Presidents-elect normally answer questions at a press conference a few days after the election. But Donald Trump has gone almost two months without holding one. …read more
Source: New date for Trump’s press conference: Jan. 11
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by John Reed Stark via LinkedIn.com,
President-elect Donald Trump has recently questioned: 1) President Obama's finger pointing at the Russians for election-related cyberattacks; and 2) the current media and pundit frenzy alleging a Russian cyber-strike targeting Secretary Hillary Clinton in order to assure a Trump presidency. President-elect Trump plans to press U.S. intelligence agencies to defend their conclusions, stating,
“I know a lot about hacking. And hacking is a very hard thing to prove. So it could be somebody else. And I also know things that other people don’t know, and so they cannot be sure of the situation.”
Having worked since 1995 as a first-responder to cyber-attacks, including serving 11 years as Chief of the SEC's Office of Internet Enforcement, I whole-heartedly agree with President-elect Trump. His skepticism is not only appropriate and warranted — it's spot-on.
Official U.S. Statements About Russian Hacking of U.S. Election
Despite countless inflammatory headlines about Russian election hacking, there exist only two official U.S. statements specifically addressing the facts of recent election-related hacking incidents. The first is the October 7, 2016 Joint Statement from the Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security (the “Joint Statement“). The second is the December 29, 2016 Joint Analysis Report of the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, entitled, “GRIZZLY STEPPE – Russian Malicious Cyber Activity” (the “JAR“).
Both government statements are curt, vague, opaque and miles away from being concrete — and both also beg far more questions than answers.
The Joint Statement
The Joint Statement adopts a cautionary approach to any sort of attribution or motive behind who “directed the recent compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from US political organizations.” The Joint Statement states that the hacks:
“. . . are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow — the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”
Announcing that we think the hacks “are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts” falls far short of a legitimate prosecutorial conclusion based upon actual evidence of Russian culpability and attribution. The Joint Statement's authors are clearly hedging their bets, which is exactly what any reasonable cyber-investigator would do under the circumstances.
After all, attributing disparate attack vectors to the same culprit is always speculative. The entire virtual criminal design could all be a ruse, where one country’s cyber gang coopts the techniques of another country’s cyber gang, to confuse or disassemble.
Moreover, even in its most favorable light, the <a target=_blank rel="nofollow" href="http://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/10/07/joint-statement-department-homeland-security-and-office-director-national" rel="nofollow noopener" …read more
Source: Why Donald Trump Is Spot-On About The Russians And The Election
By Tyler Durden
Earlier today, we were surprised to note that having aggressively drained liquidity from the interbank funding market, on the first trading day of 2017, the PBOC not only fixed the Yuan well lower (sy 6.9498 vs 6.9370 on the last day of 2016, even if this was well stronger than the Offshore Yuan), but the People’s Bank of China withdrew even more liquidity. It did that by injecting CNY20 billion via 7-day reverse repos and another CNY20 billion via 14-day reverse repos in its open-market operations Tuesday, according to traders, while continuing to skip 28-day reverse repos.
The move resulted in a net drain of CNY155 billion for the day, and followed a substantial drain of a net CNY245 billion last week – the first removal of liquidity in three weeks. We promptly followed up with a warning:
PBOC drains a net CNY155 billion for the day. Keep an eye on overnight SHIBOR/ HIBOR/ Repo
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 3, 2017
Just over an hour later, it appears our warning was warranted, because according to the latest daily fixing of the Treasury Market Association, as a result of the PBOC’s massive liquidity drain which soaked up a nearly a third of a trillion Yuan in the past two weeks, the interbank market is freezing again as follows:
Most importantly, the overnight CNH Hibor rate soared 4.95% to 17.76%, the highest since September, andconfirming of yet another daily freeze in interbank lending simply so that the PBOC can punish all those who are still short the Yuan.
The good news: at least the UCDCNH tumbled by as much as 200 pips on the session. The bad news, it is unclear how much more of this daily volatile punishment Chinese and Hong Kong banks can take.
But wait, because the interbank freeze was not all, and in a repeat of two weeks ago when China’s halted the trading of its government bond future, the Shanghai Stock Exchange announced that Shanghai halted trading of the 3.99% government bond due May 2065 after “abnormal fluctuations.” It was not exactly clear what that particular phrase meant aside from “aggressive selling” as per the chart below.
According to a statement, trading was set to resume at 11:06 am after being halted at 10:36am, but not before the exchange called on investors to “remain rational and reminded them of trading risks.” In other words, please don’t sell, especially when the central bank just yanked a near record amount of liquidity from the market.
Source: Chinese Interbank Lending Freezes; Government Bond Trading Halted After Massive PBOC Liquidity Drain
By Tyler Durden
It won’t be the first time Julian Assange was interviewed and asked whether the source of the hacked DNC and Podesta emails was Russia; however, it will be the first time everyone pays attention to his answer. Recall that the first such interview of Assange – when the question of who had sourced Wikileaks with the hacked emails came up – took place exactly two months ago, on November 3. Back then, in an interview televized by RT, John Pilger explicitly asked Asange where the emails in question had come from.
Assange’s response was straightforward: “The Clinton camp has been able to project a neo-McCarthyist hysteria that Russia is responsible for everything. Hillary Clinton has stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 US intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That’s false – we can say that the Russian government is not the source.”
That particular interview took place when Trump has losing badly in the polls, and as such few people paid attention: after all, what difference did it make who had leaked the Podesta emails: Hillary Clinton was assured to win (with a 90%+ probability according to the NYT and other “non-fake news” outlets).
Needless to say, the issue of Russian hacking has since come back with a vengeance, and culminated last week with Obama expelling 35 Russian diplomats in the greatest diplomatic escalation between the US and Russia in decades; an action which took place based on a flimsy 13-page DHS/FBI report which demonstrated that anyone could have hacked the DNC emails if only they spent a few dollars to purchase a piece of Ukranian PHP malware.
Which is why many more will pay attention to Assange’s next interview with Sean Hannity, which will air Tuesday on Fox News. According to a Fox News release, the two will discuss Russian hacking, the 2016 presidential election, and both the Obama and upcoming Trump administrations. It will air at 10 p.m. on Jan. 3, with additional portions of the interview airing throughout the week. As Variety adds, The interview will mark Assange’s first face-to-face cable news appearance. It is not, however, the first time he’s spoken publicly to Hannity. Most recently, in December, Assange called into Hannity’s radio show, in which the host gushed to Assange that “you’ve done us a favor” in exposing gaps in U.S. cybersecurity.
And while what Assange would say was rather predictable, as he would simply reiterate what he has said previously, courtesy of Real Clear Politics, we have an advance glimpse into the punchline, to wit:
HANNITY: Can you say to the American people, unequivocally, that you did not get this information about the DNC, John Podesta’s emails, can you tell the American people 1,000 percent that you did not get it from Russia or anybody associated with Russia?
ASSANGE: Yes. We can say, we have said, repeatedly that over the last two months that our source is not the Russian government and it is not a …read more
Source: Assange To Hannity: "Our Source Is Not The Russian Government"
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By Tyler Durden
The following dramatic time-lapse video, shows a wall of toxic smog rolling into Beijing over a 20-minute period collapsed into a 10 second video; it gives a glimpse of the pollution problem in China’s capital city. Chas Pope, a British engineering consultant working in Beijing, shot the video.
An air-quality index released by China’s municipal environmental protection bureau, which measures potentially hazardous particles in the air, hit 482 on Sunday, almost touching the 500 mark where the scale tops out, and far beyond the point deemed hazardous to health, according to the South China Morning Post.
“Everyone should avoid all physical activity outdoors,” a warning accompanying the reading warns. “People with heart or lung disease, older adults, and children should remain indoors and keep activity levels low.”
As a result of the heavy smog to hit much of northern China on Sunday, hundreds of flights were canceled and highways shut, disrupting the first day of the New Year holiday. The latest smog incident to hit Beijing, and which forced local authorities to extend an “orange alert” – the second highest level for air pollution until Jan. 4 – followed a similar hazardous smog alert in mid-December, leading authorities to order hundreds of factories to close and to restrict motorists to cut emissions.
The latest bout of air pollution began on Friday and is expected to persist until Thursday, although it will ease slightly on Monday, the last day of the New Year holiday according to ABC.
In Beijing, 126 flights were canceled at the city’s main airport and all buses from there to neighboring cities suspended, state news agency Xinhua said.
Average concentrations of small breathable particles known as PM2.5 were higher than 500 micrograms per cubic meter in Beijing – 50 times higher than World Health Organization recommendations.
In Tianjin, Beijing’s next door metropolis, the smog was not as serious but visibility much worse, with more than 300 flights canceled at Tianjin airport and conditions not expected to improve in the near term, the city government said. Xinhua said highways into and out of the city were also closed.
In Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei province that surrounds most of Beijing, about two dozen flights were canceled and eight flights diverted to other airports because of the smog, the People’s Daily said on its website.
A total of 24 Chinese cities have issued red alerts for the current round of pollution, which mandate measures like limiting car usage and closing factories, while 21 have issued orange alerts, including Beijing and Tianjin.
As Reuters notes, Pollution alerts are common in northern China, especially during winter when energy demand, much of it met by coal, soars. The country’s northern provinces mostly rely on the burning of hundreds of millions of tonnes of coal each year for heating during northern China’s bitterly cold winters.
China began a “war on pollution” in 2014 amid concerns its heavy industrial past was tarnishing its global reputation and holding back its future development, but it has struggled …read more
Source: Dramatic Time-Lapse Video Captures Arrival Of Beijing Smog Cloud
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,
Edward Jay Epstein has an op-ed in the Wall Street journal promoting his new book “How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft”.
Epstein discusses the Fable of Edward Snowden
At the forefront of Epstein’s claims is the fact that Snowden lied. “As he seeks a pardon, the NSA thief has told multiple lies about what he stole and his dealings with Russian intelligence,” says Epstein.
Of all the lies that Edward Snowden has told since his massive theft of secrets from the National Security Agency and his journey to Russia via Hong Kong in 2013, none is more provocative than the claim that he never intended to engage in espionage, and was only a “whistleblower” seeking to expose the overreach of NSA’s information gathering. With the clock ticking on Mr. Snowden’s chance of a pardon, now is a good time to review what we have learned about his real mission.
Mr. Snowden’s theft of America’s most closely guarded communication secrets occurred in May 2013, according to the criminal complaint filed against him by federal prosecutors the following month. At the time Mr. Snowden was a 29-year-old technologist working as an analyst-in-training for the consulting firm of Booz Allen Hamilton at the regional base of the National Security Agency (NSA) in Oahu, Hawaii. On May 20, only some six weeks after his job there began, he failed to show up for work, emailing his supervisor that he was at the hospital being tested for epilepsy.
This excuse was untrue. Mr. Snowden was not even in Hawaii. He was in Hong Kong. He had flown there with a cache of secret data that he had stolen from the NSA.
Well la-de-friggin da. The idiocy of those opening paragraphs is obvious to the world.
What was Snowden supposed to say? “Hey guys I am not coming into work because I stole documents and I am meeting up with Greenwald?”
So of course Snowden lied… he had to lie.
It was not the quantity of Mr. Snowden’s theft but the quality that was most telling. Mr. Snowden’s theft put documents at risk that could reveal the NSA’s Level 3 tool kit—a reference to documents containing the NSA’s most-important sources and methods. Since the agency was created in 1952, Russia and other adversary nations had been trying to penetrate its Level-3 secrets without great success.
Yet it was precisely these secrets that Mr. Snowden changed jobs to steal. In an interview in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post on June 15, 2013, he said he sought to work on a Booz Allen contract at the CIA, even at a cut in pay, because it gave him access to secret lists of computers that the NSA was tapping into around the world.
Snowden figured out the NSA was involved in illegal activity and he wanted to investigate the depth of it. He succeeded. Congratulations to Snowden for a job well done.
In October 2014, he told the editor of the Nation, “I’m …read more
Source: Edward Snowden Trashed In Absurd WSJ Op-Ed
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By Tyler Durden
Authored by BelowGotham.com's Bill Blunden,
The New York Times has published an interactive piece which encapsulates, in all of 200 words, the alleged campaign by Russian hackers to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. Yet the media’s framing of events eschews basic facts – the actual content of the leaks – in favor of screaming “thief” at the top of its lungs.
And so the following 200-word summary is presented as an antidote to the establishment’s clumsy post-election messaging…
Someone delivers exact copies of emails written by Democratic Party mandarins into the public record. These messages are subsequently posted online. Thank you WikiLeaks!
Several email threads demonstrate that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) secretly ganged up on Bernie Sanders to undermine his campaign.
Hillary Clinton, who made over a hundred million in speaking fees with her husband, furtively reassures American oligarchs that her “private position” on economic issues won’t threaten their bottom line. In one related email which highlights big money in politics, a wealthy donor jokes “I guess it takes a study to point out the obvious.”
Voters learn that the DNC leveraged its extensive contacts with the media to manipulate coverage in an effort to elevate Trump. The DNC’s strategy document includes a list of Republican “Pied Pipers” which the media was told to “take seriously.”
The Democratic elites become desperate. Rather than accept their party’s role in Trump’s victory and their betrayal of the working class, they decide to blame Russian Hackers.
The Washington Post hyperventilates about Russian Hackers “penetrating” a utility in Vermont. The headline is exposed as a shameless distortion.
Source: The Russian Hacking Frenzy (Summed Up In 200 Words)
By Tyler Durden
In an oddly self-reflective moment of realization, The New York Times' investigative reporter James Risen, writes an oddly un-liberal op-ed pointing out the hypocrisy of Obama administration proclamations with regard 'free press' and transparency and the awkwardly dismal facts on the ground.
If Donald J. Trump decides as president to throw a whistle-blower in jail for trying to talk to a reporter, or gets the F.B.I. to spy on a journalist, he will have one man to thank for bequeathing him such expansive power: Barack Obama.
Mr. Trump made his animus toward the news media clear during the presidential campaign, often expressing his disgust with coverage through Twitter or in diatribes at rallies. So if his campaign is any guide, Mr. Trump seems likely to enthusiastically embrace the aggressive crackdown on journalists and whistle-blowers that is an important yet little understood component of Mr. Obama’s presidential legacy.
Criticism of Mr. Obama’s stance on press freedom, government transparency and secrecy is hotly disputed by the White House, but many journalism groups say the record is clear. Over the past eight years, the administration has prosecuted nine cases involving whistle-blowers and leakers, compared with only three by all previous administrations combined. It has repeatedly used the Espionage Act, a relic of World War I-era red-baiting, not to prosecute spies but to go after government officials who talked to journalists.
Under Mr. Obama, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. have spied on reporters by monitoring their phone records, labeled one journalist an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal case for simply doing reporting and issued subpoenas to other reporters to try to force them to reveal their sources and testify in criminal cases.
I experienced this pressure firsthand when the administration tried to compel me to testify to reveal my confidential sources in a criminal leak investigation. The Justice Department finally relented — even though it had already won a seven-year court battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court to force me to testify — most likely because they feared the negative publicity that would come from sending a New York Times reporter to jail.
In an interview last May, President Obama pushed back on the criticism that his administration had been engaged in a war on the press. He argued that the number of leak prosecutions his administration had brought had been small and that some of those cases were inherited from the George W. Bush administration.
“I am a strong believer in the First Amendment and the need for journalists to pursue every lead and every angle,” Mr. Obama said in an interview with the Rutgers University student newspaper. “I think that when you hear stories about us cracking down on whistle-blowers or whatnot, we’re talking about a really small sample.
“Some of them are serious,” he continued, “where you had purposeful leaks of information that could harm or threaten operations or individuals who were in the field involved with really sensitive national security issues.”
But critics say the crackdown has had a …read more
Source: NYT Reporter Writes: "If Donald Trump Targets Journalists, Thank Obama"
An interview with Joe Scarborough, of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” who’s been publicly criticizing other journalists on Twitter after a report that he was at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago during a New Year’s Eve party held there. …read more
Source: Joe Scarborough against the world
By Tyler Durden
In a time of great change; upheaval of norms and establishment status quo dissolution, there is one steadfast member of the elite that the world can rely on to never change – no matter how the facts around him do. Nobel-prize-winner Paul Krugman has begun the year as he ended the last, with a New York Times' op-ed exclaiming that “America has become a 'Stan'.”
In 2015 the city of Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, was graced with a new public monument: a giant gold-plated sculpture portraying the country’s president on horseback. This may strike you as a bit excessive. But cults of personality are actually the norm in the “stans,” the Central Asian countries that emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union, all of which are ruled by strongmen who surround themselves with tiny cliques of wealthy crony capitalists.
Americans used to find the antics of these regimes, with their tinpot dictators, funny. But who’s laughing now?
We are, after all, about to hand over power to a man who has spent his whole adult life trying to build a cult of personality around himself; remember, his “charitable” foundation spent a lot of money buying a six-foot portrait of its founder. Meanwhile, one look at his Twitter account is enough to show that victory has done nothing to slake his thirst for ego gratification. So we can expect lots of self-aggrandizement once he’s in office. I don’t think it will go as far as gold-plated statues, but really, who knows?
Meanwhile, with only a couple of weeks until Inauguration Day, Donald Trump has done nothing substantive to reduce the unprecedented — or, as he famously wrote on Twitter, “unpresidented” — conflicts of interest created by his business empire. Pretty clearly, he never will — in fact, he’s already in effect using political office to enrich himself, with some of the most blatant examples involving foreign governments steering business to Trump hotels.
This means that Mr. Trump will be in violation of the spirit, and arguably the letter, of the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which bars gifts or profits from foreign leaders, the instant he recites the oath of office. But who’s going to hold him accountable? Some prominent Republicans are already suggesting that, rather than enforcing the ethics laws, Congress should simply change them to accommodate the great man.
And the corruption won’t be limited to the very top: The new administration seems set to bring blatant self-dealing into the center of our political system. Abraham Lincoln may have led a team of rivals; Donald Trump seems to be assembling a team of cronies, choosing billionaires with obvious, deep conflicts of interest for many key positions in his administration.
In short, America is rapidly turning into a stan.
I know that many people are still trying to convince themselves that the incoming administration will govern normally, despite the obviously undemocratic instincts of the new commander in chief and the questionable legitimacy of the process that brought him to power. Some Trump …read more
Source: New Year, Same Sh!t: Krugman Loses It, Fears "Era Of Epic Corruption" Ahead In ‘Trumpistan’
Welcome to Esh Carmel Blog.
