It’s depressing to speculate on the state of U.S. cybersecurity on the day denial of service attacks engulf the country, knocking even Twiiter offline (well, maybe that’s a good thing).
These days the Democratic Party and its minions want to blame it all on the Russians, but sometimes it’s just pure stupidity. We have the endless deluge of Podesta Emails because the Clinton campaign manager and supposed genius lawyer succumbed to one of those obvious phishing attacks most of us learned to avoid ten years ago.
One wonders if Podesta was one of the marks who wired fifty grand to an account in Nigeria on the strength of some missing relative claim. Someone had to have done it. Those sleazy scams were filling up our email inboxes forever. Oh, well. Not to worry. He could be White House chief-of-staff in a couple of months.
But even more bizarre, we now learn that another Hillary Clinton lawyer — what is it with the credulousness of these people — did all her business on Chinese computers:
Hillary Clinton‘s lawyer may have allowed hackers to obtain all of the former secretary of state’s emails by reviewing the contents of her private server on a laptop tied to Chinese cyberspies, a House Republican charged on Friday.
Heather Samuelson was one of the Clinton aides who sifted through the private email server used during Clinton’s tenure at the State Department, and helped decide which would be designated as personal messages and which were work-related. That’s when the potential Chinese hacks may have taken place, because she used two laptops made by Lenovo, a company with ties to the Chinese government that has sold laptops for years with malware pre-installed on the computer.
“It seems clear that Secretary Clinton and her associates played fast and loose with our national security, and yet no one — not a single person involved in this harmful fiasco — has been held accountable,” House Judiciary Committee chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., wrote to FBIDirector James Comey after learning the make and model of Samuelson’s computer.
What’s fascinating here is the the State Department had banned the use of Lenovo computers since 2009 for obvious reasons that clearly escaped poor Heather. Lenovos were sold with a program called “Superfish” that the Chinese themselves admitted in 2015 was “malware.” This wasn’t even subtle spying. It was hiding in plain sight — except not to hapless Heather who, not surprisingly, was one of the five immunized by the DOJ in order to obtain those very laptops. What was on them? Nobody’s telling.
This provides another opportunity for FBI Director Comey to resurrect his now pitiful reputation, which we all know he won’t take.
Meanwhile, Hillary insists that 17, count ’em 17, of our intelligence agencies agree it’s all the Russians’ fault. Besides the fact she tells the whole truth roughly only one out of twenty times, there are plenty of other reasons not to believe that, one of which, sadly, is that most of our intelligence agencies wouldn’t know the difference. We live in a world where a teenager hacked CIA Director John Brennan’s AOL email account. The shocking part of that is not so much that the teenager hacked the account, it’s that the director of the CIA, of all people, actually still has or had an AOL email account. Wow! Talk about Luddites.
But the Queen of the Cyber-Luddites was Hillary Rodham Clinton herself who reportedly, while secretary of State, communicated with outdated BlackBerrys bought on eBay either because she preferred them or could not be bothered to learn how to use the new ones, assuming she was capable. These BlackBerrys were no longer even supported by the company and were undoubtedly at that point entirely permeable to hacking by practically anybody. This is the woman, we don’t need to be reminded, who warns us repeatedly of Donald Trump’s proximity to the nuclear football.
Of course, the intention of blaming all this hacking on the Russians is the canard that they want Trump to win the election. Really? That would make them extraordinarily optimistic. How could Putin & Co. do better than they already have with Obama and Hillary, starting with the risible reset button? Since then, the Russians have taken over Crimea and, after the red line in Syria fiasco, virtually run the U.S. out of the Middle East while linking up with Iran in an (American-financed) hegemony extending across Syria and into Iraq, Yemen and who knows where else, placing the former Soviets in the best position they’ve been in for decades. Good job, Barack and Hillary.
More likely, the Russians just want to make a mockery of our system and rub our faces in it, assuming they are behind some or most of this, and not a ragtag collection of teenagers similar to the young man who got caught hacking Brennan. It could be some or all of these things, but in the end it doesn’t matter. Our cybersecurity has been a disgrace.
I have a suggestion for Donald, if he wins. Make PayPal founder and cyberwhiz Peter Thiel (your supporter) director of Homeland Security and in charge of all of this. He’s probably more intelligent than all the doofuses currently running these things put together.
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