing my service, the military experience and friendships developed helped me forge my own strategic framework for building a company and leading a team of highly-qualified engineers to create amazing products.
2. Christopher Krebs, a (recently fired) Trump administration official, who was widely hailed for pronouncing the 2020 US presidential election the "most secure in American history" was the Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during the entire months-long period that the SUNBURST attacked went undetected. Krebs was also in charge when "cellphone surveillance devices ... were found near the White House and other sensitive locations around Washington". Unnamed US officials fingered Israel as the likely culprit.

3. "Just days before the [SUNBURST] hack came to light, the firm's [i.e. SolarWinds] two biggest investors, Silver Lake and Thoma Bravo, sold more than $280 million in stock to a Canadian public pension fund", according to Security Week.

4. According to Globes, "The share prices of Israel's two largest publicly traded cybersecurity companies ..." rose "sharply" on the news of the SolarWinds breach.

Note on Israeli Attacks on the U.S.
* For example, there is the 1947 attempted assassination of Harry Truman by Lehi/the Stern Gang; 1954's Operation Susannah/the Lavon Affair, a false flag bomb attack against US diplomatic facilities in Cairo; the deadly 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty; an alleged false flag assassination attempt against the US Ambassador to Lebanon in 1979; decades of transfers of US and US-bankrolled Israeli military technology to China by Israel and other economic espionage; the Jonathan Pollard espionage scandal in 1985; the Lawrence Franklin/AIPAC espionage scandal in 2004; the Ben-Ami Kadish espionage scandal in 2008; and, the Stewart Nozette espionage scandal in 2009. These are only the alleged or confirmed Israeli operations that have been exposed. They are all largely unknown by the American public and Israel has never been held publicly accountable for any of them.

In 2014, Jeff Stein at Newsweek wrote a series of articles on Israeli espionage directed against the United States. Here are some of them:

See also: "Update: Israel & the SolarWinds/SUNBURST Hack"

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# posted by VFPDissident @ 12/25/2020 09:41:00 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, December 08, 2020

 

Anointing Biden & Election Irregularity Allegations IV

Yesterday, the Texas Attorney General filed a motion to have the US Supreme Court consider the State of Texas' complaint on 2020 presidential election irregularities and improprieties in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The four defendant states have already submitted their certificates of ascertainment regarding their presidential electors to the National Archives.

In the complaint, which, again, the Court has not yet agreed to hear, Texas is thus asking the Court to order:

E. If any of Defendant States have already appointed presidential electors to the Electoral College using the 2020 election results, direct such States' legislatures, pursuant to 3 U.S.C. § 2 and U.S. CONST. art. II, § 1, cl. 2, to appoint a new set of presidential electors in a manner that does not violate the Electors Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment, or to appoint no presidential electors at all.
In sum, as I read it, Texas wants either the four defendant states' Republican-controlled legislatures or the US House of Representatives pursuant to the 12th Amendment ("the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote") to decide the election.

Here are my thoughts:

1. The Texas action is the best pled and most concise case I've seen so far alleging problems in the 2020 presidential election. It's far better than the dumpster fire pleadings offered by Sidney Powell that I've read.

2. I think the State of Texas should have standing but that is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition and it's motion comes awfully late.

3. I have not followed the lower state and federal court election cases closely enough to say how persuasive the evidence is of substantial issues with the election so I will not presume to know how the Supreme Court should or will rule (I mention this because the Texas complaint appears to rely heavily on lower court filings and opinions). If the allegations are substantially true as pled then I would hope the Court would agree to hear the complaint; however, I am skeptical that Texas is on solid legal and evidentiary ground.

4. I think the statistical evidence offered by Charles J. Cicchetti, PhD is flawed, unpersuasive, and harmful to the case. Cicchetti tested the hypothesis "that other things being the same" Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden "would have an equal number of votes" (see Cicchetti Declaration at ¶¶ 11-13). But we know "other things" beyond alleged election irregularities were far from the same in 2016 and 2020. For example, among other things, Trump was running as an incumbent heading an administration beset by personnel instability, incompetence, and a lack of discipline.

5. If, as seems likely, the Supreme Court refuses to hear this complaint then it's probably game over for all the election challenges.

6. If the Supreme Court agrees to hear this complaint then it's a game changer and, although I never want to underestimate their capacity for dishonesty, the mainstream media will probably be compelled to drop their mantra that claims of election irregularities are "baseless", etc. We'll probably also see violent protests by Trump haters.

7. If the Supreme Court agrees to hear this complaint then to open up the possibility that Trump stays in the White House for another term the Supreme Court would have to invalidate the election results in at least three of the four defendant states. If they do agree to hear the complaint then I predict they will overturn the election results in fewer than three states and send Biden to the White House with an unchanged or, more likely, smaller Electoral College margin.

See also:

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# posted by VFPDissident @ 12/08/2020 11:09:00 PM 2 comments

Sunday, December 06, 2020

 

Anointing Biden & Election Irregularity Allegations III

Who said it?: "Even assuming there's nothing nefarious about the national election why has the cascade of irregularities around this country occurred virtually in a news blackout?" 

If you guessed Tucker Carlson or some other right-wing crank then you are mistaken. It was MSNBC's Keith Olbermann talking with Newsweek senior editor and columnist Jonathan Alter days after the 2004 presidential election. Back then, Media Matters for America was complaining:

Media conservatives have labeled MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann a "voice of paranoia" and accused him of perpetuating "idiotic conspiracy theories" for his sustained spotlight on the numerous local news reports of voting irregularities during the November 2 presidential election. Olbermann's emphasis during Countdown with Keith Olbermann on voting irregularities has been part of a critique of what he has called the "Rube Goldberg voting process of ours" -- as well as a criticism of the major media outlets' failure to report on the irregularities.

So, in 2020, is Media Matters still complaining now that the shoe is on the other foot and the mainstream, pro-Democrat corporate media is engaged in a full court press to ignore, deny, and dismiss alleged irregularities in the 2020 presidential election and to denigrate anyone who makes or reports the allegations?

Why, yes, they are complaining ... about "Donald Trump's attempts to steal and thwart the election" and they are cataloging "right-wing media figures who have supported Trump's efforts to spread false claims and conspiracy theories about the election". In short, they have hypocritically done a complete about-face.

You see, it was not so long ago that some Democrats and other left-of-center folks took allegations of electoral irregularities and concern about voting machines very seriously or at least put on a good show of it. Election integrity activists produced an Emmy-nominated 2006 documentary, Hacking Democracy, and started groups such as VoteTrustUSA, VotersUnite, and Black Box Voting (all now moribund). Now that Biden has presumptively won the 2020 election such talk, from Democrats and their media lackeys, at least, is verboten.

Back in the day it was Diebold that lefties were mainly concerned about. Diebold, renamed as Premier Election Solutions, was sold to Dominion Voting Systems in 2010. That same year Dominion also bought assets of Sequoia Voting Systems.

In 2010, Project Censored published "Election 2008: Vanishing Votes, Disappearing Democracy And Media Misdirection" by Brad Friedman. Friedman, who is anti-Trump and now sees no evidence of voting irregularities wrote:

There was, of course, reason for everyone to be concerned, particularly about voting machines made by Sequoia Voting Systems, Inc. The company had been on the verge of bankruptcy and hostile takeover all year, and—though they had told federal investigators that they had divested from Smartmatic, their Venezuelan-owned, Hugo Chavez-tied parent company, in late 2006, after a hue and cry from Republicans—all of their systems’ Intellectual Property rights had secretly remained under the ownership of the Venezuelan firm.
The Venezuelan connection has, of course, recently been echoed by Sidney Powell along with allegations about Dominion. Though the Project Censored crowd seems uninterested in her allegations. 

Also, in 2010, Project Censored published a revision of a 2006 piece by Dennis Loo titled: "No Paper Trail Left Behind: the Theft of the 2004 Presidential Election". Loo writes:

Welcome to a world where statistical probability and normal arithmetic no longer apply! The Democrats, rather than vigorously pursuing these patently obvious signs of election fraud in 2004, have nearly all decided that being gracious losers is better than being winners, probably because – and this may be the most important reason for the Democrats' relative silence – a full-scale uncovering of the fraud runs the risk of mobilizing and unleashing popular forces that the Democrats find just as threatening as the GOP does.

On November 8, I wrote: "I doubt that Trump's campaign will be able to muster evidence of election irregularities substantial enough to overturn the presumptive Biden victory. I am inclined to believe that he actually lost the election due to his unpopularity, not error or fraud." I still believe that but more strongly than ever I also believe there probably were significant election irregularities.

It seems the reason we are told over and over again that Biden is the "president-elect" and allegations of election problems are "baseless" is precisely because the mainstream strongly suspects or knows the allegations are not baseless at all. I also believe that the undisciplined and incompetent Team Trump is likely not up to the task of getting to the truth and, in any case, they have Democrats, the media, establishment Republicans, and the Deep State working against them.

See also:

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# posted by VFPDissident @ 12/06/2020 11:30:00 PM 0 comments

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