Category Archives: US government

More than 1,100 law school professors nationwide oppose Sessions’s nomination as attorney general

The Washington Post reports: A group of more than 1,100 law school professors from across the country is sending a letter to Congress on Tuesday urging the Senate to reject the nomination of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) for attorney general.

The letter, signed by professors from 170 law schools in 48 states, is also scheduled to run as a full-page newspaper ad aimed at members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will be holding confirmation hearings for Sessions on Jan. 10-11.

“We are convinced that Jeff Sessions will not fairly enforce our nation’s laws and promote justice and equality in the United States,” states the letter, signed by prominent legal scholars including Laurence H. Tribe of Harvard Law School, Geoffrey R. Stone of the University of Chicago Law School, Pamela S. Karlan of Stanford Law School and Erwin Chemerinsky of the University of California, Irvine School of Law. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. lending support to Baltic states fearing Russia

The New York Times reports: Dozens of United States Special Operations forces are now in the Baltics to bolster the training and resolve of troops who are confronting a looming threat from Russia, and to enhance the Americans’ ability to detect Moscow’s shadowy efforts to destabilize the former Soviet republics.

“They’re scared to death of Russia,” Gen. Raymond T. Thomas, the head of the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command, who visited here recently, said of the tiny militaries of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. “They are very open about that. They’re desperate for our leadership.”

As a result, General Thomas said, American commandos now have a “persistent” presence here with Baltic special operations troops, after forging close ties with them over the past decade while fighting together in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Americans bring sophisticated surveillance technology and broad sources of intelligence. The Baltic partners have a deep understanding of conventional Russian military might as well as Moscow’s increasing use of cyberwarfare, information subterfuge and other means less than all-out war to weaken the Western-backed governments. [Continue reading…]

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How Nixon conspired to prolong the Vietnam War

John A. Farrell writes that in 1968: Nixon had entered the fall campaign with a lead over [Vice President Hubert H.] Humphrey, but the gap was closing that October. Henry A. Kissinger, then an outside Republican adviser, had called, alerting Nixon that a deal was in the works: If Johnson would halt all bombing of North Vietnam, the Soviets pledged to have Hanoi engage in constructive talks to end a war that had already claimed 30,000 American lives.

But Nixon had a pipeline to Saigon, where the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, feared that Johnson would sell him out. If Thieu would stall the talks, Nixon could portray Johnson’s actions as a cheap political trick. The conduit was Anna Chennault, a Republican doyenne and Nixon fund-raiser, and a member of the pro-nationalist China lobby, with connections across Asia.

“! Keep Anna Chennault working on” South Vietnam, Haldeman scrawled, recording Nixon’s orders. “Any other way to monkey wrench it? Anything RN can do.”

Nixon told Haldeman to have Rose Mary Woods, the candidate’s personal secretary, contact another nationalist Chinese figure — the businessman Louis Kung — and have him press Thieu as well. “Tell him hold firm,” Nixon said.

Nixon also sought help from Chiang Kai-shek, the president of Taiwan. And he ordered Haldeman to have his vice-presidential candidate, Spiro T. Agnew, threaten the C.I.A. director, Richard Helms. Helms’s hopes of keeping his job under Nixon depended on his pliancy, Agnew was to say. “Tell him we want the truth — or he hasn’t got the job,” Nixon said.

Throughout his life, Nixon feared disclosure of this skulduggery. “I did nothing to undercut them,” he told Frost in their 1977 interviews. “As far as Madame Chennault or any number of other people,” he added, “I did not authorize them and I had no knowledge of any contact with the South Vietnamese at that point, urging them not to.” Even after Watergate, he made it a point of character. “I couldn’t have done that in conscience.” [Continue reading…]

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America’s emerging unelected leaders

David Rothkopf examines the implications of the emerging organizational chart of the Trump administration. He writes: Last week, [Trump’s transition team] unveiled a new White House entity called the National Trade Council (NTC) to oversee many of the same responsibilities of the NEC [National Economic Council] and the USTR [United States Trade Representative]. On Tuesday, it announced that it is re-establishing the HSC [Homeland Security Council whose operations President Obama had folded into the National Security Council] as a separate agency. And, just for kicks, the transition team also announced the creation of a position called the “special representative for international negotiations,” to be filled by a Trump Organization executive vice president and lawyer who will be involved — somehow — in all U.S. negotiations around the world.

So, we now have four major interagency councils in the White House — the NSC [National Security Council], the NEC [National Economic Council], the NTC [National Trade Council], and the HSC. We have at least five entities that now feel empowered to take the lead on U.S. international trade policy: the NEC, the NTC, the new special representative for international negotiations, USTR, and the Commerce Department (whose incoming nominee for secretary, Wilbur Ross, has asserted that he will have a leading role in this regard). You have the overlap between the NSC (which, for example, might handle a terrorist threat where it originated) and the HSC (which might handle a threat where it manifested itself). You have the historic rivalry between the State and Defense departments over national security policy leadership, exacerbated by the move to add even more clout within the White House through the creation of the international negotiator job and the return to two security-focused interagency leadership groups residing there (the NSC and HSC). You still have two top-level officials in the intelligence community (the director of national intelligence and the director of the CIA) overseeing or leading 17 different intelligence agencies. And … well, you don’t need another “and” here. This is a mess waiting to happen. Rivalries, confusion, and miscommunication are all likely outcomes.

What is emerging looks less like a tight, well-managed structure for the world’s largest and most complex organization and more like a loose holding company. Perhaps that should not be a surprise given that the Trump Organization is a loose holding company with hundreds of entities within it and lots of different independent operating units. The key in such structures, however, is a strong coordinating hand at the top. But who is that going to be?

Reports from within the Trump Organization say Trump was not that day-to-day manager. He focused on building the brand, being its face, its messenger. He would dip in and make a few decisions on key deals or an element of a construction project — but leave the rest to his managers.

There is no reason not to assume that this will be his role within the U.S. government. He has said as much, suggesting that Vice President-elect Mike Pence will play a big role overseeing both domestic and international policy. Further, Trump has surrounded himself at a high level in the White House with a team primarily focused on message and politics (his “brand” as president), from senior counselors like Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway to a handful of other senior messaging and press associates.

In the past, when presidents have sought to run a White House in which power was devolved (as opposed to “micromanagers” like Carter and Obama), much of the responsibility for managing rivalries and competing interests has fallen to the chief of staff. Under Dwight Eisenhower, Chief of Staff Sherman Adams was so powerful that he was considered the “deputy president.” Under Reagan, chiefs of staff also played a key role (with varying degrees of success). Clinton and George W. Bush were helped immensely by strong White House chiefs of staff to help manage day-to-day operations.

The problem for Trump is that his White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, has absolutely no qualifications to play this role. He has no executive branch experience. He has no national security experience. He has no real international economic experience. And yet, with competing White House councils clamoring for presidential approvals and face time, he, as gatekeeper, could inadvertently become the most powerful person in the White House.

Here’s the thing: In a holding company, the power lies with the person who ends up coordinating the structure and resolving the inevitable rivalries that emerge within it. Will it be Pence — continuing the recent trend of increasingly important No. 2s, from Al Gore to Dick Cheney to Joe Biden — inheriting a vice presidency vastly more powerful than ever before? Will it be Priebus, who like Trump will be engaging in the most high-stakes on-the-job training in history? Might it be someone like Bannon, who could play a president-whisperer role like Valerie Jarrett or Reagan confidant Mike Deaver once did? Could it be a small committee of advisors that could include Jared Kushner or Ivanka Trump?

The answer is unclear. But the more convoluted the Trump administration becomes (and it is already setting records), given the character and track record of the incoming president, the more clear it is that an awesome amount of power is going to be in the hands of someone who the American people did not select for the country’s top job. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s Syria policies could create a hotbed for ISIS to plan attacks

Mohamad Bazzi writes: Since Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime and its allies forced out the last rebels from eastern Aleppo and regained full control over Syria’s largest city, the six-year-old Syrian civil war has now entered a new phase. The next major battle will be to drive out the Islamic State group from the city of Raqqa, but that fight is far more dependent on the United States than Assad and his allies.

Donald Trump wants to stay out of Syria’s complicated war. But as soon as he’s inaugurated on Jan. 20, the new American president will face a crucial decision: Will he continue the Pentagon’s support and training for a coalition of Syrian rebel groups leading the offensive to oust ISIS from Raqqa, the capital of its self-proclaimed caliphate?

That campaign began Nov. 6 with a mobilization of some 30,000 rebels to encircle Raqqa and cut it off from all sides and deny ISIS the ability to resupply with weapons and fighters. The battle to push the Islamic State out of Raqqa could take months. If it falters under a fledging Trump administration, ISIS would continue to have a safe base from which it would unleash new terror attacks in Syria and Iraq, and inspire and possibly direct operations around the world.

After the fall of eastern Aleppo, there are signs of an emerging division of labor in Syria between the incoming Trump administration and that of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Russia would continue its intensive air strikes and logistical aid to help Assad recapture territory from rebels, while Washington would take the lead in the fight against ISIS. On Dec. 10, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced that the Pentagon would send 200 additional special forces to Syria — for a total of 500 US troops on the ground — to help train and advise Syrian opposition groups who are fighting ISIS, especially around Raqqa. [Continue reading…]

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NASA’s overlooked duty to look inward

Elisa Gabbert writes: In 1942, not long after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the poet Archibald MacLeish wrote an essay called “The Image of Victory,” in which he asked what winning the Second World War, the “airman’s war,” would mean for posterity. MacLeish believed that pilots could do more than bring victory; by literally rising above the conflicts on the ground, they could also reshape our very understanding of the planet. “Never in all their history have men been able truly to conceive of the world as one: a single sphere, a globe, having the qualities of a globe, a round earth in which all the directions eventually meet, in which there is no center because every point, or none, is center — an equal earth which all men occupy as equals,” he wrote. The airplane, he felt, was both an engine of perspective and a symbol of unity.

MacLeish could not, perhaps, have imagined the sight of a truly whole Earth. But, twenty-six years after his essay appeared, the three-man crew of Apollo 8 reached the highest vantage point in history, becoming the first humans to witness Earth rising over the surface of the moon. The most iconic photograph of our planet, popularly known as “The Blue Marble,” was taken by their successors on Apollo 17, in 1972. In it, Earth appears in crisp focus, brightly lit, as in studio portraiture, against a black backdrop. The picture clicked with the cultural moment. As the neuroscientist Gregory Petsko observed, in 2011, in an essay on the consciousness-shifting power of images, it became a symbol of the budding environmentalist movement. “Our whole planet suddenly, in this image, seemed tiny, vulnerable, and incredibly lonely against the vast blackness of the cosmos,” Petsko wrote. “Regional conflict and petty differences could be dismissed as trivial compared with environmental dangers that threatened all of humanity.” Apollo 17 marked America’s last mission to the moon, and the last time that humans left Earth’s orbit.

It was always part of NASA’s mission to look inward, not just outward. The National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, which established the agency, claimed as its first objective “the expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere and space.” NASA’s early weather satellites were followed, in the seventies and eighties, by a slew of more advanced instruments, which supplied data on the ozone layer, crops and vegetation, and even insect infestations. They allowed scientists to recognize and measure the symptoms of climate change, and their decades’ worth of data helped the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change conclude, in 2007, that global warming is “very likely” anthropogenic. According to a report released last month by NASA’s inspector general, the agency’s Earth Science Division helps commercial, government, and military organizations around the world locate areas at risk for storm-related flooding, predict malaria outbreaks, develop wildfire models, assess air quality, identify remote volcanoes whose toxic emissions contribute to acid rain, and determine the precise length of a day. [Continue reading…]

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Evidence of Russian malware found on U.S. electrical company laptop

The Verge reports: A utilities company in Vermont has detected evidence of Russian malware, according to a report this evening from The Washington Post, which cited anonymous US officials. The code is said to be connected to a Russian hacking outfit the US government has named Grizzly Steppe.

According to the company, later revealed to be the Burlington Electric Department, the code linked to Grizzly Steppe was found on just one laptop, and the laptop wasn’t connected to the electrical grid — allaying earlier fears that Russia had hacked into the nation’s electrical grid. Owned by the city of Burlington, the utility firm confirmed the breach in a post on its Facebook page.

“The grid is not in danger,” Vermont Public Service Commissioner Christopher Recchia told the Burlington Free Press. “The utility flagged it, saw it, notified appropriate parties and isolated that one laptop with that malware on it.” [Continue reading…]

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The FBI/DHS report on Russian malicious cyber activity

The FBI/DHS reports: This Joint Analysis Report (JAR) is the result of analytic efforts between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). This document provides technical details regarding the tools and infrastructure used by the Russian civilian and military intelligence Services (RIS) to compromise and exploit networks and endpoints associated with the U.S. election, as well as a range of U.S. Government, political, and private sector entities. The U.S. Government is referring to this malicious cyber activity by RIS as GRIZZLY STEPPE.

Previous JARs have not attributed malicious cyber activity to specific countries or threat actors. However, public attribution of these activities to RIS is supported by technical indicators from the U.S. Intelligence Community, DHS, FBI, the private sector, and other entities. This determination expands upon the Joint Statement released October 7, 2016, from the Department of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security.

This activity by RIS is part of an ongoing campaign of cyber-enabled operations directed at the U.S. government and its citizens. These cyber operations have included spearphishing campaigns targeting government organizations, critical infrastructure entities, think tanks, universities, political organizations, and corporations leading to the theft of information. In foreign countries, RIS actors conducted damaging and/or disruptive cyber-attacks, including attacks on critical infrastructure networks. In some cases, RIS actors masqueraded as third parties, hiding behind false online personas designed to cause the victim to misattribute the source of the attack. This JAR provides technical indicators related to many of these operations, recommended mitigations, suggested actions to take in response to the indicators provided, and information on how to report such incidents to the U.S. Government. [Continue reading…]

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The Mosul Dam is failing

Dexter Filkins writes: On the morning of August 7, 2014, a team of fighters from the Islamic State, riding in pickup trucks and purloined American Humvees, swept out of the Iraqi village of Wana and headed for the Mosul Dam. Two months earlier, ISIS had captured Mosul, a city of nearly two million people, as part of a ruthless campaign to build a new caliphate in the Middle East. For an occupying force, the dam, twenty-five miles north of Mosul, was an appealing target: it regulates the flow of water to the city, and to millions of Iraqis who live along the Tigris. As the ISIS invaders approached, they could make out the dam’s four towers, standing over a wide, squat structure that looks like a brutalist mausoleum. Getting closer, they saw a retaining wall that spans the Tigris, rising three hundred and seventy feet from the riverbed and extending nearly two miles from embankment to embankment. Behind it, a reservoir eight miles long holds eleven billion cubic metres of water.

A group of Kurdish soldiers was stationed at the dam, and the ISIS fighters bombarded them from a distance and then moved in. When the battle was over, the area was nearly empty; most of the Iraqis who worked at the dam, a crew of nearly fifteen hundred, had fled. The fighters began to loot and destroy equipment. An ISIS propaganda video posted online shows a fighter carrying a flag across, and a man’s voice says, “The banner of unification flutters above the dam.”

The next day, Vice-President Joe Biden telephoned Masoud Barzani, the President of the Kurdish region, and urged him to retake the dam as quickly as possible. American officials feared that ISIS might try to blow it up, engulfing Mosul and a string of cities all the way to Baghdad in a colossal wave. Ten days later, after an intense struggle, Kurdish forces pushed out the isis fighters and took control of the dam.

But, in the months that followed, American officials inspected the dam and became concerned that it was on the brink of collapse. The problem wasn’t structural: the dam had been built to survive an aerial bombardment. (In fact, during the Gulf War, American jets bombed its generator, but the dam remained intact.) The problem, according to Azzam Alwash, an Iraqi-American civil engineer who has served as an adviser on the dam, is that “it’s just in the wrong place.” Completed in 1984, the dam sits on a foundation of soluble rock. To keep it stable, hundreds of employees have to work around the clock, pumping a cement mixture into the earth below. Without continuous maintenance, the rock beneath would wash away, causing the dam to sink and then break apart. But Iraq’s recent history has not been conducive to that kind of vigilance. [Continue reading…]

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Kerry rebukes Israel, calling settlements a threat to peace

The New York Times reports: Secretary of State John Kerry warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Wednesday that the Israeli government was undermining any hope of a two-state solution to its decades-long conflict with the Palestinians, and said that the American vote in the United Nations last week was driven by an effort to save Israel from “the most extreme elements” in its own government.

With only 23 days left as secretary of state, Mr. Kerry, the former presidential candidate who made the search for peace in the Middle East one of the driving missions of his four years as secretary, spoke with clear frustration about Mr. Netanyahu’s continued support of settlements “strategically placed in locations that make two states impossible.” But he spoke knowing that the incoming administration of President-elect Donald J. Trump may well abandon the key principles that the United States has used for decades of Middle East negotiations.

“The status quo is leading toward one state, or perpetual occupation,” Mr. Kerry said, his voice animated. He argued that Israel, with a growing Arab population, could not survive as both a Jewish state and a democratic state unless it embraced the two-state approach that a succession of American presidents have advocated. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Israeli leaders postponed plans on Wednesday to move ahead with new housing in East Jerusalem, just hours before Secretary of State John Kerry delivered a much-anticipated speech outlining an American vision for peace with the Palestinians.

The Jerusalem city planning committee, which was reported to be acting at the behest of the national government, canceled at the last moment a scheduled vote on permits for 618 new housing units in the predominantly Palestinian eastern section of the city. Members of the committee said the delay came at the request of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. [Continue reading…]

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Inside the coming war between the United States and the United Nations

Josh Rogin writes: Even before Donald Trump’s inauguration as president, Congress is planning to escalate the clash over the U.N. Security Council’s anti-Israel resolution into a full-on conflict between the United States and the United Nations. If Trump embraces the strategy — and all signals indicate he will — the battle could become the Trump administration’s first confrontation with a major international organization, with consequential but largely unpredictable results.

Immediately after the Obama administration abstained Friday from a vote to condemn Israeli settlements as illegal, which passed the Security Council by a vote of 14 to zero, Republicans and Democrats alike criticized both the United Nations and the U.S. government for allowing what Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) called “a one-sided, biased resolution.” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the chairman of the Senate appropriations subcommittee for the State Department and foreign operations, pledged to lead an effort to withhold the U.S. funding that makes up 22 percent of the U.N.’s annual operating budget.

“The U.N. has made it impossible for us to continue with business as usual,” Graham told me right after the vote. “Almost every Republican will feel like this is a betrayal of Israel and the only response that we have is the power of purse.” [Continue reading…]

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Fresh advance in east Mosul to begin within days

Reuters reports: Iraqi forces will resume their push against Islamic State inside Mosul in the coming days, a U.S. battlefield commander said, in a new phase of the two-month-old operation that will see American troops deployed closer to the front line in the city.

The battle for Mosul, involving 100,000 Iraqi troops, members of the Kurdish security forces and Shi’ite militiamen, is the biggest ground operation in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion of 2003. The upcoming phase appears likely to give American troops their biggest combat role since they fulfilled President Barack Obama’s pledge to withdraw from Iraq in 2011.

Elite Iraqi soldiers have retaken a quarter of Mosul, the jihadists’ last major stronghold in Iraq, but their advance has been slow and punishing. They entered a planned “operational refit” this month, the first significant pause of the campaign.

A heavily armoured unit of several thousand federal police was redeployed from the southern outskirts two weeks ago to reinforce the eastern front after army units advised by the Americans suffered heavy losses in an Islamic State counter-attack.

U.S. advisers, part of an international coalition that has conducted thousands of air strikes and trained tens of thousands of Iraqi ground troops, will work directly with those forces and an elite Interior Ministry strike force. [Continue reading…]

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John Kerry, in a final, pointed plea, will outline a vision of Mideast peace

The New York Times reports: In a last-chance effort to shape the outlines of a Middle East peace deal, Secretary of State John Kerry is to outline in a speech on Wednesday the Obama administration’s vision of a final Israeli-Palestinian accord based on bitter lessons learned from an effort that collapsed in 2014.

A senior State Department official said that Mr. Kerry, who will be out of office in less than a month and no longer in a position to negotiate any deal, will use his remarks to confront Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who has charged that the United States “orchestrated” a United Nations Security Council resolution last week condemning Israel’s continued building of settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The United States abstained from the resolution, infuriating Mr. Netanyahu.

The speech, the latest salvo in a final conflict between Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Obama as Donald J. Trump prepares to assume the presidency, will make the case that “the vote was not unprecedented” and that Mr. Obama’s decision “did not blindside Israel.” Mr. Kerry, the official said, would cite other cases in which Washington officials had allowed similar votes under previous presidents.

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a coming speech, said Mr. Kerry would also argue that, with the notable exception of Israel, there was a “complete international consensus” against further settlements in areas that might ultimately be the subject of negotiations.

At this late date, weeks ahead of the inauguration of Mr. Trump, who openly lobbied on Israel’s side against the United Nations resolution, it is unclear what Mr. Kerry hopes to achieve from the speech, other than to leave a set of principles that he believes will one day emerge as the basis for talks, if and when they resume.

Mr. Kerry, the official said, has long wanted to give a speech outlining an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal but was held back by White House officials, who saw it as unnecessary pressure on Israel that would anger Mr. Netanyahu. But that objection was lifted last week as Mr. Obama and Mr. Kerry agreed the time had come to abstain on the United Nations resolution. That decision led to one of the biggest breaches yet in the rocky American-Israeli relationship during the Obama years. [Continue reading…]

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Did Russia just test an anti-satellite weapon?

The Daily Beast reports: Russia isn’t done screwing with the United States in 2016.

On Dec. 16, the Russian military reportedly tested what appears to be an anti-satellite weapon — a rocket that can boost into low orbit and smash into enemy spacecraft.

The test could be the latest sign of Russia’s intention, and improving ability, to threaten America’s hundreds of government and private spacecraft — and chip away at the United States’ military and commercial advantage in space.

It might also be the latest provocation from a Russian regime that increasingly denies any responsibility for its most destabilizing moves. That’s how Moscow can get away with hacking elections in the United States and other Western countries and invading Ukraine, among other attacks on global order.

The apparent anti-satellite (ASAT) test largely escaped public notice. The Washington Free Beacon was the first to report on the weapon’s trial, on Dec. 21 — attributing the information to unnamed U.S. government sources. CNN also pointed out the test, again citing anonymous U.S. officials.

Capt. Nicholas Mercurio, a spokesman for the 14th U.S. Air Force, which oversees space systems, declined to specifically comment on the reported Russian test. “We monitor missile launches around the globe,” Mercurio told The Daily Beast, “but as a matter of policy we don’t normally discuss intelligence specific to those launches.”

For the anti-satellite test, the Russians have a tidy cover story — that the rocket isn’t actually an anti-satellite weapon, or ASAT. Instead, it’s a meant for shooting down incoming ballistic missiles.

That is to say, the rocket that Russia tested on Dec. 16 could be a defensive rocket-killer, rather than an offensive satellite-killer. “My take is that it could be either,” Pavel Podvig, an independent expert on Russian strategic forces, told The Daily Beast via email. “It is difficult to say at this point.”

But in fact, there’s no meaningful difference between an anti-satellite weapon and a defensive missile-interceptor. The same basic hardware can do both jobs.

“The only difference between a hit-to-kill interceptor for missile defense and one for low-Earth-orbit ASAT is going to be in the software,” Jeffrey Lewis, who helps lead nonproliferation programs at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, told The Daily Beast via email. [Continue reading…]

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Snowden still has contacts with Russian intelligence: U.S. House report

Reuters reports: Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden “has had and continues to have contact” with Russian intelligence services, according to a newly declassified U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee report released on Thursday.

The Pentagon found 13 undisclosed “high risk” security issues caused by Snowden’s release to media outlets of tens of thousands of the U.S. eavesdropping agency’s most sensitive documents, the report said.

If China or Russia obtained access to information on eight of the 13 issues, “American troops will be at greater risk in any future conflict,” said the report, which contained a table outlining the “issues”, but like large portions of the document, was blacked out.

Snowden criticized the report on Twitter, saying it was “rifled with obvious falsehoods” and presented no evidence that his disclosures were made “with harmful intent, foreign influence, or harm. Wow.” [Continue reading…]

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Cybersecurity firm finds evidence that Russian military unit was behind DNC hack

The Washington Post reports: A cybersecurity firm has uncovered strong proof of the tie between the group that hacked the Democratic National Committee and Russia’s military intelligence arm — the primary agency behind the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 election.

The firm CrowdStrike linked malware used in the DNC intrusion to malware used to hack and track an Android phone app used by the Ukrainian army in its battle against pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine from late 2014 through 2016.

While CrowdStrike, which was hired by the DNC to investigate the intrusions and whose findings are described in a new report, had always suspected that one of the two hacker groups that struck the DNC was the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, it had only medium confidence.

Now, said CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch, “we have high confidence” it was a unit of the GRU. CrowdStrike had dubbed that unit “Fancy Bear.”

The FBI, which has been investigating Russia’s hacks of political, government, academic and other organizations for several years, privately has concluded the same. But the bureau has not publicly drawn the link to the GRU. [Continue reading…]

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Russia missing from Trump’s top defense priorities, according to Pentagon memo

Foreign Policy reports: A Pentagon memo outlining the incoming Trump administration’s top “defense priorities” identifies defeating the Islamic State, eliminating budget caps, developing a new cybersecurity strategy, and finding greater efficiencies as the president-elect’s primary concerns. But the memo, obtained by Foreign Policy, does not include any mention of Russia, which has been identified by senior military officials as the No. 1 threat to the United States.

“People there now would be pretty concerned to see Russia not on the list,” said Evelyn Farkas, a former senior Pentagon official who worked on Russia policy before leaving in 2015.

For years, top cabinet officials at the Defense Department and the intelligence community cited Russia as the foremost threat because of its vast nuclear arsenal, sophisticated cyber capabilities, recently modernized military, and willingness to challenge the United States and its allies in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and other regions.

Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who will remain in that role after Trump takes office Jan. 20, told Congress last year that no other threat is more serious.

“If you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential threat to the United States, I’d have to point to Russia,” Dunford told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “If you look at their behavior, it’s nothing short of alarming.” He listed China, North Korea, and the Islamic State as the next biggest threats, in that order. [Continue reading…]

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