Seth Rich

Exploration of Conspiracy Theories from Perspective of Esoteric Traditions

Moderator: yorick

Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Sun Feb 11, 2018 2:14 am

Those pesky Russians again.
Very Funny stuff. Best entertainment we can hope for for our tax dollar. The Italians still get a better deal I think..



CIA denies report over mystery Russian who promised Trump info

yahoo.com

Washington (AFP) - The CIA on Saturday categorically denied reports that it was fleeced by a mystery Russian who promised compromising information on US President Donald Trump.

The secretive agency rarely issues any kind of comment, but came out to deny the report in The New York Times and a similar one in The Intercept, an online journal focusing on national security issues.

"The fictional story that CIA was bilked out of $100,000 is patently false," the Central Intelligence Agency said in a statement sent to AFP.

"The people swindled here were James Risen and Matt Rosenberg," the CIA said, referring to Times reporter Rosenberg, who wrote the story, and Risen, a former Times reporter who authored The Intercept's article.

Both reports appeared on Friday.

The president tweeted approvingly that The Times article shows a need to "drain the swamp" in Washington.

In a story worthy of a John le Carre novel that included secret USB-drive handovers in a small Berlin bar and coded messages delivered over the National Security Agency's Twitter account, CIA agents spent much of last year trying to buy back from the Russians hacking programs stolen from the NSA, the Times reported.

The seller, who was not identified but had suspected links to both cyber criminals and Russian intelligence, tantalized the US spies with an offer of the NSA hacking tools that had been advertised for sale online by a group called the Shadow Brokers.

Some of the tools, developed by the NSA to break into the computers of US rivals, were used by other hackers last year to crack or infect computer systems around the world. The Times described the Americans as "desperate" to get the tools back.

Reached through a chain of intermediaries, the seller reportedly wanted $1 million after quickly dropping his opening demand of about $10 million.

The $100,000 was an initial payment by US agents still dubious he really had what he was promising.

In its report, the Times cited US and European intelligence officials, the Russian, and communications the newspaper reviewed.

The seller also repeatedly pressed US agents with offers of compromising materials, or kompromat, on Trump, the Times said.

- 'Off the books' -

But an investigation was already under way in Washington on possible links between Moscow and Trump's 2016 election campaign, and the US agents reportedly did not want to get involved in anything that smelled of the politics back home.

US intelligence officials say that Russia interfered with the election to help elect Trump, and that it continues to use disinformation to sow confusion in the American political system.

The Intercept reported that the "off-the-books communications channel" with Russia created rifts in the CIA. The agency is led by Trump loyalist Mike Pompeo, but many of its staffers are still smarting over Trump's repeated harsh comments about the intelligence community's role in the Russia meddling investigation.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is probing the possible links between Trump's presidential campaign and Moscow, as well as possible obstruction of justice.

Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu said in a tweet Friday that Risen's article "suggests the CIA Director fears getting information damaging to @realDonaldTrump that is being offered by Russians."

If that's true, Lieu said, "the CIA Director needs to explain his actions to Congress. He took an oath to the Constitution, not to Trump."

Trump on Saturday referred favorably to the Times article about the Russian who "sold phony secrets on 'Trump' to the US," and noted the operative reportedly had drastically lowered his original price.

"I hope people are now seeing and understanding what is going on here. It is all now starting to come out -- DRAIN THE SWAMP!" he tweeted, in a reference to what he sees as a need for reform.

Trump has frequently criticized the Times, which has published numerous investigative reports about him and his administration, calling it a "failing" newspaper providing "fake news."

Trump has repeatedly denied any collusion with Russia.

The Times reported that, in the end, the deal with the Russian broke down last month as the Russian failed to come up with any of the sought-after NSA materials, and the Trump-related material was either already known or untrustworthy.

The Russian was told by the Americans to leave Western Europe and not return, according to the Times.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/cia-denies-r ... 49595.html
33




AND..
(I found the audio of Schiff's conversation with the Russians really funny. The "Odessa" Ref , and .. "Uncle Mischa", really got me laughing. And, maybe the best stuff I've heard since Carlin: "And I also would like to advise you when you or your colleagues will meet with Mr Trump I advise you to tell him first part of the password, 'The weather is good on Deribasivska,' and look at how his face will change color." The audio can be found on a number of web sites.) kd



LISTEN To Adam Schiff Get Pranked on Trump Dirt By Russian Comics

Big League Politics | 2018-02-06T17:17:49+00:00

Democratic House Intelligence Committee ranking member Rep. Adam Schiff was pranked by a pair of Russian comedians shopping fake dirt on President Donald Trump.

The existence of the audiotape, broken by The Atlantic and presented below, proves Schiff’s hunger for anti-Trump material that he could use in his investigations.

Comedians Vovan and Lexus, posing as Ukrainian politicians, offered Schiff naked pictures of Trump, and spun a fable about Trump’s supposed interactions with Russian celebrities.

“Okay. And so Putin was made aware of the availability of the compromising material?” Schiff asked.

Schiff asked if information could be turned over to his committee and to the FBI that could corroborate the claims.

Schiff clearly fell for the subterfuge, pledging to “have my staff follow up to get spellings” of names and locations.

“Obviously we would welcome a chance to get copies of those recordings,” Schiff said.

“I’ll be in touch with the FBI about this,” Schiff added.

https://bigleaguepolitics.com/listen-ad ... an-comics/
33




READ HOW RUSSIAN PRANKSTERS TOLD DEMOCRAT ADAM SCHIFF THEY HAD 'KOMPROMAT' ON PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP

Mail Online | 2018-02-06T20:13:34+0000

Adam Schiff: Hi, how are you?

Caller: Hello Mr. Schiff, thank you for your time.

Schiff: Thank you, Chairman. I appreciate the opportunity to speak to you.

Caller: I know that you work for investigation regarding Trump and Russian government.

Schiff: Yes

Caller: We have some important information about it.

Schiff: And that is documented as well in materials you want to provide to us?

Caller: Yes. Could I explain you where we are?

Schiff: Yes of course. But again, I would caution that our Russian friends may be listening to the conversation so I wouldn't share anything over the phone that you wouldn't want them to hear.

Caller: No, I don't think that will impact on our investigation.

Schiff: Yes. Please, go ahead then.

Caller: In November 2013, Mr. Trump visited Moscow, it was competition Miss Universe. There he met with Russian journalist and celebrity Ksenia Sobchak.

Schiff: I'm sorry, can you explain that again? While he was in Moscow in November 2013 he met with a journalist?

Caller: Well, she's poor journalist. But anyway, she became famous because Putin is her godfather.

Schiff: Okay. Putin godfather, okay.

Caller: She also known as the person who provide support for oligarchs. She met with Trump and she brought him one of Russian girl celebrities, Olga Buzova, who's also known as person who's [unintelligible].

Schiff: Okay, and how do you spell her name?

Caller: Olga Buzova.

Schiff: So Olga Buzova is a friend of the reporter?

Caller: Yes, she's a friend of reporter and I think a special agent of Russia Secret Service Ksenia Sobchak.

Schiff: That Sobchak is or Olga is?

Caller: No, Sobchak is [unintelligible]

Schiff: Okay. So Buzova met with Trump in New York at some point after the 2013 Miss Universe.

Caller: Yes, absolutely. And she got compromising materials on Trump after their short relations.

Schiff: Okay. And what's the nature of the Kompromat?

Caller: Well, there were pictures of naked Trump.

Schiff: Okay. And so Putin was made aware of the availability of the comprising material?

Caller: Yes, of course. Buzova shared those materials with Sobchak and Sobchak shared those materials with Putin, because she's the goddaughter of Putin. And Putin decided to press Trump.

Schiff: And the materials you could provide to the committee or to the FBI, would they corroborate this allegation?

Caller: Sure, of course. When they were in Ukraine we got their conversation by the phone where they are discussing those compromising materials. We are ready to provide it.

Schiff: So you have recordings of both Sobchak and Buzova where they are discussing the compromising material on Trump?

Caller: Absolutely, and we also know who was a mediator between Trump and Russian government who met with ex-advisor of Trump, Mr. Flynn. It was Russian singer, very famous singer, Arkadiy Ukupnik, who met with Mr. Flynn on Brighton Beach in Brooklyn in special Russian café Langeron.

Schiff: What's that again?

Caller: Langeron.

Schiff: Langeron?

Caller: Yes, it's on Brighton Beach. It's a Russian district in Brooklyn.

Schiff: And do you know what was discussed?

Caller: They discussed many things. But the most interesting thing is they used a special password for their meetings. When they met each other they said 'The weather is good on Deribasivska.'

Schiff: The weather is good in – where?

Caller: 'The weather is good on Deribasivska.' That is the name of a street in Odessa. Did you hear?

Schiff: Yes, I did. So it's a street in Odessa?

Caller: Yes.

Schiff: And the code word is 'Weather is good on 'Zerabasta'?'

Caller: Deribasivskaya. Deribasivskaya.

Schiff: Okay. And I'll have my staff call up to get spellings and more details on this.

Caller: The next part of their password was, 'It rains again on Brighton Beach.'

Schiff: 'It rains again on Brighton Beach.'

Caller: Yes. On that meeting, Ukupnik told Flynn that all those compromising materials will never be released if Trump will cancel all the Russian sanctions.

Schiff: Okay. Well obviously we would welcome the chance to get copies of those recordings. So we will try to work with the FBI to figure out along with your staff how we can obtain copies of those.

Caller: Of course we will provide you all our copies of all our materials. But I also would like to let you know that Sobchak and Buzova will pretty soon visit our country and we could arrest them and deliver them to your embassy and we also could extradite them to your country and you can put them to your special jail Guantanamo.

Schiff: Well, I'll be in touch with the FBI about this. And we'll make arrangements with your staff. I think it probably would be best to provide these materials both to our committee and to the FBI. So we'll make arrangements between my staff and yours on how to facilitate that. And we'll also obviously let the FBI know about Buzova and Sobchak's plans to travel to Ukraine.

Caller: I also advise you to check all Sobchak's visits in the West because she was in the West very often and suggest you check what she did there actually. And I also would like to look at Russian café on Brighton Beach Langeron and especially on head of Russian Mafia Uncle Mischa.

Schiff: Uncle Mischa? In Brighton Beach?

Caller: Yes, he's the head of Russian mafia. And he's located on that restaurant on Brighton Beach.

Schiff: Okay.

Caller: I just want to advise you just to look at them, please.

Rep. Schiff: Alrighty. This was very helpful, I appreciate it. Anything else you wanted to add today?

Caller: Well I hope that my information will be useful for you and your committee. And I also would like to advise you when you or your colleagues will meet with Mr Trump I advise you to tell him first part of the password, 'The weather is good on Deribasivska,' and look at how his face will change color.

Schiff: And so those passwords were used with Mr. Trump?

Caller: Yes, of course.

Rep. Schiff: Okay. Well thank you very much. We will be back in touch with you through our staff to make arrangements to obtain these materials for our committee and the FBI. I appreciate you reaching out to us.

Caller: Well let's be in touch and wait for your response from FBI.

Schiff: Excellent. I'll have them follow up as soon as possible, and I thank you again. Goodbye.



© Associated Newspapers Ltd
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... p-pic.html
kinderdigi
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Wed Feb 14, 2018 1:23 am

Operation Ivy Bells

tallman

everything2.com | Mon Jun 09 2003 at 2:06:40

A U.S. Navy and NSA plot to bug Soviet underwater communications cables in the Sea of Okhotsk. Submarines periodically serviced the device and recovered tapes from it, providing U.S. Intelligence with tons of valuable data. One intelligence officersecond-oldest profession

Targeting Communications
Underwater cables play a dominant role in international telecommunications since they offer a much larger capacity than the limited bandwidth available for space systems. Soviet defense officials insisted on constant reports from the field, but to transmit that information safely over the air would require a painstaking and intensive encryption effort. Submarine cables also appear to be intrinsically secure because of the nature of the ocean environment. Or, so the Soviets thought.

Captain James F. Bradley knew this, and thus surmised that there would be a communications cable system running from the Soviet Union's missile submarine base at Petropavlovsk (located on the KamchatkaPeninsula, northeast of Japan) under the Sea of Okhotsk to join land cables going to Pacific Fleet headquarters near Vladivostok (north of Japan) and then on to Moscow.

In late 1970, sitting in his Pentagon office at 3 a.m., Bradley could just imagine the intelligence windfall that would occur if one of his subs was able to find the underwater communications cable and tap it. It would provide a window to the heart and soul of Soviet leaders, including technical analysis free from propaganda, reports on the abilities and problems with Soviet submarines, tactical patrol plans, and maybe even assessments of ICBM test flights that were known to occur in the area (and which the U.S. knew frustratingly little about).

There were a few tiny little problems with Bradley's grand plan, of course. To start, Bradley had no proof that this cable even existed at all, and even if he did there was no way to really tell where it lay beneath the 611,000-square-mile expanse of the Okhotsk. He couldn't very comfortably justify the risk of sending a U.S. submarine into Soviet waters (if the sub got caught, the Soviets would probably see the intrusion as an act of piracy, and try to sink or destroy her, forcing a dangerous international incident) on a hunch that a cable, which couldn't be more than 5 inches wide, might be somewhere in the general area.

Sitting in his office at 3 a.m., Bradley cleared his mind of the stress and obligations of the business of Naval intelligence, thought back to his childhood, and came up with a solution so simple and strange that it might just be true. He remembered the riverboat rides along the Mississippi that his mother used to take him on in the 1930s. He grew up on riverboats, passing the time with the steamer captains in the pilothouse. From there he had a clear view of the river, and he could see a series of signs placed discreetly along the shore. Most of these signs marked mileage and locationphone or utility cable in the shallows. Bradley snapped back to reality, and wondered to himself: Could what was true of the Mississippi also be true of the Okhotsk? This was how his sub would find the cable!

Funding and Politics
The idea of tapping Soviet underwater communications was nothing new. Bradley and his team had been dreaming up these types of operations for years, but the technology to do so was only just becoming available (this included not only deep sea diving, but also the physical ability to tap the lines without being detected). If he wanted this to succeed, he would need to secure funding and political support. Bradley had earned the respect and trust of most of the field personnel, so it wouldn't be hard to field a crew for the daring mission (indeed, the daring of the cable-tapping mission would make it easier to sell). Garnering Washington's support would be a little trickier. The very idea of the cable-tapping mission was still a shaky one, so it wasn't easy. In the end, Bradley was able to meet with Henry Kissinger and his top deputy, General Alexander Haig, and won approval for the mission.

USS Halibut and the First Mission
The mission wasn't explicitly planned to find a submarine cable, but rather, to find and recover pieces of a new and deadly Soviet ship-to-ship missile, known to be tested in the Okhotsk. The ship chosen to carry out the mission was the USS Halibut, a truly goofyhumpBat CaveFish) and a huge Univac computer (a rarity at the time).

Halibut and its Fish had enjoyed a moderate degree of success (and its share of frustrations), which allowed Bradley to again refit it for the cable-tapping operation. This new refit added yet another ugly hump to the boat, a secret and crucial piece of equipment that was so well hidden that the Navy proudly advertised its presence. In fact, the media even praised the Navy for relaxing the secrets surrounding Halibut. The extra hump was a deep-submergence rescue vehicle (DSRV) - at least, that's what it looked like. In reality, the hump wasn't a DSRV at all, but a divers' decompression and lockout chamber that was welded to the hull.

In the fall of 1971, Halibut set out on its new mission. It took nearly a month to even reach the Okhotsk, and several hours to get inside the sea. The way in was shallow and narrow, but Halibut's crew managed. They were in. Still, they took elaborate precautions to make sure they weren't being followed, and they were careful not to expose themselves on the surface for too long.

After about a week of searching, they found it. The Russianvideo feed from the Fish as they navigated the murky waters. Several hours later, they found what looked like a bump in the sand. After closer examination, they were convinced they had found the cable.

A diving crew was readied in the fake DSRV, and sent out with the tapping device. The device was about 3 feet long, and it contained a recorder filled with big rolls of tape. It worked through induction, so there was no need to cut into the cable (risking an electrical short from the seeping seawater). They remained there for some time, collecting an adequate sample of Soviet voice and data transmissions. Eventually the diving crew returned and the Halibut set off for a Soviet test range to look for those ship-to-ship missiles.

Though it sounds tedious and difficult, the mission went unbelievably smoothly. The Halibut had enjoyed some moderate success in the past, but it was also rife with frustrations and failures. The Fish that had worked so well in finding the cable, were much more painful on previous missions, their towing lines constantly getting snagged or cut, and their picture was infamously poor. In fact, the mission went so well that Halibut was able to go to a Soviet test range to look for pieces of the new missile (which made use of a new kind of infraredguidance system that the U.S. wasn't able to counter). Other spy subs were able to locate where the tests occurred, but only the Halibut could send divers out to retrieve the pieces, which they did.

Upon their return, the tapes from the cable tap were immediately transported to the National Security Agency complex at Fort Meade. This is where some of the nation's top mathematicians and scientists worked to break Soviet codes. There were also thousands of Russian linguists and analysts looking over decoded communications. They immediately got to work on the tapes from the cable tap.

Meanwhile, the missile fragments that were recovered from the Soviet test range were also being analyzed. They never did manage to find the new infrared guidance system (it was assumed that the devices must not have survived impact), but they did find other crucial parts of the Soviet missile, giving U.S. engineers some help in building a countermeasure.

Eventually, word came from the NSA that Bradley's guess had been correct. The recordings were pure military gold: conversations between the submarine base and high level Soviet Navy officials, some of them unencrypted or coded only in simplistic ways. Nothing like this existed in U.S. intelligence. For the first time ever, the U.S. was getting a look at the Soviet Navy's fears and frustrations, its assessments of its own successes and failures, and its intentions. Not only that, but the potential for the tap had yet to be fully realized. The first tap was merely a test, conducted over only a few days worth of communications.

Next Steps
The next step was clear. Bradley wanted to tap as many of the lines as possible, and he wanted a device that could record for several months at a time. Halibut would place the tap one year, then retrieve the tap the next year. Bell Laboratories developed a new recorder for Bradley's mission. Nearly 20 feet long and more than 3 feet wide, it weighed about 6 tons and utilized a form of nuclear power. Leaving the device behind was risky, so Bradley's group wrote up some highly classified papers that argued that the use of an induction device was legal.

At this point, Bradley was able to secure a more formal declaration of political support from Washington, and the Halibut was off again. Halibut was again successful, though she was beginning to show signs of her age.

The intelligence gained from the recordings was invaluable. No human agent or standard spyIvy Bells

Indeed, the Okhotsk operations were so successful that the Navy later took the opportunity to tap underwater communications cables in the Barents sea, gaining even more crucial insight into the Soviet Navy. Such a tap was not possible with the Halibut, she was too old and too noisy, and though her special modifications got the job done, they were far from ideal. The Barents wasn't as desolate as Okhotsk, and it was difficult water to navigate. The USS Parche

Crisis!
All throughout the 1970s, the cable tapping operations in the Okhotsk continued. The Halibut's replacement, the USS Seawolf, handled the job until the early 1980s, when she was actually detected limping back home after sustaining some damage in an accident caused by bad weather and some equipment failures. The boat had actually fallen onto the sea's floor, landing right on top of the communications wire. She was able to make it back home, but satellites uncovered evidence that the Soviets had found the cable tap in Okhotsk. Nobody knew how, of course. The operation may have been compromised by Seawolf's drop onto the cable or by a mole within the crew, or, as unthinkable as it might be, among the few intelligence officers who knew about the taps in the first place.

As time passed, and all the available intelligence was gathered and analyzed, it became clear that the Seawolf's misadventures didn't line up with other intelligence reports. At the time, it had been easy to blame Seawolf and her crew for compromising the operation - after all, she had slammed several tons of steel down on the Soviet cable. But the facts didn't line up. The Soviet survey team that found the cable taps was well on its way even before Seawolf fell on the cable. Some U.S. investigators thought that the search for the cable taps looked deliberate. Too deliberate. The Soviets must have been tipped off by a spy in U.S. intelligence. Rich Haver, a civilian Naval intelligence department head, wrote a report dated January 30, 1982 which suggested this, but the report, which was only seen by a few, was readily dismissed and his warnings were given little thought. Haver didn't have much traction when it came to possible intelligence leaks, as he had already tried to convince admirals to investigate a possible communications leak in the late 1970s.

At the time, there was a great deal of political wrangling between the Soviets and the U.S. The Soviets were deploying their nuclear subs to the Arctic, a brilliant move that could give them a slight edge in the nuclear balance. During this time (and indeed, all throughout the cable tapping operations) the recordings brought back from the Barents helped in convincing U.S. officials that the Soviet move to the Arctic and other Naval moves were not signs of aggression.

Betrayal!
By March of 1985, when Konstantin Chernenko died and the more tolerant Mikhail Gorbachev was appointed, tensions were no longer quite so high. Gorbachev seemed more willing to negotiate and consider major changes. Despite the progress being made on these fronts, U.S. authorities made some startling discoveries that underscored that the days of the old-style cold warriors and spies were not over.

In May of 1985, John A. Walker Jr. was arrested. Walker was a retired Navy submariner and communications specialist, and he had given all sorts of Naval communications secrets to the Soviets. He continued his espionage even after he retired, recruiting his brother and son, among others. He was only caught because his ex-wife turned him in when he tried to recruit their daughter.

In July, a high-ranking KGBVitaly Yurchenko, the defecting KGB agent offered up evidence of the Navy's second spy. The evidence was sparse, but it was enough. Ronald W. Pelton, a former NSA employee, was arrested on November 25, 1985. Among the intelligence he had offered the Soviets was information regarding a certain top-secret cable tapping operation in the Sea of Okhotsk.

Pelton had sold out the Okhotsk taps for $35,000.

Recent Activity
Cable tapping operations continued throughout the 1980s. After the unsettling news of the two spies in 1985, there were a lot of questions being asked by Congress and the media. The Navy managed to keep the focus away from the USS Parche and the the tapping operations in the Barents and other places.

As you might be able to figure out, the Navy has not exactly been forthcoming when it comes to its precious cable tapping operations. Much of what is known has come out only after the Soviet Union fell, and its not exactly clear just how much surveillance went on during the 1990s, though it is suspected that President Clinton agreed to continue the special projects submarine spy program, albeit with less of a focus on Russia. Parche came back from extensive overhauls in the mid 90s and is suspected to have continued its cable tapping operations. It is scheduled to be retired sometime in 2003, when it will be replaced by the USS Jimmy Carter, which has been undergoing a refitting of its own so that she can carry Parche's unique gear. - These locations are just rough approximations that I derived from looking at a map, just to give you an idea of where it was that I was talking about.
- I can't decide whether or not to be comforted or creeped out by the fact that there are people that are so dedicated to this country that they spend their twilight hours in the Pentagon dreaming up new and wierd ways to spy on our enemies. But that's another discussion for another node.
- Pelton was attempting to mask his bankruptcy and sold one of our nation's most important secrets for $35,000. U.S. cable tapping operations took years of research, millions of dollars in investments in technology, and risked our submariners' lives. Of course, Soviets had a somewhat more restrictive society, so a simple human spy might not have been as easy for us to find as it was for them (not to mention the fact that Aldrich Ames would later sell out all of our Soviet spies), but its worth noting that this is an example of the U.S. reliance on technology. Its an amazing feat and the research and technology were not exclusive to the cable tapping operations, to be sure, but the simple Soviet spy rings provide an interesting contrast. Sources:
90% of the above information was gleened from the book Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage, edited by Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew. Its an excellent book, with much more than just cable-tapping information (though there is also a lot more on cable tapping there as well). I found out about the book from some History Channel program that featured the Ivy Bells story...
The following are some online sources:
http://www.specialoperations.com/Operat ... bells.html
http://www.military.com/Content/MoreCon ... f_ivybells
http://www.randomhouse.com/features/spy ... 61219.html
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/nsa/stories/traitor/
http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/ic2000/ic2000.htm

Special thanks to Professor Pi and Caknuck of the Typo Death Squad for pointing out my many typos.
https://everything2.com/title/Operation+Ivy+Bells
kinderdigi
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Wed Feb 14, 2018 1:28 am

Operation Ivy Bells

blogspot.com | Sunday, September 12, 2010

Both the United States and the former Soviet Union ran numerous aggressive Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) operations against each other during the Cold War era. A most spectacular one was operation Ivy Bells, a top secret joint operation between the US Navy, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA). Ivy Bells enables the eavesdropping on high level communications of the Soviet Pacific Fleet.

Communications cables were, and still are, an interesting target for intelligence agencies. The 1953 Berlin Tunnel operation is a well known example of the tapping of a land cable. Especially in the pre-satellite era, undersea cables were the only method of high-volume communications between continents or islands. In the early 1970's, the US discovered the existence of such an undersea cable in the Sea of Okhotsk, in the north-east of the Soviet Union.

The cable connected the Soviet naval submarine base in Kamchatsky, north-east of the Kuril Islands, with Vladivostok Fleet headquarters in the south-west. Both bases played an important role in the Soviet Pacific Fleet communications. Although a very attractive intelligence target, the Sea of Okhotsk was Soviet territorial waters, forbidden for foreign ships and heavily protected. The Soviets also carried out many surface and subsurface naval exercises in these waters. An attractive target but far from friendly enviroment.

Despite the high risks to a SIGINT operation in that area, US intelligence could not pass this opportunity and started a most complex top secret operation to tap into the Okhotsk cable. In October 1971, the nuclear submarine USS Halibut (SSGN-587) entered the Sea of Okhotsk in search of the cable. Saturation divers with special rebreather equipment eventually found the cable at a depth of 400 feet (120 m) and installed a 3 feet (1 m) long tapping device, which was wrapped around the cable to register the signals by induction. This avoided the need for piercing trough the cable.

The signals were recorded on tapes that were recovered on a regular basis. To its surprise, NSA discovered that the Soviets felt so confident about the security of the undersea cable that the majority of the communications were unencrypted. Needles to say that the gained intelligence was invaluable. Due to its success, Bell Laboratories was asked to develop a new tapping device that could capture more lines simultaneously from the cable and could record for several months.

The new ingenious tap, which was installed the next year, measured 20 feet (6 m), weighed 6 tons and had a nuclear electrical power source. Each month, the USS Halibut divers retrieved the recording tapes and installed new ones. Back in the US, the tapes were analysed by the NSA and processed for further use in the intelligence community. It proved to be a spectacular intelligence coup. The tapes provided a front seat view on Soviet naval operations.


Operation Ivy Bells's success lead to further operations to install more advanced tapping devices onto other Soviet undersea cables across the world. Several other submarines were brought into the operation to install taps and retrieve recordings. The operation lasted for a decade, until surveillance satellites showed several Soviet war ships on top of the Okhotsk tap. A US submarine later discovered that the tapping device had disappeared. As it turned out in 1985, the top secret operation was betrayed in 1981 by Ronald Pelton, a former NSA employee. Nonetheless, US intelligence retrieved an enormous quantity of military information during the ten years of tapping the undersea cables, giving them an important lead in the Cold War.

More about Operation Ivy Bells on Special Operations Com and on Everything2


https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_7gRtgeipY_E/ ... ybells.jpg

https://rijmenants.blogspot.com/2009/12 ... bells.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4N-4ydW6Hk
kinderdigi
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Wed Feb 14, 2018 1:43 am

Secrets haunt the still-classified Operation Ivy Bells, a daring Cold War wiretapping operation conducted 400 feet underwater.

Matt Blitz

Popular Mechanics

It's the summer of 1972 and the U.S. is in the middle of pulling off the most daring, covert, and dangerous operation of the Cold War. Only a few months before, the signing of SALT I (Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty) limited the number of nuclear missiles of the world's two largest superpowers. Yet even with this well-publicized US/Soviet détente in place, a submerged American submarine rests mere miles from the Russian coastline.

At the bottom of the Sea of Okhotsk, the U.S. nuclear submarine Halibut silently listens to the secret conversations of the Soviet Union. With the Kremlin completely unaware, Navy divers emerge from a hidden compartment (referred to as the "Bat Cave") and walk along the bottom of the sea in complete darkness, wiretapping the Soviet's underwater communications line.

America wiretapped this particular Soviet communications cable for maybe a decade or more—and many details remain classified. It was the U.S.'s most ambitious wiretapping operation, until this point, in its entire history. This was Operation Ivy Bells.

Battle Plans and Mistresses

Down below the sea surface, the intel is flooding in. With the divers' taps in place, American communication techs onboard the Halibut gather a wide range of intelligence, from operational tactics to Soviet commanders' conversations with their mistresses. But up on the sea surface, a storm is brewing.

As the angry sea rocks the sub, the still-working divers are trapped outside the vessel in the murky cold water. Then, with a loud snap, the steel anchor lines break free. The Halibut drifts upwards, in danger of exposing itself to the enemy.

"If (they) had gotten caught, [they] had every reason to belief that [the Soviets] would have blown [them] away," says Sherry Sontag, who co-wrote the 1998 book Blind Man's Bluff.

Quickly, Captain John McNish makes a rather unconventional decision: to flood the sub. In a matter of seconds, the Halibut plops back down into the sea bottom's sandy muck. The divers scramble back into their decompression chamber (used toprevent the "bends") and an international crisis is averted—at least temporarily.

Days later and after the storm subsides, the Halibut finally emerges from its watery depths. The mission is a resounding success, and the sub is returning home with tapes of recorded Soviet Union voices discussing the secrets of a superpower. As W. Craig Reed wrote in his book Red November, it was like the U.S. placing "a glass against the Soviet Union's wall to hear their every word."




What Lies Beneath

This sub mission was one of several that made up the still-classified Operation Ivy Bells. It's not exactly a secret that the U.S. and USSR launched a silent intelligence war, one that lasted for decades and likely continues to this day, even after the fall of the Soviet Union. What made Operation Ivy Bells so unprecedented is the literal depths to which the U.S. government would go to spy on its Cold War rival.

According to Sontag's book, it was Captain James Bradley who first considered the possibility of an underwater wiretapping operation. A World War II and Vietnam War vet who had commanded ships in the heat of the battle, Bradley knew how to operate in close proximity to the enemy. In 1966, he became the undersea warfare director in the Office of Naval Intelligence, where he came up with the idea that forever shifted the Cold War in America's favor.

In 1968, Bradley devised and led a mission that sent the Halibut into the Pacific in search of the Soviet sub K-129, lost due to an internal explosion during a routine patrol. The Soviets' searched for months with little success, but they were missing an invaluable ally that aided the American quest: "the fish."

Built by Westinghouse Electric at an estimated cost of $5 million each, this was a two-ton underwater camera mounted inside a mini-sub, deployed while remaining tethered to the Halibut. The fish hovered just above the ocean floor taking pictures. "It was kinda like a sophisticated vacuum cleaner for your pool," Reed told Popular Mechanics.

While the covert mission to dredge up K-129 called Project Azorian was only a partial success, it proved the fish could capture images even in the dark waters of the ocean floor. But the Halibut and the fish's next mission would be much more complicated—and dangerous.

Bradley believed an unencrypted telephone line connected Petropavlovsk's submarine base (near the tip of Kamchatka peninsula) to Russia's mainland, likely running under the Sea of Okhotsk. Soviet cryptographers were notoriously backlogged and military officers needed fast communication between the Kremlin and Russia's most important naval base. So, Bradley theorized, the Soviet's solution was to deposit a communications line so deep underwater and close to Russia's shoreline that no one could access it.

Or so they thought.


The Challenges Ahead—and Below

Three obstacles stood in Bradley's way. First, the search area needed to be significantly narrowed to have any chance of finding the cables in 611,200 square miles of water. According to legend, the solution came to Bradley one morning in his Pentagon office. Daydreaming about his boyhood spent on the Mississippi River, Bradley remembered that there were signs near the shorelines warning boaters not to anchor due to utility lines at the bottom of the river. He realized that if there were location signs like this in America, there surely would be in Russia as well.

He was absolutely right. When the Halibut moved into the Sea of Okhotsk, they scanned the Siberian coast and found warning signs dotting its northernmost half, telling fisherman to avoid particular areas.

"The Soviets weren't trying to hide (the cables)," says Sontag, "They had no idea we could get that close...that we could send divers walking on the bottom that deep...or that we had the technology to tap it. No one had conceived anything like this before."

Within days, the Navy had found what they'd been looking for. Next, they needed to figure out how divers were going to go and stay that deep underwater for the several hours needed to complete the wiretapping. The answer was helium. Since the late 1950s, Navy Captain George F. Bond had been developing new methods, techniques, and gases that would allow divers to go deeper and stay submerged for longer. While his infamous Sealab project was shut down after the death of a diver, Bond proved that certain gas mixes could work.



We land mammals breathe in a cocktail of gases every day that is around 80 percent nitrogen and 20 percent oxygen, with a few other garnishes thrown in. When these gasses are compressed by water pressure, it causes nitrogen to build up in the blood. This can be an extremely dangerous condition for humans that can result in nitrogen narcosis or decompression sickness, a fatal embolism if the diver does not decompress properly while ascending. So instead, Ivy Bells substituted nitrogen for helium. Helium has a lower molecular weight than nitrogen and leaves human tissue more rapidly, making it perfect for a diving technique known as saturation diving.

With the search completed and the human element solved, the last complication involved the mechanics of the tap itself. To avoid shorting out the cable (and alarming the Soviets), the divers couldn't just open it up. Instead, the wiretap had to work through induction. The divers would need to place the tap by wrapping a connector around the comm line and then feed it into a three-foot-long reel-to-reel tape recorder.

The big technological problem wasn't pulling the signal out from the cable but separating the channels so someone could understand it. Running through that one cable was perhaps up to a dozen different lines, all with Soviet voices chattering away. As Reeds puts it, it was a "gargled cacophony" and nearly impossible to gather any real intelligence. For this reason, the first mission failed. "It was trial and error," says Reed, "When they first got the signals in, it was a mess."

But as the mission moved forward, the communication technicians jerry-rigged equipment that separated signals and drew out particular voices. Exactly what and how they did it remains a mystery as parts of Ivy Bells remains classified.

"These guys were the original makers... they were making it up as they went along," says Sontag regarding the operation's communication technicians. "No one else was doing underwater cable tapping. This was all brand new."


40 Years a Secret

Now retired, David LeJeune was a Navy saturation diver who participated in several later missions. Although he was unable to answer many questions, he says that the information that he and his fellow divers uncovered led to the successful completion of the SALT II talks, which was eventually signed in 1979 and restricted each country's nuclear delivery systems.

LeJeune also says the tech and gear they were using was cutting edge. "We were using technology that is so far advanced from the civilian community that the public doesn't know that capability even exists."

For a decade, the U.S. wiretapped this comm line at the bottom of the Sea of Okhotsk. The Halibut and other subs would venture into the Sea of Okhotsk a couple of times a year, picking up the tap and replacing it with a new and often more advanced one. It was an intelligence gold mine, consistently providing the U.S. with invaluable information.

"We didn't know... how much we were frightening (the Soviets)... until we listened to these tapes," says Sontag, "Very quickly, we pulled back from the brink. And this had a lot to do with it.... I think finding this information turned out to be the thing that let the Cold War end."

But in 1980, a former NSA employee named Ronald Peltonwalked into the Soviet Embassy in Washington D.C., and for $35,000, divulged the inner workings of Ivy Bells. With that, the operation abruptly ended—or so it was claimed.

Over three decades later, this type of wiretapping is thought to be largely obsolete. Thanks to the digital age, there are far more efficient, easier, and less risky ways to spy on someone's comms. However, these types of underwater cables still exist and are of great importance. As the New York Times reported in 2015, there are continued fears that these cables could be cut, effectively halting communications across the globe.

But, even though this type of surveillance may be old fashioned, Reed thinks it's possibly still happening today. "Submarines absolutely still have the capability to do these kind of missions and there are personnel that are still trained on how to do these missions," says Reed. "Whether or not those missions are still underway, that would be considered classified."



©2018 Hearst Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/techno ... retapping/

http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-bu ... ater-21370
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Wed Feb 14, 2018 4:02 am

Answering the question I asked last year:
This is easy to understand, even for the math challenged.


Good question - How fast are you moving through the universe right now?

by Marshall Brain

BrainStuff


TOPICS IN THIS POST

Chances are that you are sitting in a chair right now, so it seems like you are stationary. But in fact you are moving through the universe at a tremendous speed at this very moment. Let's take a look at where all that motion is coming from.

The first thing to consider is the earth's rotation. The earth is 24,900 miles in circumference at the equator, or 40,000 kilometers. The earth takes 24 hours to make one rotation. So:

24,900 / 24 = 1,037 MPH or 1,666 KPH

As you move toward the poles that number decreases. At the north pole the speed is zero and you are simply rotating in place at one rotation every 24 hours. So let's assume you are sitting somewhere in South Florida moving at about 1,000 miles per hour or 1,610 KPH.

The Earth is also making one orbit around the sun every year. That sounds like a long time, but the orbit is huge. The Earth is roughly 93 million miles (150 million km) away from the sun, giving its orbit a circumference of 584 million miles (942 million km). That works out to 66,666 MPH or 107,000 KPH.

If you are on the side of the planet where the planet's rotation is moving in the same direction as the orbital direction, these two speeds add together. If you are on the opposite side, they subtract. We are trying to calculate a maximum speed, so we will be adding.

Our solar system itself is also moving in an orbit around the galactic core. The solar system is something like 25,000 light years away from the center of the galaxy, and the galaxy makes one rotation every 250 million years or so. That gives the solar system a speed of something like 420,000 MPH or 675,000 KPH.

And then the galaxy itself is moving. According to this page:

So there is speculation that the galaxy is moving through the universe at a speed of 1,000 km/s, which means 3,600,000 KPH or 2,237,000 MPH.

Adding it all up, you get:

1000 + 66,666 + 420,000 + 2,237,000 = 2,724,666 MPH

Or

1,610 + 107,000 + 675,000 + 3,600,000 = 4,383,610 KPH

In other words, you are hurling through space at 2.7 million MPH (4.4 million KPH) even though it feels like you are sitting still.
https://www.brainstuffshow.com/blogs/go ... ht-now.htm

Mach only applies in a fluid.. so only on earth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_number

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_dynamics
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Wed Feb 14, 2018 5:58 pm

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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Wed Feb 14, 2018 6:10 pm

My favorite Russian humor web site:

http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Fri Feb 16, 2018 4:57 am

Just in case this story goes away..
The source is in question.


‘He was definitely not the only shooter’

Shepard Ambellas

Intellihub | 2018-02-15T09:53:12+00:00

PARKLAND, Fla. (INTELLIHUB) Stoneman High School student and Valentine’s Day shooting survivor Alexa Miednik told a reporter that she spoke with the alleged shooter Nikolas Cruz in the hallway just after shots rang out at the other end of the building and said she knows that there was definitely another shooter.

It appears that the mainstream media and authorities have been actively covering up the fact that at least one other shooter was on the ground at the school Wednesday.

The young lady said that she had just gotten back to her classroom after a bathroom break and was knocking on the classroom door when the fire bell rang which prompted the school’s principal to come over the loudspeaker and announce the evacuation.

“[…] the fire alarm went off and the principal came on the speaker and just said ‘everyone needs to evacuate right now,'” she explained. “As I was going down the stairs I heard a couple of shots fired.”

“Everyone was freaking out saying it was a gun, then, as we were walking, the whole class together, I was actually speaking to the suspect, Nikolas Cruz” Miednik maintained as she physically motioned her fingers to form air quotes around the word “suspect.”

The student confirmed that she was, in fact, speaking to Cruz in the hallway as they were making their way to the building’s exit along with others and admits that Cruz was “trouble in middle school.”

Astonishingly, while the two were conversing in the hallway before making their exit, Miednik said she jokingly told Cruz: “I’m surprised you weren’t the one that did it.”

According to the young lady Cruz then replied: “Huh?” [dumbfounded look]

When asked if she was scared, Miednik replied: “No not at the moment because there was obviously, definitely, another shooter involved.”

He was “definitely not” the only shooter, she said. “When shots were fired I saw him [right] after the fact, so, and the shots were coming from the other part of the building so there definitely had to be at least two shooters involved.”

Miednik did not see any wounded students.

Additionally, it was reported by the father of a student who attends the school that both a fire drill and an active shooter drill were scheduled for Wednesday.



©2018. INTELLIHUB.COM. All Rights Reserved.
https://www.intellihub.com/there-was-ob ... l-student/

33

Eyewitness says she heard shots fired down hall while talking to suspect!

Kit Daniels
Prison Planet.com
Feb. 15, 2018

Eyewitness Alexa Miednik, who believes there was a second shooter, said she was WALKING with accused suspect Nikolas Cruz (who the media previous spelled as Nicolas) after she heard shots being fired – and told Cruz she was glad “it wasn’t him” who was doing the shooting at the school in Florida:

"As I was going down the stairs I heard a couple of shots fired, everyone was freaking out – there was a gun, and as we were walking – the whole class together – I actually was speaking to the “suspect” [she even did air quotes] and as I was speaking with him, he seemed very… I don’t know what the word is I want to say… but he was very troubled in middle school and I joked to him about it and said “I’m surprised you weren’t the one who did it.”

Video:
https://www.prisonplanet.com/video-seco ... sacre.html
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Sun Feb 18, 2018 8:22 pm

Fl shooting:

Weird stuff, maybe a hack or some other glitch on the site? Still, pretty odd. I'm waiting to see if it's explained or taken down.
It reminds me of the WTC Building 7 footage that's still unexplained.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=677i43QfYpQ

"Florida Shooting posted 2 days BEFORE event on Google"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1yos5gbRGE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl1d4CvIxq8
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Sun Feb 18, 2018 10:25 pm

kinderdigi wrote:Fl shooting:

Weird stuff, maybe a hack or some other glitch on the site? Still, pretty odd. I'm waiting to see if it's explained or taken down.
It reminds me of the WTC Building 7 footage that's still unexplained.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=677i43QfYpQ

"Florida Shooting posted 2 days BEFORE event on Google"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1yos5gbRGE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl1d4CvIxq8



Google says..

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-dat ... 25248.html
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Sun Feb 18, 2018 10:50 pm

I do a lot of research on the web, both for work and for my interests. One benefit of my media work is that I meet many people. Several years ago I had a conversation with a women who was at a Silicon Valley event. She is an executive for Google. We talked about a lot of stuff. But, the thing that stood out from our conversation was her comment .."No one in our group searches with Google, we know better". She told me about Scroogle, which I used until Google forced a takedown. She said, we all use Scroogle: https://searchengineland.com/scroogle-o ... ner-112245

Since this conversation, I've been pretty sensitive to what I'm searching and where I'm doing it. I used an IronKey, with their private TOR network when serious stuff was done.

One friend, a former NSA employee, won't discuss various topics over the phone or email. We meet in person to talk. I don't mean this to sound clandestine. We have lunch at his favorite deli and talk. He's American born, has an expertise in SIGINT, and is fluent in English, his native tongue, and in Russian and Japanese. He owns a small consulting company. He has a number of computers in his office. None of them are connected to the web. He does web research by proxy. Many of his clients are Govt. Agencies. They communicate via secure fax.

Google was funded with seed money from the Intel establishment. Have a look at In-Q-Tel's list of venture capital recipients. The past startups are no longer on the site. https://www.iqt.org/

The following is long..
It's likely of little concern to most. But, if you travel extensively and report electronically, you might have a look.

PRISM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(su ... ce_program)

This list is old and may not have been accurate when published. But, it will given you some idea as per PRISM "(launch codes" was always my favorite).
http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-pris ... ing-2013-6

ECHELON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

In-Q-Tel Keyhole Google Earth and CIA
shulquist
Laboratory of Hidden Alternatives | November 13, 2011
EarthViewer 3D, and was created by Keyhole, Inc, a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) funded company acquired by Google in 2004.
It maps the Earth by the superimposition of images obtained from satellite imagery, aerial photography and GIS 3D globe
More:
https://laboratoryofhiddenalternatives. ... h-and-cia/



How The CIA Made Google

Zero Hedge

TwitterFacebookRedditEmailPrint
Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet...

Linton Wells II (right) former Pentagon chief information officer and assistant secretary of defense for networks, at a recent Pentagon Highlands Forum session. Rosemary Wenchel, a senior official in the US Department of Homeland Security, is sitting next to him

New Scientist magazine (paywall) has compared the Highlands Forum to elite meetings like “Davos, Ditchley and Aspen,” describing it as “far less well known, yet… arguably just as influential a talking shop.” Regular Forum meetings bring together “innovative people to consider interactions between policy and technology. Its biggest successes have been in the development of high-tech network-based warfare.”

Given Wells’ role in such a Forum, perhaps it was not surprising that his defense transformation white paper was able to have such a profound impact on actual Pentagon policy. But if that was the case, why had no one noticed?

Despite being sponsored by the Pentagon, I could find no official page on the DoD website about the Forum. Active and former US military and intelligence sources had never heard of it, and neither did national security journalists. I was baffled.

The Pentagon’s intellectual capital venture firm

In the prologue to his 2007 book, A Crowd of One: The Future of Individual Identity, John Clippinger, an MIT scientist of the Media Lab Human Dynamics Group, described how he participated in a “Highlands Forum” gathering, an “invitation-only meeting funded by the Department of Defense and chaired by the assistant for networks and information integration.” This was a senior DoD post overseeing operations and policies for the Pentagon’s most powerful spy agencies including the NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), among others. Starting from 2003, the position was transitioned into what is now the undersecretary of defense for intelligence. The Highlands Forum, Clippinger wrote, was founded by a retired US Navy captain named Dick O’Neill. Delegates include senior US military officials across numerous agencies and divisions?—?“captains, rear admirals, generals, colonels, majors and commanders” as well as “members of the DoD leadership.”

What at first appeared to be the Forum’s main website describes Highlands as “an informal cross-disciplinary network sponsored by Federal Government,” focusing on “information, science and technology.” Explanation is sparse, beyond a single ‘Department of Defense’ logo.

But Highlands also has another website describing itself as an “intellectual capital venture firm” with “extensive experience assisting corporations, organizations, and government leaders.” The firm provides a “wide range of services, including: strategic planning, scenario creation and gaming for expanding global markets,” as well as “working with clients to build strategies for execution.” ‘The Highlands Group Inc.,’ the website says, organizes a whole range of Forums on these issue.

For instance, in addition to the Highlands Forum, since 9/11 the Group runs the ‘Island Forum,’ an international event held in association with Singapore’s Ministry of Defense, which O’Neill oversees as “lead consultant.” The Singapore Ministry of Defense website describes the Island Forum as “patterned after the Highlands Forum organized for the US Department of Defense.” Documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden confirmed that Singapore played a key role in permitting the US and Australia to tap undersea cables to spy on Asian powers like Indonesia and Malaysia.

The Highlands Group website also reveals that Highlands is partnered with one of the most powerful defense contractors in the United States. Highlands is “supported by a network of companies and independent researchers,” including “our Highlands Forum partners for the past ten years at SAIC; and the vast Highlands network of participants in the Highlands Forum.”
SAIC stands for the US defense firm, Science Applications International Corporation, which changed its name to Leidos in 2013, operating SAIC as a subsidiary. SAIC/Leidos is among the top 10 largest defense contractors in the US, and works closely with the US intelligence community, especially the NSA. According to investigative journalist Tim Shorrock, the first to disclose the vast extent of the privatization of US intelligence with his seminal book Spies for Hire, SAIC has a “symbiotic relationship with the NSA: the agency is the company’s largest single customer and SAIC is the NSA’s largest contractor.”
Richard ‘Dick’ Patrick O’Neill, founding president of the Pentagon’s Highlands Forum

The full name of Captain “Dick” O’Neill, the founding president of the Highlands Forum, is Richard Patrick O’Neill, who after his work in the Navy joined the DoD. He served his last post as deputy for strategy and policy in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Defense for Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence, before setting up Highlands.

The Club of Yoda

But Clippinger also referred to another mysterious individual revered by Forum attendees:


“He sat at the back of the room, expressionless behind thick, black-rimmed glasses. I never heard him utter a word… Andrew (Andy) Marshall is an icon within DoD. Some call him Yoda, indicative of his mythical inscrutable status… He had served many administrations and was widely regarded as above partisan politics. He was a supporter of the Highlands Forum and a regular fixture from its beginning.”

Since 1973, Marshall has headed up one of the Pentagon’s most powerful agencies, the Office of Net Assessment (ONA), the US defense secretary’s internal ‘think tank’ which conducts highly classified research on future planning for defense policy across the US military and intelligence community. The ONA has played a key role in major Pentagon strategy initiatives, including Maritime Strategy, the Strategic Defense Initiative, the Competitive Strategies Initiative, and the Revolution in Military Affairs.
Andrew ‘Yoda’ Marshall, head of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA) and co-chair of the Highlands Forum, at an early Highlands event in 1996 at the Santa Fe Institute. Marshall is retiring as of January 2015

In a rare 2002 profile in Wired, reporter Douglas McGray described Andrew Marshall, now 93 years old, as “the DoD’s most elusive” but “one of its most influential” officials. McGray added that “Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz”?—?widely considered the hawks of the neoconservative movement in American politics?—?were among Marshall’s “star protégés.”

Speaking at a low-key Harvard University seminar a few months after 9/11, Highlands Forum founding president Richard O’Neill said that Marshall was much more than a “regular fixture” at the Forum. “Andy Marshall is our co-chair, so indirectly everything that we do goes back into Andy’s system,” he told the audience. “Directly, people who are in the Forum meetings may be going back to give briefings to Andy on a variety of topics and to synthesize things.” He also said that the Forum had a third co-chair: the director of the Defense Advanced Research and Projects Agency (DARPA), which at that time was a Rumsfeld appointee, Anthony J. Tether. Before joining DARPA, Tether was vice president of SAIC’s Advanced Technology Sector.
Anthony J. Tether, director of DARPA and co-chair of the Pentagon’s Highlands Forum from June 2001 to February 2009

The Highlands Forum’s influence on US defense policy has thus operated through three main channels: its sponsorship by the Office of the Secretary of Defense (around the middle of last decade this was transitioned specifically to the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, which is in charge of the main surveillance agencies); its direct link to Andrew ‘Yoda’ Marshall’s ONA; and its direct link to DARPA.
According to Clippinger in A Crowd of One, “what happens at informal gatherings such as the Highlands Forum could, over time and through unforeseen curious paths of influence, have enormous impact, not just within the DoD but throughout the world.” He wrote that the Forum’s ideas have “moved from being heretical to mainstream. Ideas that were anathema in 1999 had been adopted as policy just three years later.”

Although the Forum does not produce “consensus recommendations,” its impact is deeper than a traditional government advisory committee. “The ideas that emerge from meetings are available for use by decision-makers as well as by people from the think tanks,” according to O’Neill:


“We’ll include people from Booz, SAIC, RAND, or others at our meetings… We welcome that kind of cooperation, because, truthfully, they have the gravitas. They are there for the long haul and are able to influence government policies with real scholarly work… We produce ideas and interaction and networks for these people to take and use as they need them.”

My repeated requests to O’Neill for information on his work at the Highlands Forum were ignored. The Department of Defense also did not respond to multiple requests for information and comment on the Forum.

Information warfare

The Highlands Forum has served as a two-way ‘influence bridge’: on the one hand, for the shadow network of private contractors to influence the formulation of information operations policy across US military intelligence; and on the other, for the Pentagon to influence what is going on in the private sector. There is no clearer evidence of this than the truly instrumental role of the Forum in incubating the idea of mass surveillance as a mechanism to dominate information on a global scale.

In 1989, Richard O’Neill, then a US Navy cryptologist, wrote a paper for the US Naval War College, ‘Toward a methodology for perception management.’ In his book, Future Wars, Col. John Alexander, then a senior officer in the US Army’s Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), records that O’Neill’s paper for the first time outlined a strategy for “perception management” as part of information warfare (IW). O’Neill’s proposed strategy identified three categories of targets for IW: adversaries, so they believe they are vulnerable; potential partners, “so they perceive the cause [of war] as just”; and finally, civilian populations and the political leadership so they “perceive the cost as worth the effort.” A secret briefing based on O’Neill’s work “made its way to the top leadership” at DoD. “They acknowledged that O’Neill was right and told him to bury it.

Except the DoD didn’t bury it. Around 1994, the Highlands Group was founded by O’Neill as an official Pentagon project at the appointment of Bill Clinton’s then defense secretary William Perry?—?who went on to join SAIC’s board of directors after retiring from government in 2003.

In O’Neill’s own words, the group would function as the Pentagon’s ‘ideas lab’. According to Government Executive, military and information technology experts gathered at the first Forum meeting “to consider the impacts of IT and globalization on the United States and on warfare. How would the Internet and other emerging technologies change the world?” The meeting helped plant the idea of “network-centric warfare” in the minds of “the nation’s top military thinkers.”

Excluding the public

Official Pentagon records confirm that the Highlands Forum’s primary goal was to support DoD policies on O’Neill’s specialism: information warfare. According to the Pentagon’s 1997 Annual Report to the President and the Congress under a section titled ‘Information Operations,’ (IO) the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) had authorized the “establishment of the Highlands Group of key DoD, industry, and academic IO experts” to coordinate IO across federal military intelligence agencies.

The following year’s DoD annual report reiterated the Forum’s centrality to information operations: “To examine IO issues, DoD sponsors the Highlands Forum, which brings together government, industry, and academic professionals from various fields.”

Notice that in 1998, the Highlands ‘Group’ became a ‘Forum.’ According to O’Neill, this was to avoid subjecting Highlands Forums meetings to “bureaucratic restrictions.” What he was alluding to was the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), which regulates the way the US government can formally solicit the advice of special interests.

Known as the ‘open government’ law, FACA requires that US government officials cannot hold closed-door or secret consultations with people outside government to develop policy. All such consultations should take place via federal advisory committees that permit public scrutiny. FACA requires that meetings be held in public, announced via the Federal Register, that advisory groups are registered with an office at the General Services Administration, among other requirements intended to maintain accountability to the public interest.
But Government Executive reported that “O’Neill and others believed” such regulatory issues “would quell the free flow of ideas and no-holds-barred discussions they sought.” Pentagon lawyers had warned that the word ‘group’ might necessitate certain obligations and advised running the whole thing privately: “So O’Neill renamed it the Highlands Forum and moved into the private sector to manage it as a consultant to the Pentagon.” The Pentagon Highlands Forum thus runs under the mantle of O’Neill’s ‘intellectual capital venture firm,’ ‘Highlands Group Inc.’

In 1995, a year after William Perry appointed O’Neill to head up the Highlands Forum, SAIC?—?the Forum’s “partner” organization?—?launched a new Center for Information Strategy and Policy under the direction of “Jeffrey Cooper, a member of the Highlands Group who advises senior Defense Department officials on information warfare issues.” The Center had precisely the same objective as the Forum, to function as “a clearinghouse to bring together the best and brightest minds in information warfare by sponsoring a continuing series of seminars, papers and symposia which explore the implications of information warfare in depth.” The aim was to “enable leaders and policymakers from government, industry, and academia to address key issues surrounding information warfare to ensure that the United States retains its edge over any and all potential enemies.”

Despite FACA regulations, federal advisory committees are already heavily influenced, if not captured, by corporate power. So in bypassing FACA, the Pentagon overrode even the loose restrictions of FACA, by permanently excluding any possibility of public engagement.

O’Neill’s claim that there are no reports or recommendations is disingenuous. By his own admission, the secret Pentagon consultations with industry that have taken place through the Highlands Forum since 1994 have been accompanied by regular presentations of academic and policy papers, recordings and notes of meetings, and other forms of documentation that are locked behind a login only accessible by Forum delegates. This violates the spirit, if not the letter, of FACA?—?in a way that is patently intended to circumvent democratic accountability and the rule of law.

The Highlands Forum doesn’t need to produce consensus recommendations. Its purpose is to provide the Pentagon a shadow social networking mechanism to cement lasting relationships with corporate power, and to identify new talent, that can be used to fine-tune information warfare strategies in absolute secrecy.

Total participants in the DoD’s Highlands Forum number over a thousand, although sessions largely consist of small closed workshop style gatherings of maximum 25–30 people, bringing together experts and officials depending on the subject. Delegates have included senior personnel from SAIC and Booz Allen Hamilton, RAND Corp., Cisco, Human Genome Sciences, eBay, PayPal, IBM, Google, Microsoft, AT&T, the BBC, Disney, General Electric, Enron, among innumerable others; Democrat and Republican members of Congress and the Senate; senior executives from the US energy industry such as Daniel Yergin of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates; and key people involved in both sides of presidential campaigns.

Other participants have included senior media professionals: David Ignatius, associate editor of the Washington Post and at the time the executive editor of the International Herald Tribune; Thomas Friedman, long-time New York Times columnist; Arnaud de Borchgrave, an editor at Washington Times and United Press International; Steven Levy, a former Newsweek editor, senior writer for Wired and now chief tech editor at Medium; Lawrence Wright, staff writer at the New Yorker; Noah Shachtmann, executive editor at the Daily Beast; Rebecca McKinnon, co-founder of Global Voices Online; Nik Gowing of the BBC; and John Markoff of the New York Times.

Due to its current sponsorship by the OSD’s undersecretary of defense for intelligence, the Forum has inside access to the chiefs of the main US surveillance and reconnaissance agencies, as well as the directors and their assistants at DoD research agencies, from DARPA, to the ONA. This also means that the Forum is deeply plugged into the Pentagon’s policy research task forces.

Google: seeded by the Pentagon

In 1994?—?the same year the Highlands Forum was founded under the stewardship of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the ONA, and DARPA?—?two young PhD students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, made their breakthrough on the first automated web crawling and page ranking application. That application remains the core component of what eventually became Google’s search service. Brin and Page had performed their work with funding from the Digital Library Initiative (DLI), a multi-agency programme of the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA and DARPA.

But that’s just one side of the story.

Throughout the development of the search engine, Sergey Brin reported regularly and directly to two people who were not Stanford faculty at all: Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham and Dr. Rick Steinheiser. Both were representatives of a sensitive US intelligence community research programme on information security and data-mining.

Thuraisingham is currently the Louis A. Beecherl distinguished professor and executive director of the Cyber Security Research Institute at the University of Texas, Dallas, and a sought-after expert on data-mining, data management and information security issues. But in the 1990s, she worked for the MITRE Corp., a leading US defense contractor, where she managed the Massive Digital Data Systems initiative, a project sponsored by the NSA, CIA, and the Director of Central Intelligence, to foster innovative research in information technology.

“We funded Stanford University through the computer scientist Jeffrey Ullman, who had several promising graduate students working on many exciting areas,” Prof. Thuraisingham told me. “One of them was Sergey Brin, the founder of Google. The intelligence community’s MDDS program essentially provided Brin seed-funding, which was supplemented by many other sources, including the private sector.”

This sort of funding is certainly not unusual, and Sergey Brin’s being able to receive it by being a graduate student at Stanford appears to have been incidental. The Pentagon was all over computer science research at this time. But it illustrates how deeply entrenched the culture of Silicon Valley is in the values of the US intelligence community.

In an extraordinary document hosted by the website of the University of Texas, Thuraisingham recounts that from 1993 to 1999, “the Intelligence Community [IC] started a program called Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) that I was managing for the Intelligence Community when I was at the MITRE Corporation.” The program funded 15 research efforts at various universities, including Stanford. Its goal was developing “data management technologies to manage several terabytes to petabytes of data,” including for “query processing, transaction management, metadata management, storage management, and data integration.”

At the time, Thuraisingham was chief scientist for data and information management at MITRE, where she led team research and development efforts for the NSA, CIA, US Air Force Research Laboratory, as well as the US Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) and Communications and Electronic Command (CECOM). She went on to teach courses for US government officials and defense contractors on data-mining in counter-terrorism.

In her University of Texas article, she attaches the copy of an abstract of the US intelligence community’s MDDS program that had been presented to the “Annual Intelligence Community Symposium” in 1995. The abstract reveals that the primary sponsors of the MDDS programme were three agencies: the NSA, the CIA’s Office of Research & Development, and the intelligence community’s Community Management Staff (CMS) which operates under the Director of Central Intelligence. Administrators of the program, which provided funding of around 3–4 million dollars per year for 3–4 years, were identified as Hal Curran (NSA), Robert Kluttz (CMS), Dr. Claudia Pierce (NSA), Dr. Rick Steinheiser (ORD?—?standing for the CIA’s Office of Research and Devepment), and Dr. Thuraisingham herself.

Thuraisingham goes on in her article to reiterate that this joint CIA-NSA program partly funded Sergey Brin to develop the core of Google, through a grant to Stanford managed by Brin’s supervisor Prof. Jeffrey D. Ullman:


“In fact, the Google founder Mr. Sergey Brin was partly funded by this program while he was a PhD student at Stanford. He together with his advisor Prof. Jeffrey Ullman and my colleague at MITRE, Dr. Chris Clifton [Mitre’s chief scientist in IT], developed the Query Flocks System which produced solutions for mining large amounts of data stored in databases. I remember visiting Stanford with Dr. Rick Steinheiser from the Intelligence Community and Mr. Brin would rush in on roller blades, give his presentation and rush out. In fact the last time we met in September 1998, Mr. Brin demonstrated to us his search engine which became Google soon after.”

Brin and Page officially incorporated Google as a company in September 1998, the very month they last reported to Thuraisingham and Steinheiser. ‘Query Flocks’ was also part of Google’s patented ‘PageRank’ search system, which Brin developed at Stanford under the CIA-NSA-MDDS programme, as well as with funding from the NSF, IBM and Hitachi. That year, MITRE’s Dr. Chris Clifton, who worked under Thuraisingham to develop the ‘Query Flocks’ system, co-authored a paper with Brin’s superviser, Prof. Ullman, and the CIA’s Rick Steinheiser. Titled ‘Knowledge Discovery in Text,’ the paper was presented at an academic conference.


“The MDDS funding that supported Brin was significant as far as seed-funding goes, but it was probably outweighed by the other funding streams,” said Thuraisingham. “The duration of Brin’s funding was around two years or so. In that period, I and my colleagues from the MDDS would visit Stanford to see Brin and monitor his progress every three months or so. We didn’t supervise exactly, but we did want to check progress, point out potential problems and suggest ideas. In those briefings, Brin did present to us on the query flocks research, and also demonstrated to us versions of the Google search engine.”

Brin thus reported to Thuraisingham and Steinheiser regularly about his work developing Google.


UPDATE 2.05PM GMT [2nd Feb 2015]:

Since publication of this article, Prof. Thuraisingham has amended her article referenced above. The amended version includes a new modified statement, followed by a copy of the original version of her account of the MDDS. In this amended version, Thuraisingham rejects the idea that CIA funded Google, and says instead:

“In fact Prof. Jeffrey Ullman (at Stanford) and my colleague at MITRE Dr. Chris Clifton together with some others developed the Query Flocks System, as part of MDDS, which produced solutions for mining large amounts of data stored in databases. Also, Mr. Sergey Brin, the cofounder of Google, was part of Prof. Ullman’s research group at that time. I remember visiting Stanford with Dr. Rick Steinheiser from the Intelligence Community periodically and Mr. Brin would rush in on roller blades, give his presentation and rush out. During our last visit to Stanford in September 1998, Mr. Brin demonstrated to us his search engine which I believe became Google soon after…

There are also several inaccuracies in Dr. Ahmed’s article (dated January 22, 2015). For example, the MDDS program was not a ‘sensitive’ program as stated by Dr. Ahmed; it was an Unclassified program that funded universities in the US. Furthermore, Sergey Brin never reported to me or to Dr. Rick Steinheiser; he only gave presentations to us during our visits to the Department of Computer Science at Stanford during the 1990s. Also, MDDS never funded Google; it funded Stanford University.”

Here, there is no substantive factual difference in Thuraisingham’s accounts, other than to assert that her statement associating Sergey Brin with the development of ‘query flocks’ is mistaken. Notably, this acknowledgement is derived not from her own knowledge, but from this very article quoting a comment from a Google spokesperson.

However, the bizarre attempt to disassociate Google from the MDDS program misses the mark. Firstly, the MDDS never funded Google, because during the development of the core components of the Google search engine, there was no company incorporated with that name. The grant was instead provided to Stanford University through Prof. Ullman, through whom some MDDS funding was used to support Brin who was co-developing Google at the time. Secondly, Thuraisingham then adds that Brin never “reported” to her or the CIA’s Steinheiser, but admits he “gave presentations to us during our visits to the Department of Computer Science at Stanford during the 1990s.” It is unclear, though, what the distinction is here between reporting, and delivering a detailed presentation?—?either way, Thuraisingham confirms that she and the CIA had taken a keen interest in Brin’s development of Google. Thirdly, Thuraisingham describes the MDDS program as “unclassified,” but this does not contradict its “sensitive” nature. As someone who has worked for decades as an intelligence contractor and advisor, Thuraisingham is surely aware that there are many ways of categorizing intelligence, including ‘sensitive but unclassified.’ A number of former US intelligence officials I spoke to said that the almost total lack of public information on the CIA and NSA’s MDDS initiative suggests that although the progam was not classified, it is likely instead that its contents was considered sensitive, which would explain efforts to minimise transparency about the program and the way it fed back into developing tools for the US intelligence community. Fourthly, and finally, it is important to point out that the MDDS abstract which Thuraisingham includes in her University of Texas document states clearly not only that the Director of Central Intelligence’s CMS, CIA and NSA were the overseers of the MDDS initiative, but that the intended customers of the project were “DoD, IC, and other government organizations”: the Pentagon, the US intelligence community, and other relevant US government agencies.

In other words, the provision of MDDS funding to Brin through Ullman, under the oversight of Thuraisingham and Steinheiser, was fundamentally because they recognized the potential utility of Brin’s work developing Google to the Pentagon, intelligence community, and the federal government at large.

==

The MDDS programme is actually referenced in several papers co-authored by Brin and Page while at Stanford, specifically highlighting its role in financially sponsoring Brin in the development of Google. In their 1998 paper published in the Bulletin of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committeee on Data Engineering, they describe the automation of methods to extract information from the web via “Dual Iterative Pattern Relation Extraction,” the development of “a global ranking of Web pages called PageRank,” and the use of PageRank “to develop a novel search engine called Google.” Through an opening footnote, Sergey Brin confirms he was “Partially supported by the Community Management Staff’s Massive Digital Data Systems Program, NSF grant IRI-96–31952”?—?confirming that Brin’s work developing Google was indeed partly-funded by the CIA-NSA-MDDS program.

This NSF grant identified alongside the MDDS, whose project report lists Brin among the students supported (without mentioning the MDDS), was different to the NSF grant to Larry Page that included funding from DARPA and NASA. The project report, authored by Brin’s supervisor Prof. Ullman, goes on to say under the section ‘Indications of Success’ that “there are some new stories of startups based on NSF-supported research.” Under ‘Project Impact,’ the report remarks: “Finally, the google project has also gone commercial as Google.com.”

Thuraisingham’s account, including her new amended version, therefore demonstrates that the CIA-NSA-MDDS program was not only partly funding Brin throughout his work with Larry Page developing Google, but that senior US intelligence representatives including a CIA official oversaw the evolution of Google in this pre-launch phase, all the way until the company was ready to be officially founded. Google, then, had been enabled with a “significant” amount of seed-funding and oversight from the Pentagon: namely, the CIA, NSA, and DARPA.

The DoD could not be reached for comment.

When I asked Prof. Ullman to confirm whether or not Brin was partly funded under the intelligence community’s MDDS program, and whether Ullman was aware that Brin was regularly briefing the CIA’s Rick Steinheiser on his progress in developing the Google search engine, Ullman’s responses were evasive: “May I know whom you represent and why you are interested in these issues? Who are your ‘sources’?” He also denied that Brin played a significant role in developing the ‘query flocks’ system, although it is clear from Brin’s papers that he did draw on that work in co-developing the PageRank system with Page.

When I asked Ullman whether he was denying the US intelligence community’s role in supporting Brin during the development of Google, he said: “I am not going to dignify this nonsense with a denial. If you won’t explain what your theory is, and what point you are trying to make, I am not going to help you in the slightest.”

The MDDS abstract published online at the University of Texas confirms that the rationale for the CIA-NSA project was to “provide seed money to develop data management technologies which are of high-risk and high-pay-off,” including techniques for “querying, browsing, and filtering; transaction processing; accesses methods and indexing; metadata management and data modelling; and integrating heterogeneous databases; as well as developing appropriate architectures.” The ultimate vision of the program was to “provide for the seamless access and fusion of massive amounts of data, information and knowledge in a heterogeneous, real-time environment” for use by the Pentagon, intelligence community and potentially across government.

These revelations corroborate the claims of Robert Steele, former senior CIA officer and a founding civilian deputy director of the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, whom I interviewed for The Guardian last year on open source intelligence. Citing sources at the CIA, Steele had said in 2006 that Steinheiser, an old colleague of his, was the CIA’s main liaison at Google and had arranged early funding for the pioneering IT firm. At the time, Wired founder John Batelle managed to get this official denial from a Google spokesperson in response to Steele’s assertions:


“The statements related to Google are completely untrue.”

This time round, despite multiple requests and conversations, a Google spokesperson declined to comment.

UPDATE: As of 5.41PM GMT [22nd Jan 2015], Google’s director of corporate communication got in touch and asked me to include the following statement:

“Sergey Brin was not part of the Query Flocks Program at Stanford, nor were any of his projects funded by US Intelligence bodies.”

This is what I wrote back:

My response to that statement would be as follows: Brin himself in his own paper acknowledges funding from the Community Management Staff of the Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) initiative, which was supplied through the NSF. The MDDS was an intelligence community program set up by the CIA and NSA. I also have it on record, as noted in the piece, from Prof. Thuraisingham of University of Texas that she managed the MDDS program on behalf of the US intelligence community, and that her and the CIA’s Rick Steinheiser met Brin every three months or so for two years to be briefed on his progress developing Google and PageRank. Whether Brin worked on query flocks or not is neither here nor there.

In that context, you might want to consider the following questions:

1) Does Google deny that Brin’s work was part-funded by the MDDS via an NSF grant?

2) Does Google deny that Brin reported regularly to Thuraisingham and Steinheiser from around 1996 to 1998 until September that year when he presented the Google search engine to them?

Total Information Awareness

A call for papers for the MDDS was sent out via email list on November 3rd 1993 from senior US intelligence official David Charvonia, director of the research and development coordination office of the intelligence community’s CMS. The reaction from Tatu Ylonen (celebrated inventor of the widely used secure shell [SSH] data protection protocol) to his colleagues on the email list is telling: “Crypto relevance? Makes you think whether you should protect your data.” The email also confirms that defense contractor and Highlands Forum partner, SAIC, was managing the MDDS submission process, with abstracts to be sent to Jackie Booth of the CIA’s Office of Research and Development via a SAIC email address.

By 1997, Thuraisingham reveals, shortly before Google became incorporated and while she was still overseeing the development of its search engine software at Stanford, her thoughts turned to the national security applications of the MDDS program. In the acknowledgements to her book, Web Data Mining and Applications in Business Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism (2003), Thuraisingham writes that she and “Dr. Rick Steinheiser of the CIA, began discussions with Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on applying data-mining for counter-terrorism,” an idea that resulted directly from the MDDS program which partly funded Google. “These discussions eventually developed into the current EELD (Evidence Extraction and Link Detection) program at DARPA.”

So the very same senior CIA official and CIA-NSA contractor involved in providing the seed-funding for Google were simultaneously contemplating the role of data-mining for counter-terrorism purposes, and were developing ideas for tools actually advanced by DARPA.

Today, as illustrated by her recent oped in the New York Times, Thuraisingham remains a staunch advocate of data-mining for counter-terrorism purposes, but also insists that these methods must be developed by government in cooperation with civil liberties lawyers and privacy advocates to ensure that robust procedures are in place to prevent potential abuse. She points out, damningly, that with the quantity of information being collected, there is a high risk of false positives.

In 1993, when the MDDS program was launched and managed by MITRE Corp. on behalf of the US intelligence community, University of Virginia computer scientist Dr. Anita K. Jones?—?a MITRE trustee?—?landed the job of DARPA director and head of research and engineering across the Pentagon. She had been on the board of MITRE since 1988. From 1987 to 1993, Jones simultaneously served on SAIC’s board of directors. As the new head of DARPA from 1993 to 1997, she also co-chaired the Pentagon’s Highlands Forum during the period of Google’s pre-launch development at Stanford under the MDSS.

Thus, when Thuraisingham and Steinheiser were talking to DARPA about the counter-terrorism applications of MDDS research, Jones was DARPA director and Highlands Forum co-chair. That year, Jones left DARPA to return to her post at the University of Virgina. The following year, she joined the board of the National Science Foundation, which of course had also just funded Brin and Page, and also returned to the board of SAIC. When she left DoD, Senator Chuck Robb paid Jones the following tribute : “She brought the technology and operational military communities together to design detailed plans to sustain US dominance on the battlefield into the next century.”
Dr. Anita Jones, head of DARPA from 1993–1997, and co-chair of the Pentagon Highlands Forum from 1995–1997, during which officials in charge of the CIA-NSA-MDSS program were funding Google, and in communication with DARPA about data-mining for counterterrorism

On the board of the National Science Foundation from 1992 to 1998 (including a stint as chairman from 1996) was Richard N. Zare. This was the period in which the NSF sponsored Sergey Brin and Larry Page in association with DARPA. In June 1994, Prof. Zare, a chemist at Stanford, participated with Prof. Jeffrey Ullman (who supervised Sergey Brin’s research), on a panel sponsored by Stanford and the National Research Council discussing the need for scientists to show how their work “ties to national needs.” The panel brought together scientists and policymakers, including “Washington insiders.”

DARPA’s EELD program, inspired by the work of Thuraisingham and Steinheiser under Jones’ watch, was rapidly adapted and integrated with a suite of tools to conduct comprehensive surveillance under the Bush administration.

According to DARPA official Ted Senator, who led the EELD program for the agency’s short-lived Information Awareness Office, EELD was among a range of “promising techniques” being prepared for integration “into the prototype TIA system.” TIA stood for Total Information Awareness, and was the main global electronic eavesdropping and data-mining program deployed by the Bush administration after 9/11. TIA had been set up by Iran-Contra conspirator Admiral John Poindexter, who was appointed in 2002 by Bush to lead DARPA’s new Information Awareness Office.

The Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was another contractor among 26 companies (also including SAIC) that received million dollar contracts from DARPA (the specific quantities remained classified) under Poindexter, to push forward the TIA surveillance program in 2002 onwards. The research included “behaviour-based profiling,” “automated detection, identification and tracking” of terrorist activity, among other data-analyzing projects. At this time, PARC’s director and chief scientist was John Seely Brown. Both Brown and Poindexter were Pentagon Highlands Forum participants?—?Brown on a regular basis until recently.

TIA was purportedly shut down in 2003 due to public opposition after the program was exposed in the media, but the following year Poindexter participated in a Pentagon Highlands Group session in Singapore, alongside defense and security officials from around the world. Meanwhile, Ted Senator continued to manage the EELD program among other data-mining and analysis projects at DARPA until 2006, when he left to become a vice president at SAIC. He is now a SAIC/Leidos technical fellow.

Google, DARPA and the money trail

Long before the appearance of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Stanford University’s computer science department had a close working relationship with US military intelligence. A letter dated November 5th 1984 from the office of renowned artificial intelligence (AI) expert, Prof Edward Feigenbaum, addressed to Rick Steinheiser, gives the latter directions to Stanford’s Heuristic Programming Project, addressing Steinheiser as a member of the “AI Steering Committee.” A list of attendees at a contractor conference around that time, sponsored by the Pentagon’s Office of Naval Research (ONR), includes Steinheiser as a delegate under the designation “OPNAV Op-115”?—?which refers to the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations’ program on operational readiness, which played a major role in advancing digital systems for the military.

From the 1970s, Prof. Feigenbaum and his colleagues had been running Stanford’s Heuristic Programming Project under contract with DARPA, continuing through to the 1990s. Feigenbaum alone had received around over $7 million in this period for his work from DARPA, along with other funding from the NSF, NASA, and ONR.

Brin’s supervisor at Stanford, Prof. Jeffrey Ullman, was in 1996 part of a joint funding project of DARPA’s Intelligent Integration of Information program. That year, Ullman co-chaired DARPA-sponsored meetings on data exchange between multiple systems.

In September 1998, the same month that Sergey Brin briefed US intelligence representatives Steinheiser and Thuraisingham, tech entrepreneurs Andreas Bechtolsheim and David Cheriton invested $100,000 each in Google. Both investors were connected to DARPA.

As a Stanford PhD student in electrical engineering in the 1980s, Bechtolsheim’s pioneering SUN workstation project had been funded by DARPA and the Stanford computer science department?—?this research was the foundation of Bechtolsheim’s establishment of Sun Microsystems, which he co-founded with William Joy.

As for Bechtolsheim’s co-investor in Google, David Cheriton, the latter is a long-time Stanford computer science professor who has an even more entrenched relationship with DARPA. His bio at the University of Alberta, which in November 2014 awarded him an honorary science doctorate, says that Cheriton’s “research has received the support of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for over 20 years.”

In the meantime, Bechtolsheim left Sun Microsystems in 1995, co-founding Granite Systems with his fellow Google investor Cheriton as a partner. They sold Granite to Cisco Systems in 1996, retaining significant ownership of Granite, and becoming senior Cisco executives.

An email obtained from the Enron Corpus (a database of 600,000 emails acquired by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and later released to the public) from Richard O’Neill, inviting Enron executives to participate in the Highlands Forum, shows that Cisco and Granite executives are intimately connected to the Pentagon. The email reveals that in May 2000, Bechtolsheim’s partner and Sun Microsystems co-founder, William Joy?—?who was then chief scientist and corporate executive officer there?—?had attended the Forum to discuss nanotechnology and molecular computing.

In 1999, Joy had also co-chaired the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, overseeing a report acknowledging that DARPA had:


“… revised its priorities in the 90’s so that all information technology funding was judged in terms of its benefit to the warfighter.”

Throughout the 1990s, then, DARPA’s funding to Stanford, including Google, was explicitly about developing technologies that could augment the Pentagon’s military intelligence operations in war theatres.

The Joy report recommended more federal government funding from the Pentagon, NASA, and other agencies to the IT sector. Greg Papadopoulos, another of Bechtolsheim’s colleagues as then Sun Microsystems chief technology officer, also attended a Pentagon Highlands’ Forum meeting in September 2000.

In November, the Pentagon Highlands Forum hosted Sue Bostrom, who was vice president for the internet at Cisco, sitting on the company’s board alongside Google co-investors Bechtolsheim and Cheriton. The Forum also hosted Lawrence Zuriff, then a managing partner of Granite, which Bechtolsheim and Cheriton had sold to Cisco. Zuriff had previously been an SAIC contractor from 1993 to 1994, working with the Pentagon on national security issues, specifically for Marshall’s Office of Net Assessment. In 1994, both the SAIC and the ONA were, of course, involved in co-establishing the Pentagon Highlands Forum. Among Zuriff’s output during his SAIC tenure was a paper titled ‘Understanding Information War’, delivered at a SAIC-sponsored US Army Roundtable on the Revolution in Military Affairs.

After Google’s incorporation, the company received $25 million in equity funding in 1999 led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. According to Homeland Security Today, “A number of Sequoia-bankrolled start-ups have contracted with the Department of Defense, especially after 9/11 when Sequoia’s Mark Kvamme met with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to discuss the application of emerging technologies to warfighting and intelligence collection.” Similarly, Kleiner Perkins had developed “a close relationship” with In-Q-Tel, the CIA venture capitalist firm that funds start-ups “to advance ‘priority’ technologies of value” to the intelligence community.

John Doerr, who led the Kleiner Perkins investment in Google obtaining a board position, was a major early investor in Becholshtein’s Sun Microsystems at its launch. He and his wife Anne are the main funders behind Rice University’s Center for Engineering Leadership (RCEL), which in 2009 received $16 million from DARPA for its platform-aware-compilation-environment (PACE) ubiquitous computing R&D program. Doerr also has a close relationship with the Obama administration, which he advised shortly after it took power to ramp up Pentagon funding to the tech industry. In 2013, at the Fortune Brainstorm TECH conference, Doerr applauded “how the DoD’s DARPA funded GPS, CAD, most of the major computer science departments, and of course, the Internet.”

From inception, in other words, Google was incubated, nurtured and financed by interests that were directly affiliated or closely aligned with the US military intelligence community: many of whom were embedded in the Pentagon Highlands Forum.

Google captures the Pentagon

In 2003, Google began customizing its search engine under special contract with the CIA for its Intelink Management Office, “overseeing top-secret, secret and sensitive but unclassified intranets for CIA and other IC agencies,” according to Homeland Security Today. That year, CIA funding was also being “quietly” funneled through the National Science Foundation to projects that might help create “new capabilities to combat terrorism through advanced technology.”

The following year, Google bought the firm Keyhole, which had originally been funded by In-Q-Tel. Using Keyhole, Google began developing the advanced satellite mapping software behind Google Earth. Former DARPA director and Highlands Forum co-chair Anita Jones had been on the board of In-Q-Tel at this time, and remains so today.

Then in November 2005, In-Q-Tel issued notices to sell $2.2 million of Google stocks. Google’s relationship with US intelligence was further brought to light when an IT contractor told a closed Washington DC conference of intelligence professionals on a not-for-attribution basis that at least one US intelligence agency was working to “leverage Google’s [user] data monitoring” capability as part of an effort to acquire data of “national security intelligence interest.”

A photo on Flickr dated March 2007 reveals that Google research director and AI expert Peter Norvig attended a Pentagon Highlands Forum meeting that year in Carmel, California. Norvig’s intimate connection to the Forum as of that year is also corroborated by his role in guest editing the 2007 Forum reading list.

The photo below shows Norvig in conversation with Lewis Shepherd, who at that time was senior technology officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, responsible for investigating, approving, and architecting “all new hardware/software systems and acquisitions for the Global Defense Intelligence IT Enterprise,” including “big data technologies.” Shepherd now works at Microsoft. Norvig was a computer research scientist at Stanford University in 1991 before joining Bechtolsheim’s Sun Microsystems as senior scientist until 1994, and going on to head up NASA’s computer science division.
Norvig shows up on O’Neill’s Google Plus profile as one of his close connections. Scoping the rest of O’Neill’s Google Plus connections illustrates that he is directly connected not just to a wide range of Google executives, but also to some of the biggest names in the US tech community.

Those connections include Michele Weslander Quaid, an ex-CIA contractor and former senior Pentagon intelligence official who is now Google’s chief technology officer where she is developing programs to “best fit government agencies’ needs”; Elizabeth Churchill, Google director of user experience; James Kuffner, a humanoid robotics expert who now heads up Google’s robotics division and who introduced the term ‘cloud robotics’; Mark Drapeau, director of innovation engagement for Microsoft’s public sector business; Lili Cheng, general manager of Microsoft’s Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Labs; Jon Udell, Microsoft ‘evangelist’; Cory Ondrejka, vice president of engineering at Facebook; to name just a few.

In 2010, Google signed a multi-billion dollar no-bid contract with the NSA’s sister agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). The contract was to use Google Earth for visualization services for the NGA. Google had developed the software behind Google Earth by purchasing Keyhole from the CIA venture firm In-Q-Tel.

Then a year after, in 2011, another of O’Neill’s Google Plus connections, Michele Quaid?—?who had served in executive positions at the NGA, National Reconnaissance Office and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence?—?left her government role to become Google ‘innovation evangelist’ and the point-person for seeking government contracts. Quaid’s last role before her move to Google was as a senior representative of the Director of National Intelligence to the Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Task Force, and a senior advisor to the undersecretary of defense for intelligence’s director of Joint and Coalition Warfighter Support (J&CWS). Both roles involved information operations at their core. Before her Google move, in other words, Quaid worked closely with the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, to which the Pentagon’s Highlands Forum is subordinate. Quaid has herself attended the Forum, though precisely when and how often I could not confirm.

In March 2012, then DARPA director Regina Dugan?—?who in that capacity was also co-chair of the Pentagon Highlands Forum?—?followed her colleague Quaid into Google to lead the company’s new Advanced Technology and Projects Group. During her Pentagon tenure, Dugan led on strategic cyber security and social media, among other initiatives. She was responsible for focusing “an increasing portion” of DARPA’s work “on the investigation of offensive capabilities to address military-specific needs,” securing $500 million of government funding for DARPA cyber research from 2012 to 2017.
By November 2014, Google’s chief AI and robotics expert James Kuffner was a delegate alongside O’Neill at the Highlands Island Forum 2014 in Singapore, to explore ‘Advancement in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Society, Security and Conflict.’ The event included 26 delegates from Austria, Israel, Japan, Singapore, Sweden, Britain and the US, from both industry and government. Kuffner’s association with the Pentagon, however, began much earlier. In 1997, Kuffner was a researcher during his Stanford PhD for a Pentagon-funded project on networked autonomous mobile robots, sponsored by DARPA and the US Navy.

Rumsfeld and persistent surveillance

In sum, many of Google’s most senior executives are affiliated with the Pentagon Highlands Forum, which throughout the period of Google’s growth over the last decade, has surfaced repeatedly as a connecting and convening force. The US intelligence community’s incubation of Google from inception occurred through a combination of direct sponsorship and informal networks of financial influence, themselves closely aligned with Pentagon interests.

The Highlands Forum itself has used the informal relationship building of such private networks to bring together defense and industry sectors, enabling the fusion of corporate and military interests in expanding the covert surveillance apparatus in the name of national security. The power wielded by the shadow network represented in the Forum can, however, be gauged most clearly from its impact during the Bush administration, when it played a direct role in literally writing the strategies and doctrines behind US efforts to achieve ‘information superiority.’

In December 2001, O’Neill confirmed that strategic discussions at the Highlands Forum were feeding directly into Andrew Marshall’s DoD-wide strategic review ordered by President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld to upgrade the military, including the Quadrennial Defense Review?—?and that some of the earliest Forum meetings “resulted in the writing of a group of DoD policies, strategies, and doctrine for the services on information warfare.” That process of “writing” the Pentagon’s information warfare policies “was done in conjunction with people who understood the environment differently?—?not only US citizens, but also foreign citizens, and people who were developing corporate IT.”

The Pentagon’s post-9/11 information warfare doctrines were, then, written not just by national security officials from the US and abroad: but also by powerful corporate entities in the defense and technology sectors.

In April that year, Gen. James McCarthy had completed his defense transformation review ordered by Rumsfeld. His report repeatedly highlighted mass surveillance as integral to DoD transformation. As for Marshall, his follow-up report for Rumsfeld was going to develop a blueprint determining the Pentagon’s future in the ‘information age.’

O’Neill also affirmed that to develop information warfare doctrine, the Forum had held extensive discussions on electronic surveillance and “what constitutes an act of war in an information environment.” Papers feeding into US defense policy written through the late 1990s by RAND consultants John Arquilla and David Rondfeldt, both longstanding Highlands Forum members, were produced “as a result of those meetings,” exploring policy dilemmas on how far to take the goal of ‘Information Superiority.’ “One of the things that was shocking to the American public was that we weren’t pilfering Milosevic’s accounts electronically when we in fact could,” commented O’Neill.

Although the R&D process around the Pentagon transformation strategy remains classified, a hint at the DoD discussions going on in this period can be gleaned from a 2005 US Army School of Advanced Military Studies research monograph in the DoD journal, Military Review, authored by an active Army intelligence officer.

“The idea of Persistent Surveillance as a transformational capability has circulated within the national Intelligence Community (IC) and the Department of Defense (DoD) for at least three years,” the paper said, referencing the Rumsfeld-commissioned transformation study.

The Army paper went on to review a range of high-level official military documents, including one from the Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, showing that “Persistent Surveillance” was a fundamental theme of the information-centric vision for defense policy across the Pentagon.

We now know that just two months before O’Neill’s address at Harvard in 2001, under the TIA program, President Bush had secretly authorized the NSA’s domestic surveillance of Americans without court-approved warrants, in what appears to have been an illegal modification of the ThinThread data-mining project?—?as later exposed by NSA whistleblowers William Binney and Thomas Drake.

The surveillance-startup nexus

From here on, Highlands Forum partner SAIC played a key role in the NSA roll out from inception. Shortly after 9/11, Brian Sharkey, chief technology officer of SAIC’s ELS3 Sector (focusing on IT systems for emergency responders), teamed up with John Poindexter to propose the TIA surveillance program. SAIC’s Sharkey had previously been deputy director of the Information Systems Office at DARPA through the 1990s.

Meanwhile, around the same time, SAIC vice president for corporate development, Samuel Visner, became head of the NSA’s signals-intelligence programs. SAIC was then among a consortium receiving a $280 million contract to develop one of the NSA’s secret eavesdropping systems. By 2003, Visner returned to SAIC to become director of strategic planning and business development of the firm’s intelligence group.

That year, the NSA consolidated its TIA programme of warrantless electronic surveillance, to keep “track of individuals” and understand “how they fit into models” through risk profiles of American citizens and foreigners. TIA was doing this by integrating databases on finance, travel, medical, educational and other records into a “virtual, centralized grand database.”

This was also the year that the Bush administration drew up its notorious Information Operations Roadmap. Describing the internet as a “vulnerable weapons system,” Rumsfeld’s IO roadmap had advocated that Pentagon strategy “should be based on the premise that the Department [of Defense] will ‘fight the net’ as it would an enemy weapons system.” The US should seek “maximum control” of the “full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems,” advocated the document.

The following year, John Poindexter, who had proposed and run the TIA surveillance program via his post at DARPA, was in Singapore participating in the Highlands 2004 Island Forum. Other delegates included then Highlands Forum co-chair and Pentagon CIO Linton Wells; president of notorious Pentagon information warfare contractor, John Rendon; Karl Lowe, director of the Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) Joint Advanced Warfighting Division; Air Vice Marshall Stephen Dalton, capability manager for information superiority at the UK Ministry of Defense; Lt. Gen. Johan Kihl, Swedish army Supreme Commander HQ’s chief of staff; among others.

As of 2006, SAIC had been awarded a multi-million dollar NSA contract to develop a big data-mining project called ExecuteLocus, despite the colossal $1 billion failure of its preceding contract, known as ‘Trailblazer.’ Core components of TIA were being “quietly continued” under “new code names,” according to Foreign Policy’s Shane Harris, but had been concealed “behind the veil of the classified intelligence budget.” The new surveillance program had by then been fully transitioned from DARPA’s jurisdiction to the NSA.

This was also the year of yet another Singapore Island Forum led by Richard O’Neill on behalf of the Pentagon, which included senior defense and industry officials from the US, UK, Australia, France, India and Israel. Participants also included senior technologists from Microsoft, IBM, as well as Gilman Louie, partner at technology investment firm Alsop Louie Partners.

Gilman Louie is a former CEO of In-Q-Tel?—?the CIA firm investing especially in start-ups developing data mining technology. In-Q-Tel was founded in 1999 by the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, under which the Office of Research and Development (ORD)?—?which was part of the Google-funding MDSS program?—?had operated. The idea was to essentially replace the functions once performed by the ORD, by mobilizing the private sector to develop information technology solutions for the entire intelligence community.

Louie had led In-Q-Tel from 1999 until January 2006?—?including when Google bought Keyhole, the In-Q-Tel-funded satellite mapping software. Among his colleagues on In-Q-Tel’s board in this period were former DARPA director and Highlands Forum co-chair Anita Jones (who is still there), as well as founding board member William Perry: the man who had appointed O’Neill to set-up the Highlands Forum in the first place. Joining Perry as a founding In-Q-Tel board member was John Seely Brown, then chief scientist at Xerox Corp and director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) from 1990 to 2002, who is also a long-time senior Highlands Forum member since inception.

In addition to the CIA, In-Q-Tel has also been backed by the FBI, NGA, and Defense Intelligence Agency, among other agencies. More than 60 percent of In-Q-Tel’s investments under Louie’s watch were “in companies that specialize in automatically collecting, sifting through and understanding oceans of information,” according to Medill School of Journalism’s News21, which also noted that Louie himself had acknowledged it was not clear “whether privacy and civil liberties will be protected” by government’s use of these technologies “for national security.”

The transcript of Richard O’Neill’s late 2001 seminar at Harvard shows that the Pentagon Highlands Forum had first engaged Gilman Louie long before the Island Forum, in fact, shortly after 9/11 to explore “what’s going on with In-Q-Tel.” That Forum session focused on how to “take advantage of the speed of the commercial market that wasn’t present inside the science and technology community of Washington” and to understand “the implications for the DoD in terms of the strategic review, the QDR, Hill action, and the stakeholders.” Participants of the meeting included “senior military people,” combatant commanders, “several of the senior flag officers,” some “defense industry people” and various US representatives including Republican Congressman William Mac Thornberry and Democrat Senator Joseph Lieberman.

Both Thornberry and Lieberman are staunch supporters of NSA surveillance, and have consistently acted to rally support for pro-war, pro-surveillance legislation. O’Neill’s comments indicate that the Forum’s role is not just to enable corporate contractors to write Pentagon policy, but to rally political support for government policies adopted through the Forum’s informal brand of shadow networking.

Repeatedly, O’Neill told his Harvard audience that his job as Forum president was to scope case studies from real companies across the private sector, like eBay and Human Genome Sciences, to figure out the basis of US ‘Information Superiority’?—?“how to dominate” the information market?—?and leverage this for “what the president and the secretary of defense wanted to do with regard to transformation of the DoD and the strategic review.”

By 2007, a year after the Island Forum meeting that included Gilman Louie, Facebook received its second round of $12.7 million worth of funding from Accel Partners. Accel was headed up by James Breyer, former chair of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) where Louie also served on the board while still CEO of In-Q-Tel. Both Louie and Breyer had previously served together on the board of BBN Technologies?—?which had recruited ex-DARPA chief and In-Q-Tel trustee Anita Jones.

Facebook’s 2008 round of funding was led by Greylock Venture Capital, which invested $27.5 million. The firm’s senior partners include Howard Cox, another former NVCA chair who also sits on the board of In-Q-Tel. Apart from Breyer and Zuckerberg, Facebook’s only other board member is Peter Thiel, co-founder of defense contractor Palantir which provides all sorts of data-mining and visualization technologies to US government, military and intelligence agencies, including the NSA and FBI, and which itself was nurtured to financial viability by Highlands Forum members.

Palantir co-founders Thiel and Alex Karp met with John Poindexter in 2004, according to Wired, the same year Poindexter had attended the Highlands Island Forum in Singapore. They met at the home of Richard Perle, another Andrew Marshall acolyte. Poindexter helped Palantir open doors, and to assemble “a legion of advocates from the most influential strata of government.” Thiel had also met with Gilman Louie of In-Q-Tel, securing the backing of the CIA in this early phase.

And so we come full circle. Data-mining programs like ExecuteLocus and projects linked to it, which were developed throughout this period, apparently laid the groundwork for the new NSA programmes eventually disclosed by Edward Snowden. By 2008, as Facebook received its next funding round from Greylock Venture Capital, documents and whistleblower testimony confirmed that the NSA was effectively resurrecting the TIA project with a focus on Internet data-mining via comprehensive monitoring of e-mail, text messages, and Web browsing.

We also now know thanks to Snowden that the NSA’s XKeyscore ‘Digital Network Intelligence’ exploitation system was designed to allow analysts to search not just Internet databases like emails, online chats and browsing history, but also telephone services, mobile phone audio, financial transactions and global air transport communications?—?essentially the entire global telecommunications grid. Highlands Forum partner SAIC played a key role, among other contractors, in producing and administering the NSA’s XKeyscore, and was recently implicated in NSA hacking of the privacy network Tor.

The Pentagon Highlands Forum was therefore intimately involved in all this as a convening network—but also quite directly. Confirming his pivotal role in the expansion of the US-led global surveillance apparatus, then Forum co-chair, Pentagon CIO Linton Wells, told FedTech magazine in 2009 that he had overseen the NSA’s roll out of “an impressive long-term architecture last summer that will provide increasingly sophisticated security until 2015 or so.”

The Goldman Sachs connection

When I asked Wells about the Forum’s role in influencing US mass surveillance, he responded only to say he would prefer not to comment and that he no longer leads the group.

As Wells is no longer in government, this is to be expected?—?but he is still connected to Highlands. As of September 2014, after delivering his influential white paper on Pentagon transformation, he joined the Monterey Institute for International Studies (MIIS) Cyber Security Initiative (CySec) as a distinguished senior fellow.

Sadly, this was not a form of trying to keep busy in retirement. Wells’ move underscored that the Pentagon’s conception of information warfare is not just about surveillance, but about the exploitation of surveillance to influence both government and public opinion.

The MIIS CySec initiative is now formally partnered with the Pentagon Highlands Forum through a Memorandum of Understanding signed with MIIS provost Dr Amy Sands, who sits on the Secretary of State’s International Security Advisory Board. The MIIS CySec website states that the MoU signed with Richard O’Neill:


“… paves the way for future joint MIIS CySec-Highlands Group sessions that will explore the impact of technology on security, peace and information engagement. For nearly 20 years the Highlands Group has engaged private sector and government leaders, including the Director of National Intelligence, DARPA, Office of the Secretary of Defense, Office of the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Singaporean Minister of Defence, in creative conversations to frame policy and technology research areas.”

Who is the financial benefactor of the new Pentagon Highlands-partnered MIIS CySec initiative? According to the MIIS CySec site, the initiative was launched “through a generous donation of seed funding from George Lee.” George C. Lee is a senior partner at Goldman Sachs, where he is chief information officer of the investment banking division, and chairman of the Global Technology, Media and Telecom (TMT) Group.

But here’s the kicker. In 2011, it was Lee who engineered Facebook’s $50 billion valuation, and previously handled deals for other Highlands-connected tech giants like Google, Microsoft and eBay. Lee’s then boss, Stephen Friedman, a former CEO and chairman of Goldman Sachs, and later senior partner on the firm’s executive board, was a also founding board member of In-Q-Tel alongside Highlands Forum overlord William Perry and Forum member John Seely Brown.

In 2001, Bush appointed Stephen Friedman to the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, and then to chair that board from 2005 to 2009. Friedman previously served alongside Paul Wolfowitz and others on the 1995–6 presidential commission of inquiry into US intelligence capabilities, and in 1996 on the Jeremiah Panel that produced a report to the Director of the National Reconnaisance Office (NRO)?—?one of the surveillance agencies plugged into the Highlands Forum. Friedman was on the Jeremiah Panel with Martin Faga, then senior vice president and general manager of MITRE Corp’s Center for Integrated Intelligence Systems?—?where Thuraisingham, who managed the CIA-NSA-MDDS program that inspired DARPA counter-terrorist data-mining, was also a lead engineer.

In the footnotes to a chapter for the book, Cyberspace and National Security (Georgetown University Press), SAIC/Leidos executive Jeff Cooper reveals that another Goldman Sachs senior partner Philip J. Venables?—?who as chief information risk officer leads the firm’s programs on information security?—?delivered a Highlands Forum presentation in 2008 at what was called an ‘Enrichment Session on Deterrence.’ Cooper’s chapter draws on Venables’ presentation at Highlands “with permission.” In 2010, Venables participated with his then boss Friedman at an Aspen Institute meeting on the world economy. For the last few years, Venables has also sat on various NSA cybersecurity award review boards.

In sum, the investment firm responsible for creating the billion dollar fortunes of the tech sensations of the 21st century, from Google to Facebook, is intimately linked to the US military intelligence community; with Venables, Lee and Friedman either directly connected to the Pentagon Highlands Forum, or to senior members of the Forum.

Fighting terror with terror

The convergence of these powerful financial and military interests around the Highlands Forum, through George Lee’s sponsorship of the Forum’s new partner, the MIIS Cysec initiative, is revealing in itself.

MIIS Cysec’s director, Dr, Itamara Lochard, has long been embedded in Highlands. She regularly “presents current research on non-state groups, governance, technology and conflict to the US Office of the Secretary of Defense Highlands Forum,” according to her Tufts University bio. She also, “regularly advises US combatant commanders” and specializes in studying the use of information technology by “violent and non-violent sub-state groups.”


Dr Lochard maintains a comprehensive database of 1,700 non-state groups including “insurgents, militias, terrorists, complex criminal organizations, organized gangs, malicious cyber actors and strategic non-violent actors,” to analyze their “organizational patterns, areas of cooperation, strategies and tactics.” Notice, here, the mention of “strategic non-violent actors”?—?which perhaps covers NGOs and other groups or organizations engaged in social political activity or campaigning, judging by the focus of other DoD research programs.

As of 2008, Lochard has been an adjunct professor at the US Joint Special Operations University where she teaches a top secret advanced course in ‘Irregular Warfare’ that she designed for senior US special forces officers. She has previously taught courses on ‘Internal War’ for senior “political-military officers” of various Gulf regimes.

Her views thus disclose much about what the Highlands Forum has been advocating all these years. In 2004, Lochard was co-author of a study for the US Air Force’s Institute for National Security Studies on US strategy toward ‘non-state armed groups.’ The study on the one hand argued that non-state armed groups should be urgently recognized as a ‘tier one security priority,’ and on the other that the proliferation of armed groups “provide strategic opportunities that can be exploited to help achieve policy goals. There have and will be instances where the United States may find collaborating with armed group is in its strategic interests.” But “sophisticated tools” must be developed to differentiate between different groups and understand their dynamics, to determine which groups should be countered, and which could be exploited for US interests. “Armed group profiles can likewise be employed to identify ways in which the United States may assist certain armed groups whose success will be advantageous to US foreign policy objectives.”

In 2008, Wikileaks published a leaked restricted US Army Special Operations field manual, which demonstrated that the sort of thinking advocated by the likes of Highlands expert Lochard had been explicitly adopted by US special forces.

Lochard’s work thus demonstrates that the Highlands Forum sat at the intersection of advanced Pentagon strategy on surveillance, covert operations and irregular warfare: mobilizing mass surveillance to develop detailed information on violent and non-violent groups perceived as potentially threatening to US interests, or offering opportunities for exploitation, thus feeding directly into US covert operations.

That, ultimately, is why the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon, spawned Google. So they could run their secret dirty wars with even greater efficiency than ever before.



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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Mon Feb 19, 2018 5:20 pm

Kim Dotcom: "Let Me Assure You, The DNC Hack Wasn’t Even A Hack"

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Kim Dotcom has once again chimed in on the DNC hack, following a Sunday morning tweet from President Trump clarifying his previous comments on Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

In response, Dotcom tweeted "Let me assure you, the DNC hack wasn't even a hack. It was an insider with a memory stick. I know this because I know who did it and why," adding "Special Counsel Mueller is not interested in my evidence. My lawyers wrote to him twice. He never replied. 360 pounds!" alluding of course to Trump's "400 pound genius" comment.

Dotcom's assertion is backed up by an analysis done last year by a researcher who goes by the name Forensicator, who determined that the DNC files were copied at 22.6 MB/s - a speed virtually impossible to achieve from halfway around the world, much less over a local network - yet a speed typical of file transfers to a memory stick.

The local transfer theory of course blows the Russian hacking narrative out of the water, lending credibility to the theory that the DNC "hack" was in fact an inside job, potentially implicating late DNC IT staffer, Seth Rich.

John Podesta's email was allegely successfully "hacked" (he fell victim to a phishing scam) in March 2016, while the DNC reported suspicious activity (the suspected Seth Rich file transfer) in late April, 2016 according to the Washington Post.

On May 18, 2017, Dotcom proposed that if Congress includes the Seth Rich investigation in their Russia probe, he would provide written testimony with evidence that Seth Rich was WikiLeaks' source.

On May 19 2017 Dotcom tweeted "I knew Seth Rich. I was involved"

Three days later, Dotcom again released a guarded statement saying "I KNOW THAT SETH RICH WAS INVOLVED IN THE DNC LEAK," adding:


"I have consulted with my lawyers. I accept that my full statement should be provided to the authorities and I am prepared to do that so that there can be a full investigation. My lawyers will speak with the authorities regarding the proper process.

If my evidence is required to be given in the United States I would be prepared to do so if appropriate arrangements are made. I would need a guarantee from Special Counsel Mueller, on behalf of the United States, of safe passage from New Zealand to the United States and back. In the coming days we will be communicating with the appropriate authorities to make the necessary arrangements. In the meantime, I will make no further comment."

Dotcom knew.

While one could simply write off Dotcom's claims as an attention seeking stunt, he made several comments and a series of tweets hinting at the upcoming email releases prior to both the WikiLeaks dumps as well as the publication of the hacked DNC emails to a website known as "DCLeaks."

In a May 14, 2015 Julian Assange Will Be Hillary Clinton's Worst Nightmare In 2016’s probably more Julian,” who threatens Hillary, Dotcom said. “But I’m aware of some of the things that are going to be roadblocks for her.”

Two days later, Dotcom tweeted this:

Around two months later, Kim asks a provocative question

Two weeks after that, Dotcom then tweeted "Mishandling classified info is a crime. When Hillary's emails eventually pop up on the internet who's going to jail?"

It should thus be fairly obvious to anyone that Dotcom was somehow involved, and therefore any evidence he claims to have, should be taken seriously as part of Mueller's investigation. Instead, as Dotcom tweeted, "Special Counsel Mueller is not interested in my evidence. My lawyers wrote to him twice. He never replied."



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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Mon Feb 19, 2018 9:06 pm

Seth Rich time line as of May, 2017

Facts

reddit | this post was submitted on 21 May 2017

•"Seth Rich seemed to be friends with everybody, but he would stand up to anybody for what's right." (source)


•"Seth slept with an American flag over his bed." (source)


•"Everyone seems to agree on Seth's fighting spirit" (source)


•"He's kind of known as a goofball, but to me it was very clear to me that there was so much more. It didn't matter who you were, where you came from or where you were going. If he thought you were in trouble, he wanted to help. If you were sad he was going to make you happy, he was going to make you laugh." (source)


•"He was a great guy, personable, always there to kind of brighten up your day, even though that was our job as bartenders, just to make the customers happy. Seth would see if we're not happy, he would just like try to cheer us up a little bit." (source)


•"All my life I wanted to be in a position that I can make a difference" (source)


•"Rich was known for his elaborate outfits. On the Fourth of July, he had dress head to toe in clothes covered with an American flag pattern." (source)


•"When he was stuck late at night working in the office, he would dress up as a panda to make his co-workers laugh." (source)

•John Podesta writes, "I'm definitely for making an example of a suspected leaker whether or not we have any real basis for it." This quote reveals John's general mindset when it comes to leakers; clearly he cannot know that more than a year from now he will be dealing with some of the most damaging leaks in the history of politics.

•12:15pm EDT Huma Shah makes appointment for Jennifer Palmieri (Director of Communications for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign) to meet Katherine Branch (Director of Special Projects and Events Special Assistant to Valerie Jarrett) in the West Wing.


•12:28pm EDT Jennifer Palmieri arrives to the West Wing.


•1:39pm EDT Jennifer Palmieri leaves.


•Last date of emails in Wikileaks dump of DNC emails, which will happen on July 22.


•Mayor of Boston issues press release that Andrew Therriault is leaving his position as Director of Data Science for the Democratic National Convention and joining the Boston city government as Chief Data Officer.

•Andrew Therriault moves to Boston from DC to begin new job.

•Approx. 2pm EDT Stephen Bannon of Brietbart News writes that Guccifer 2.0 has leaked an internal DNC memo that lists vulnerabilities Hillary faces due to activities of the Clinton Foundation.


•7:21pm EDT Crystal Carson makes appointment for Jennifer Palmieri to meet Jen Psaki in the "upper pres" of the White House. Source: obamawhitehouse.archives.gov


•12:33pm EDT Jennifer Palmieri arrives to the White House to meet Jen Psaki.


•2:28pm EDT Jennifer Palmieri leaves.


•Note that by this date, Wikileaks has not leaked any emails having to do with the 2016 election, and has been largely out of the news. Wikileaks does not become a big player in the election until it releases the DNC emails on July 22, twelve days from now.


•4:20am Officers report beginning of incident with Seth Conrad Rich.


•5:57am Seth pronounced dead by unknown physician at unknown hospital.


•7:10am Police report filed (CCN #16113797): "CIC reports the sound of gunshots at 2134 Flagler Pl. NW. Upon arriving to the scene, the decedent was laying in the Southwest corder of the intersection of W St. and Flagler Pl. NW. The decedent was conscious and breathing with apparent gunshot wound(s) to the back. The decedent was transported to local area hospital and was pronounced by attending physician at 0557 hours." Responding office listed as: "Jody O'Leary (#7859)". Assisting officers listed as: "ROBERT WINGATE ROBINSON (#7634)(Body Worn Camera),Derek Tarr (#9237)(Other Officers At Scene),Shea Ellis (#9499)(Other Officers At Scene),Benjamin Velez (#6631)(Body Worn Camera),Mark Lee (#6141)(Body Worn Camera)".


•Seth's parents recount: "Seth was walking home, talking to his girlfriend on his cellphone. He was about a block from his place when his girlfriend heard voices or something in the background. Seth said he had to go. Two minutes later, he was shot."


•Seth's father recounts: "The officers who were there and they said 'Yeah, he was quite talkative, he did not realize he had been shot.'"


•Seth's girlfriend of two years, Kelsey Mulka, recounts: "We were on the phone just wrapping up our conversation, he had kind of told me that he was getting close to his house."


•D.C. Police Captain Anthony Haythe states: "It appears he was targeted. He was shot multiple times"


•Investigators go on record to confirm: Seth still had his wallet, watch and phone when he was discovered shot in the street.


•Rafael Aguilar and Carmelo Marmolejo-Calixto are found dead in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, with "gunshot wounds to vital organs", 434 miles from where Seth was shot 24 hours earlier, a 7 hour drive.


•From the article: "On Monday, one of the deceased men was found lying face down on the ground next to a gold Chevrolet Astro van that had tinted windows with the windshield wipers still moving. The other victim was slumped over in the passenger seat of the van." Van has Florida South Carolina license plate LGL 344.


•Note that an anti-gun-violence website that shows Rafael Aguilar's occupation as "Clinton 2016 campaign aid" allows anyone to freely tag victims with occupations; "Clinton 2016 campaign aid" was likely added as a joke.

•DNC chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, attended and stated: "Seth's life was not lived in vain. Seth Rich lived his life fully every single day for 27 years. Each of us at the DNC were absolutely privileged to work with him, to fight side by side with him every single day."

•10:30am EDT WikiLeaks releases DNC email database with 44,053 emails and 17,761 attachments, in two tranches, covering period from January 2015 to May 25, 2016.


•5:25pm EDT Donna Coleman makes appointment for Andrew M. Therriault and Christopher M. Dwelley to visit Kelly Jin at White House on August 1, 2016. Source: obamawhitehouse.archives.gov

•8pm EDT Paul Tyrone Dorn, Demetrius Brandon, and Stanley Marquis Williams are arrested for an attempted armed robbery nine blocks from where Seth was shot.

•9:30am EDT Donna Coleman makes appointment for Kamau Bobb and family to visit Quincy Brown in room 491 of "OEOB" today.


•10:16am EDT Donna Coleman makes appointment for Alfred J. Cornelius to visit Rich Pouyat in room 474 of "OEOB" today.


•10:17am EDT Andrew M. Therriault and Christopher M. Dwelley arrive to White House to meet Kelly Jin in room 442 of "OEOB".


•10:37am EDT Alfred arrives to White House.


•10:43am EDT Bobb family arrives to White House.


•11:40am EDT Andrew and Christopher leave.


•11:51am EDT Bobb family leaves.


•5:48pm EDT Alfred leaves.


•Julian Assange hints in a Dutch television interview that Seth Rich is Wikileaks' source for the DNC emails.


•The same day, Wikileaks offers a $20,000 reward for information leading to a conviction in Seth's killing.


•"Police have declined to say whether he was able to describe his assailants."


•"They found his wallet, credit cards and cellphone on his body. The band of his wristwatch was torn but not broken."


•Seth's parents (Joel and Mary Rich), girlfriend (Kelsey Mulka), best friend (Michael Cass-Antony), and others (Joseph Capone) who knew Seth go on record to defend Seth against rumors that he is the DNC email leaker, giving exclusive interviews to Crime Watch Daily.


•Michael Cass-Antony, reported to be Seth's best friend, equates being good with caring for the DNC: "All those lies that are being bandied about in the news are just that, and the reason that nobody close to him has refuted them is because there's no reason to, because he spoke for himself. Because anybody who knows him knows how good of a person he was, knows how much he cared for the DNC and for where he worked and how much he believed in his cause."


•Seth's parents state: "He had just found out he was going to go to work for the Clinton campaign doing data analysis and helping getting people out to vote," and that he had just started to draft a "letter of acceptance", but had only managed to write two sentences, one of which was: "All my life I wanted to be in a position that I can make a difference." Who writes acceptance letters to job offers??? You write a letter if you've got more to say than just a simple acceptance.


•Joseph Capone, general manager of Lou's City Bar, states: "I heard there was a bunch of robberies lately by a man with a silver gun in the area. He was here just by himself that night, and even asked him if he wanted to stick around and get a ride home. He was like 'No, I'm going to go somewhere else and then I'll go home.'"

•Craig Murray of Wikileaks claims to have met a disgruntled DNC staffer in September who gave him emails. These could only have been the Podesta emails, released on October 7, 2016, not the DNC emails, which were released July 22.
•Jack Burkman appeals to Congress to investigate Seth's death under the theory that it might have been the Russians trying to disrupt the voter registration project Seth was working on for the DNC.


•Kevin Doherty, a security expert on the team, says: "We are going to look at link analysis. We are going to try and establish a timeline. We are going to see if there were individuals who may have been missed."


•The team includes a forensic physiologist, a security specialist and George Washington grad students, and are operating out of the new Seth Rich Center for Investigations in Arlington, Virginia.


•Burkman claims a former U.S. Intelligence Officer told him the Russian's had something to do with Rich's murder.



Apr 27, 2017 Andrew Therriault's tweets at Seth's Twitter account @panda4progress: "A group of Pandas is called an "Embarrassment"".
•As of May 20, tweet has been deleted.

May 15, 2017 Fox News reports that Rod Wheeler, a private investigator, says there is evidence that Seth had contact with Wikileaks. From the article:

•Wheeler states: "The police department nor the FBI have been forthcoming. They haven't been cooperating at all. I believe that the answer to solving his death lies on that computer, which I believe is either at the police department or either at the FBI. I have been told both."


•Asked if his sources have told him there is information that links Seth to Wikileaks, Wheeler stated: "Absolutely. Yeah. That's confirmed."


•Wheeler also said: "I have a source inside the police department that has looked at me straight in the eye and said, 'Rod, we were told to stand down on this case and I can't share any information with you.' Now, that is highly unusual for a murder investigation, especially from a police department. Again, I don't think it comes from the chief's office, but I do believe there is a correlation between the mayor's office and the DNC and that is the information that will come out."


•Seth's family distanced itself from Rod Wheeler: "The private investigator who spoke to press was offered to the Rich family and paid for by a third party, and contractually was barred from speaking to press or anyone outside of law enforcement or the family unless explicitly authorized by the family."



•The Gateway Pundit claims the footage from the body cameras worn by three of the police officers responding to Seth's shooting is missing.


•Brad Bauman, the spokesman for Seth's family, and a professional Democrat crisis PR consultant, claims Rod Wheeler is being funded by Ed Butowsky, but Butowsky denies this.


Fox News
•Brad Bauman releases this statement: "This is the statement from the Rich family re: today?s little fake news story. As we?ve seen through the past year of unsubstantiated claims, we see no facts, we have seen no evidence, we have been approached with no emails and only learned about this when contacted by the press. Even if tomorrow, an email was found, it is not a high enough bar of evidence to prove any interactions as emails can be altered and we?ve seen that those interested in pushing conspiracies will stop at nothing to do so. We are a family who is committed to facts, not fake evidence that surfaces every few months to fill the void and distract law enforcement and the general public from finding Seth?s murderers. The services of the private investigator who spoke to press was offered to the Rich family and paid for by a third party, and contractually was barred from speaking to press or anyone outside of law enforcement or the family unless explicitly authorized by the family."

•Kim Dotcom tweets list of security cameras in area of murder.


•Andrew Therriault's April 27 tweet @panda4progress is uncovered by online sleuths. Andrew deletes the tweet within hours.


•Seth's social media accounts discovered and archived: pandas4bernie (Facebook, Reddit comments and posts, Tumblr), MeGrimLock4 (Reddit comments and posts), panda4progress (Twitter and tweets). His online persona reveals that he was a supporter of Bernie Sanders (source).



•Kim Dotcom states: "I knew Seth Rich. I know he was the @Wikileaks source. I was involved. I'm meeting my legal team on Monday. I will issue a statement about #SethRich on Tuesday. Please be patient. This needs to be done properly."


•Reddit admins begin to edit Seth's comments and posts.

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kinderdigi
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Mon Feb 19, 2018 9:14 pm

Another Seth Rich Time line:


Seth Rich — A Timeline.

Medium

Jan 3, 1989 Seth Conrad Rich born to parents Joel and Mary Rich in Omaha, Nebraska. Seth was 27 at time of death.
•“Seth Rich seemed to be friends with everybody, but he would stand up to anybody for what’s right.” (source)
•“Seth slept with an American flag over his bed.” (source)
•“Everyone seems to agree on Seth’s fighting spirit” (source)
•“He’s kind of known as a goofball, but to me it was very clear to me that there was so much more. It didn’t matter who you were, where you came from or where you were going. If he thought you were in trouble, he wanted to help. If you were sad he was going to make you happy, he was going to make you laugh.” (source)
•“He was a great guy, personable, always there to kind of brighten up your day, even though that was our job as bartenders, just to make the customers happy. Seth would see if we’re not happy, he would just like try to cheer us up a little bit.” (source)
•“All my life I wanted to be in a position that I can make a difference” (source)
•“Rich was known for his elaborate outfits. On the Fourth of July, he had dress head to toe in clothes covered with an American flag pattern.” (source)
•“When he was stuck late at night working in the office, he would dress up as a panda to make his co-workers laugh.” (source)

Sun, Feb 22, 2015
•John Podesta writes, “I’m definitely for making an example of a suspected leaker whether or not we have any real basis for it.” This quote reveals John’s general mindset when it comes to leakers; clearly he cannot know that more than a year from now he will be dealing with some of the most damaging leaks in the history of politics.
•12:15pm EDT Huma Shah makes appointment for Jennifer Palmieri (Director of Communications for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign) to meet Katherine Branch (Director of Special Projects and Events Special Assistant to Valerie Jarrett) in the West Wing.
•12:28pm EDT Jennifer Palmieri arrives to the West Wing.
•1:39pm EDT Jennifer Palmieri leaves.

Wed, May 25, 2016
•Last date of emails in Wikileaks dump of DNC emails, which will happen on July 22.
•Mayor of Boston issues press release that Andrew Therriault is leaving his position as Director of Data Science for the Democratic National Convention and joining the Boston city government as Chief Data Officer.

June 2016
•Andrew Therriault moves to Boston from DC to begin new job.
•7:21pm EDT Crystal Carson makes appointment for Jennifer Palmieri to meet Jen Psaki in the “upper pres” of the White House.
•12:33pm EDT Jennifer Palmieri arrives to the White House to meet Jen Psaki.
•2:28pm EDT Jennifer Palmieri leaves.

Sun, July 10, 2016

Mon, July 11, 2016
•Rafael Aguilar and Carmelo Marmolejo-Calixto are found dead in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, with “gunshot wounds to vital organs”, 434 miles from where Seth was shot 24 hours earlier, a 7 hour drive.
•From the article: “On Monday, one of the deceased men was found lying face down on the ground next to a gold Chevrolet Astro van that had tinted windows with the windshield wipers still moving. The other victim was slumped over in the passenger seat of the van.” Van has Florida South Carolina license plate LGL 344.
•Note that an anti-gun-violence website that shows Rafael Aguilar’s occupation as “Clinton 2016 campaign aid” allows anyone to freely tag victims with occupations; “Clinton 2016 campaign aid” was likely added as a joke.

Tue, July 12, 2016 Hillary Clinton uses Seth’s murder to advocate in a campaign speech for stricter gun control.

Wed, July 13, 2016 More than 100 people attend vigil held in front of Seth’s home in D.C.
•DNC chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, attended and stated: “Seth’s life was not lived in vain. Seth Rich lived his life fully every single day for 27 years. Each of us at the DNC were absolutely privileged to work with him, to fight side by side with him every single day.”

Fri, July 22, 2016
•10:30am EDT WikiLeaks releases DNC email database with 44,053 emails and 17,761 attachments, in two tranches, covering period from January 2015 to May 25, 2016.
•5:25pm EDT Donna Coleman makes appointment for Andrew M. Therriault and Christopher M. Dwelley to visit Kelly Jin at White House on August 1, 2016. Source: obamawhitehouse.archives.gov

Wed, July 26, 2016 Police in Myrtle Beach, SC, ask for help solving murders of Rafael Aguilar and Carmelo Marmolejo-Calixto.

Fri, July 28, 2016
•8pm EDT Paul Tyrone Dorn, Demetrius Brandon, and Stanley Marquis Williams are arrested for an attempted armed robbery nine blocks from where Seth was shot.
•9:30am EDT Donna Coleman makes appointment for Kamau Bobb and family to visit Quincy Brown in room 491 of “OEOB” today.
•10:16am EDT Donna Coleman makes appointment for Alfred J. Cornelius to visit Rich Pouyat in room 474 of “OEOB” today.
•10:17am EDT Andrew M. Therriault and Christopher M. Dwelley arrive to White House to meet Kelly Jin in room 442 of “OEOB”.
•10:37am EDT Alfred arrives to White House.
•10:43am EDT Bobb family arrives to White House.
•11:40am EDT Andrew and Christopher leave.
•11:51am EDT Bobb family leaves.
•5:48pm EDT Alfred leaves.

Fri, Aug 5, 2016 D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier states: “Right now, we have more questions than answers.”

Tue, Aug 9, 2016
•Julian Assange hints in a Dutch television interview that Seth Rich is Wikileaks’ source for the DNC emails.
•The same day, Wikileaks offers a $20,000 reward for information leading to a conviction in Seth’s killing.

Tue, Aug 16, 2016 D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier announces she is stepping down to become head of security for the NFL.

Sat, Aug 20, 2016 Newsweek publishes story on Seth Rich. From the article:
•“Police have declined to say whether he was able to describe his assailants.”
•“They found his wallet, credit cards and cellphone on his body. The band of his wristwatch was torn but not broken.”

Sep 17, 2016 D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier’s last day of work.

Sep 30, 2016
•Seth’s parents (Joel and Mary Rich), girlfriend (Kelsey Mulka), best friend (Michael Cass-Antony), and others (Joseph Capone) who knew Seth go on record to defend Seth against rumors that he is the DNC email leaker, giving exclusive interviews to Crime Watch Daily.
•Michael Cass-Antony, reported to be Seth’s best friend, equates being good with caring for the DNC: “All those lies that are being bandied about in the news are just that, and the reason that nobody close to him has refuted them is because there’s no reason to, because he spoke for himself. Because anybody who knows him knows how good of a person he was, knows how much he cared for the DNC and for where he worked and how much he believed in his cause.”
•Seth’s parents state: “He had just found out he was going to go to work for the Clinton campaign doing data analysis and helping getting people out to vote,” and that he had just started to draft a “letter of acceptance”, but had only managed to write two sentences, one of which was: “All my life I wanted to be in a position that I can make a difference.” Who writes acceptance letters to job offers??? You write a letter if you’ve got more to say than just a simple acceptance.
•Joseph Capone, general manager of Lou’s City Bar, states: “I heard there was a bunch of robberies lately by a man with a silver gun in the area. He was here just by himself that night, and even asked him if he wanted to stick around and get a ride home. He was like ‘No, I’m going to go somewhere else and then I’ll go home.’”

Nov 23, 2016 Parents Joel and Mary Rich appear at press conference with Republican lobbyist Jack Burkman to offer $125,000 reward.

Wed, Dec 14, 2016
•Craig Murray of Wikileaks claims to have met a disgruntled DNC staffer in September who gave him emails. These could only have been the Podesta emails, released on October 7, 2016, not the DNC emails, which were released July 22.

Feb 20, 2017
•Jack Burkman appeals to Congress to investigate Seth’s death under the theory that it might have been the Russians trying to disrupt the voter registration project Seth was working on for the DNC.

Thu, Mar 23, 2017 Jack Burkman launches independent investigation into Seth’s murder, in which Seth’s family take no part. From the article:
•Kevin Doherty, a security expert on the team, says: “We are going to look at link analysis. We are going to try and establish a timeline. We are going to see if there were individuals who may have been missed.”
•The team includes a forensic physiologist, a security specialist and George Washington grad students, and are operating out of the new Seth Rich Center for Investigations in Arlington, Virginia.
•Burkman claims a former U.S. Intelligence Officer told him the Russian’s had something to do with Rich’s murder.

Apr 27, 2017 Andrew Therriault’s tweets at Seth’s Twitter account @panda4progress: A group of Pandas is called an "Embarassment".
•As of May 20, tweet has been deleted.

May 15, 2017 Fox News reports that Rod Wheeler, a private investigator, says there is evidence that Seth had contact with Wikileaks. From the article:
•Wheeler states: “The police department nor the FBI have been forthcoming. They haven’t been cooperating at all. I believe that the answer to solving his death lies on that computer, which I believe is either at the police department or either at the FBI. I have been told both.”
•Asked if his sources have told him there is information that links Seth to Wikileaks, Wheeler stated: “Absolutely. Yeah. That’s confirmed.”
•Wheeler also said: “I have a source inside the police department that has looked at me straight in the eye and said, ‘Rod, we were told to stand down on this case and I can’t share any information with you.’ Now, that is highly unusual for a murder investigation, especially from a police department. Again, I don’t think it comes from the chief’s office, but I do believe there is a correlation between the mayor’s office and the DNC and that is the information that will come out.”
•Seth’s family distanced itself from Rod Wheeler: “The private investigator who spoke to press was offered to the Rich family and paid for by a third party, and contractually was barred from speaking to press or anyone outside of law enforcement or the family unless explicitly authorized by the family.”

May 16, 2017 The Gateway Pundit claims the footage from the body cameras worn by three of the police officers responding to Seth’s shooting is missing.

May 17, 2017 Fox News modifies it’s May 15 article to note that Rod Wheeler has become wishy-washy about his previous on-camera claims that he communicated with the FBI regarding Wikileaks and Seth Rich.
•Brad Bauman, the spokesman for Seth’s family, and a professional Democrat crisis PR consultant, released this statement: “This is the statement from the Rich family re: today?s little fake news story. As we?ve seen through the past year of unsubstantiated claims, we see no facts, we have seen no evidence, we have been approached with no emails and only learned about this when contacted by the press. Even if tomorrow, an email was found, it is not a high enough bar of evidence to prove any interactions as emails can be altered and we?ve seen that those interested in pushing conspiracies will stop at nothing to do so. We are a family who is committed to facts, not fake evidence that surfaces every few months to fill the void and distract law enforcement and the general public from finding Seth?s murderers. The services of the private investigator who spoke to press was offered to the Rich family and paid for by a third party, and contractually was barred from speaking to press or anyone outside of law enforcement or the family unless explicitly authorized by the family.”

Thu, May 18, 2017
•Kim Dotcom tweets list of security cameras in area of murder.

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/160 ... Tr4nAg.png

•Andrew Therriault’s April 27 tweet @panda4progress is uncovered by online sleuths. Andrew deletes the tweet within hours.
•Seth’s social media accounts discovered and archived: pandas4bernie (Facebook, Reddit comments and posts, Tumblr), MeGrimLock4 (Reddit comments and posts), panda4progress (Twitter and tweets). His online persona reveals that he was a supporter of Bernie Sanders (source).

Sat, May 20, 2017
•Kim Dotcom states: “I knew Seth Rich. I know he was the @Wikileaks source. I was involved. I’m meeting my legal team on Monday. I will issue a statement about #SethRich on Tuesday. Please be patient. This needs to be done properly.”
•Reddit admins begin to edit Seth’s comments and posts.

Original post here: link / Further reading
https://medium.com/@kingrobb0/seth-rich ... 7b62650bb2
kinderdigi
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Tue Feb 20, 2018 6:12 am

D.C. surgeon who operated on Seth Rich: ‘The DNC staffer was alive and well after surgery, before a group of LEOs showed up to the ICU’

Shepard Ambellas

Intellihub | 2017-05-22T09:17:07+00:00

WASHINGTON (INTELLIHUB) — A 4-year resident surgeon at Washington Hospital Center claims that Seth Rich was alive and recovering well in facility’s Intensive Care Unit (ICU) after being treated for a total of 3 routine gunshot wounds — that is until a number of law enforcement officers arrived eight hours later kicking most everyone out of the ICU and physically barring doctors and others from attending to Rich.

The surgeon who witnessed this bizarre behavior decided to come forth with the information despite the fact that he or she may be easy to identify.

Posted on May 17, to 4chan under the anonymous ID: “rhotYJAg,” the surgeon wrote:


4th year surgery resident here who rotated at WHC (Washington Hospital Center) last year, it won’t be hard to identify me but I feel that I shouldn’t stay silent.

Seth Rich was shot twice, with 3 total gunshot wounds (entry and exit, and entry). He was taken to the OR emergently where we performed an exlap and found a small injury to segment 3 of the liver which was packed and several small bowel injuries (pretty common for gunshots to the back exiting the abdomen) which we resected ~12cm of bowel and left him in discontinuity (didn’t hook everything back up) with the intent of performing a washout in the morning. He did not have any major vascular injuries otherwise. I’ve seen dozens of worse cases than this which survived and nothing about his injuries suggested to me that he’d sustained a fatal wound.


In the meantime he was transferred to the ICU and transfused 2 units of blood when his post-surgery crit came back ~20. He was stable and not on any pressors, and it seemed pretty routine. About 8 hours after he arrived we were swarmed by LEOs and pretty much everyone except the attending and a few nurses was kicked out of the ICU (disallowing visiting hours -normally every odd hour, eg 1am, 3am, etc- is not something we do routinely). It was weird as hell. At turnover that morning we were instructed not to round on the VIP that came in last night (that’s exactly what the attending said, and no one except for me and another resident had any idea who he was talking about).


No one here was allowed to see Seth except for my attending when he died. No code was called. I rounded on patients literally next door but was physically blocked from checking in on him. I’ve never seen anything like it before, and while I can’t say 100% that he was allowed to die, I don’t understand why he was treated like that. Take it how you may, /pol/, I’m just one low level doc. Something’s fishy though, that’s for sure.

©2017. INTELLIHUB.COM. All Rights Reserved.
https://www.intellihub.com/d-c-surgeon- ... o-the-icu/
kinderdigi
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