The Latest Leak from Guccifer 2.0 Goes Unnoticed by Media

As of 2 p.m. EST, a Google search for news on the latest Guccifer 2.0 leak returned just three results:

1) "Clinton hacker teases identity and calls Snowden and Assange heroes" (from International Business Times UK);
2) "DNC Hacker Denies Russian Link, Says Attack Was His 'Personal Project'" (from Motherboard); and
3) "Dem party hacker answers skeptics on nationality, politics" (from The Hill).

Please note that all three headlines accurately signal the purpose of the articles, which is to focus on the identity of Guccifer 2.0 instead of analyzing the information he leaked. (Note also that since Guccifer 2.0 identified himself as a male in his latest blog post, I will no longer use gender-ambiguous pronouns such as s/he to refer to him.)

Televised coverage of the latest leak from Guccifer 2.0 appears to be non-existent here in the U.S., and high-profile corporate print media outlets are staying mute.

It's almost as if CrowdStrike is suddenly as adept at controlling the national media as the Clinton machine has been for years. Weird.

So now seems like an opportune time to share the wisdom of a purported "professional penetration tester" named Nathan McGinty who commented on a sloppy article that Cory Doctorow churned out for BoingBoing immediately following the appearance of the Guccifer 2.0 blog. Near the middle of his lengthy comment, McGinty observes:

However, it is important to remember that a company such as CrowdStrike -- or Mandiant, with Sony -- a big gun, serves multiple roles in such an incident. First is to prevent further damage. Second is to gather evidence and gain attribution. Third is PR and damage control. The third job of CrowdStrike can at times be orthogonal to the public truth. Nowhere in their job description is included the public truth. There is no penalty (that I am aware of) for them to disclose a non-truth or shade the truth. Heck there's almost no penalty for a politician to do so, and they are ostensibly called upon to serve such a thing as the public truth. [Emphasis added.]

Either my Google-fu is weak or Nathan McGinty is a more common name than you might expect. But for whatever reason, I have been unable to contact Mr. McGinty to confirm his expertise or request further analysis concerning the DNC hack. (Unfortunately, comments on the Doctorow article are now locked, so I can't simply reply to McGinty's remarks.)

Whether McGinty is an expert pen tester or not, the fact remains that the DNC, the Clinton media machine, and CrowdStrike all share jobs that "can at times be orthogonal to the public truth." Since Clinton and the Democrats routinely push for war and Shawn Henry of CrowdStrike routinely uses scare-and-sell tactics to promote his approach to cyberdefense for "the homeland," we should all be wary of these articles that focus on whether Guccifer 2.0 is really a Russian spy or not. Even when the articles leave that question up in the air, they frame the discussion in such a way that Russian cyberespionage remains the central topic.
 
Obviously, the central topic of the Guccifer 2.0 discussion should be the materials he leaked. And that's the one topic that the DNC, the Clintons, and CrowdStrike all have a vested interest in burying, as they're doing right now with a little help from their friends in the corporate media.

The Gotcha Moment in Motherboard's Interview with Guccifer 2.0

On June 21st, Motherboard presented readers with two versions of their Guccifer 2.0 interview: a transcript and a summary.

Since both documents were prepared by the same writer (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bichhierai), I was surprised to discover that the summary and the transcript bear little resemblance to one another on the subject of Guccifer 2.0's facility with Romanian.

Of the summary's fourteen paragraphs, exactly one is dedicated to evaluating just how Romanian Guccifer 2.0's Romanian really is:

But when we asked him to explain to us how he hacked into the DNC in Romanian, he seemed to stall us, and said he didn’t want to “waste” his time doing that. The few short sentences he sent in Romanian were filled with mistakes, according to several Romanian native speakers.

Got that? He only gave them a "few short sentences" of Romanian before losing patience.

In fact, Guccifer replied in Romanian to eleven out of thirty questions. But instead of debating whether eleven qualifies as a "few" of anything, let's focus on the aggravating feature of Motherboard's sudden switch from Romanian to English to Russian in a transparent attempt to trick Guccifer 2.0 into exposing himself as the Russian cyberspy that CrowdStrike and the DNC say he is:

De ce faci toate astea? [Why are you doing this?]
Asta e din partea următoare [That's the next]
What?
Am spus deja, e un filigran, un semn special [I have already said, it's a watermark, a special sign]
Do you like Trump?
I don't care at all
кто-то говорит мне, что ты румынская полна ошибок [Someone tells me that your Romanian is full of mistakes.]
What's this? Is it russian?
You don't understand it?
R u kidding? Just a moment I'll look in google translate what u meant. "Someone tells me that you are full of mistakes Romanian."
Hai sa-ti pun cateva intrebari, ca sa vad ca esti cu adevarat roman [Let me ask you a few questions to see that you are truly native.]
Man, I'm not a pupil at school.
What do you mean?
If u have serious questions u can ask. Don't waste my time. 

Although I can understand Motherboard's impulse to do some linguistic sleuthing on an unknown source of unverified information, I can also understand Guccifer 2.0's display of impatience (under these circumstances) as far more justifiable than the summary made it out to be.

But is this seeming discrepancy even worth mentioning? Shouldn't our primary task concerning anything leaked in the public interest be to focus on what was leaked rather than who leaked it?  

I thought so a few days ago. I'm less certain now. As I see the Guccifer 2.0 story dissipating into background noise, it's plain that the main takeaway CrowdSource wanted to impose on the public is almost the only part of the story that is sticking in the public consciousness: "That DNC hack was probably done by Russians, though you can never tell with cybercrime, but it was definitely probably Russians, including that Guccifer 2.0, who was undeniably and indisputably part of a Russian disinformation campaign in all probability."

Even if Guccifer 2.0's claims regarding her/his ethnicity and first language are irrelevant (as I think they are, since hackers generally rely on anonymity and deception), it's still a good idea to keep facts separate from rumors. The fact is that Motherboard's interview proved nothing conclusive about Guccifer 2.0's Romanian-ness, and yet the interview was used to support rumors about the hacker being a Russian who couldn't convincingly impersonate a Romanian in an online interview with web translation tools at his disposal.

That's how things feel today. But I had a DM conversation with @Guccifer_2 this afternoon that makes me think things won't feel that way for long. More on that tomorrow. 

Cenk Uygur Perpetuates the Myth That Democrats Are Somehow Less Corrupt Than Republicans

Two minutes and forty-five seconds into the video linked above, Cenk Uygur explains why the conservatives on the Supreme Court love bribery: because "they [the conservatives] got there through bribery."

Uygur makes an excellent case throughout the video that the Supreme Court's decision to overturn the conviction of Bob McDonnell demonstrates that our government is openly for sale because the highest court in the land is unwilling to consider anything bribery.

But that conclusion somehow becomes ancillary to Uygur's primary contention, which is that this lamentable state of affairs is the fault of deeply corrupt Republican justices appointed by deeply corrupt Republican administrations.

By the end of the video, Uygur is sputtering with rage against conservative Republican corruption. (Watch his apoplectic fit for yourself if you like.)

At no point, however, does Uygur mention that the Supreme Court's decision concerning McDonnell was unanimous.

He doesn't even bother to wonder why the justices appointed by Democratic administrations are every bit as eager to make bribery legal as their Republican colleagues.

So the question TYT viewers need to confront is simple: Is Uygur blind, or is he trying to impose blindness on his viewers?

Is his point in discussing the corruption of the Democratic Party to expose it--or to pretend that it is somehow less treacherous and less pervasive than the corruption of the Republican Party?

Each time he explains his convoluted reasoning behind supporting Clinton out of a fear of Trump, I think he answers that question.

Will the UK Treat Jeremy Corbyn the Way Brazil Treated Dilma Rousseff?

2016 has not been kind to left-leaning government leaders who dare to oppose neoliberal policies and systemic corruption.

Dilma Rousseff, the democratically elected leader of Brazil, was ousted in May on bogus charges of corruption by the very people whose corruption she was in the process of exposing.

Bernie Sanders, who challenged a foreign policy based on regime change and proposed a domestic policy based on infrastructural reinvestment, appears to have lost the nomination of his nation's so-called liberal party to Hillary Clinton, who sees spending cuts at home as the easiest way to finance wars abroad.

Earlier today, Jeremy Corbyn, the overwhelmingly popular leader of the UK's Labour Party, lost a no-confidence vote conducted among his own Members of Parliament, retaining support from only 20% of them.

But even though political officials may have lost confidence in Corbyn, the people of the UK apparently still consider him their best bulwark against neoliberal encroachments. According to an instant (and unscientific) poll conducted by The Guardian in the wake of the no-confidence vote, more than 90% of the people who voted to put Corbyn in charge of the Labour Party intend to vote for him again if presented with the opportunity to do so.

For his part, Corbyn has indicated that he will fight to represent the people who put him into his current position of power instead of kowtowing to the MPs who consider him unfit to lead:

I was democratically elected leader of our party for a new kind of politics by 60% of Labour members and supporters, and I will not betray them by resigning. Today’s vote by MPs has no constitutional legitimacy.

If Corbyn had to run against likely challenger Angela Eagle today, I don't doubt that Corbyn would win.

But such a vote won't happen until UK officials (in conjunction with their media spokespeople) have had a chance to educate the hoi polloi concerning the dangers posed by Corbyn's leadership. I suspect the process will follow (in broad strokes at least) the outline of what happened in Brazil.

The corporate media of Brazil worked actively to plant seeds of doubt concerning Rousseff's leadership (often by using the airwaves to make staged protests look far more widespread than they were). That campaign to undermine Rousseff was effective enough to shake the confidence of the electorate in the one person in the national government who was working most conspicuously to weed out corporate-sponsored corruption--with the result that the bought-and-paid-for politicians against whom Rousseff fought most fiercely were the ones who ended up in power.

Here in the US, I know plenty of people who see through what MSNBC is doing when it trots out Barney Frank to agree with Chris Matthews about what a tremendous threat Bernie Sanders poses to America's future. But I know plenty more who don't. Even people who fundamentally distrust news broadcasts end up repeating "facts" they "learned" from networks that they consider unreliable.

The media machinery that misrepresented Rousseff in Brazil and Sanders in the U.S. will doubtless give Corbyn the same treatment. I'm already hearing an overlap in the dismissive rhetoric applied to all three figures. Pundits and fellow politicians acknowledge that they are "decent" people, but go on to assert that they lack the fundamental "leadership" qualities necessary to steer their ships of state through the troubled waters ahead. After that grave pronouncement is made, the speaker pauses for a beat to let it sink in before adding something along these lines: "Look, I'm just as committed to breaking out of this neoliberal cycle as anyone else, but the global situation is simply too volatile right now for us to take the drastic steps proposed by Rousseff/Sanders/Corbyn. The only reasonable course of action is for us to temporarily entrust the government to the guidance of a compromise candidate such as Temer/Clinton/Eagle."

Corporate Media Drains You of the Energy to Consume Anything but Corporate Media

Fellow American citizens, you are surrounded by clear-headed individuals who are using plain language to report on the world exactly as it is, but you'll never even notice these folks as long as you keep staring into the black hole of corporate news.

You know full well that the job of CNN is to distract you from troublesome facts and inconvenient information by ignoring some stories and coating others in a veneer of impotent moral outrage. You don't (and can't) expect Wolf Blitzer to diagnose the 2016 election with anything approaching lucidity. But since it's no trouble to turn on the tube and passively soak up lies and distortions, you let access-based reporters tell you how the world isn't instead of letting research-based journalists such as Chris Hedges tell you how it is, as in this excerpt from a recent article for TruthDig:

The liberal class refuses to fight for the values it purports to care about. It is paralyzed and trapped by the induced panic manufactured by the systems of corporate propaganda. The only pressure within the political system comes from corporate power. With no counterweight, with no will on the part of the liberal class to defy the status quo, we slide deeper and deeper into corporate despotism. The repeated argument of the necessity of supporting the “least worse” makes things worse.

People ignore such points out of convenience, not stupidity. It's easy to follow Hedges' logic, but even easier to have a newscast playing in the background while doing household chores. Why should you spend time reading thoughtful political commentary when the only result of doing so is the sense that you're now duty-bound to demand accountability in government?

Your job is hard. Your family is demanding. You're tired and you need a little downtime, so you drown out your own memories of how terrible the Clintons have been with fanciful narratives from MSNBC about how terrible Trump might be. You let Rachel Maddow spew nonsense into your ear instead of heeding Michael Howard when he writes:

[T]he notion that voting third party is a reckless and ultimately dangerous decision is losing its cogency, if it ever had any to begin with. Third-party voters—and hopefully there are many more of them this time around—understand that meaningful change in this country presupposes a subversion of our inveterate two-party (or two-factions-of-the-same-party) political system. By “holding your nose” and voting for Wall Street’s vetted candidate, you are casting a vote for the system itself, and you’re hindering real progress. And all for the sake of… what, exactly? Expediency? It’s always rich to hear establishment pundits charge the #NeverHillary crowd with myopia. Nothing could be further from the truth. In trying to establish a viable third party, one not subservient to the economic elite, these voters have an eye to the distant future, one in which the U.S. actually functions as a democracy. How short-sighted of them!

Do Hedges and Howard sound like petulant brats--or like adult human beings who have seen firsthand what we accomplish by electing the less obnoxious servant of plutocracy every four years?

The main lesson we should all have learned about Hillary Clinton by now is that she wouldn't be inevitable if we weren't already convinced of her inevitability. The important corollary of this lesson, however, is that we wouldn't be convinced of her inevitability if not for a few dozen highly paid, well-placed Clintonite mouthpieces assuring us of her inevitability 24/7.

Let's say that you're a person with a sweet tooth who is trying to lose weight. You take pains to eliminate all forms of candy and dessert from your house, but your paper boy starts including a complimentary chocolate doughnut with your daily paper. Is the paper boy helping you out--or tempting you to backslide into self-destructive behavior?

Now let's say that you're a person with limited free time trying to help build a better future. You take pains to educate yourself about political realities, but the New York Times and Washington Post and every other major news publication in the country keep inserting themselves into your Facebook feed with stories about how you had better settle for Clinton to avoid Trump. Are those news sources helping you out--or tempting you to backslide into self-destructive behavior?

We're killing each other. We're killing the world. We're killing ourselves. And the only reason we accept this reality is because the articles we read from the Wall Street Journal, the stories we hear from NPR, and the reports we soak up from cable news all tell us this is the way things have to be and that any attempt to bring change will only make things worse.

Please dig deep enough within yourself to find the energy required to tune that garbage out. Please don't allow the corporate shills to manufacture your consent for the destruction of your political voice.

A Lullaby for the DNC before It Slumbers Eternally

Trump v. Clinton: epic fail

that proves democracy's for sale.

He plays with debt the conman's way.
She'll do the same with Fannie Mae.

It's bad he slurs Latino kids,

but ask Hondurans what she did.   

Call him a bigot, a disgrace;

ignore the Syrians she displaced.

The Hillbots shriek and snarl as one:

"Fear what he says, not what she's done."

Apocalyptic claims abound

on their side, so let's turn that 'round:

If his words might start World War 3,

then her deeds will—I guarantee.

Flournoy, Sherman—ladyhawks

rouse old bloodlust with new warsquawks.

But they can't be as bad as Dick

because they're women. See the trick?

I've swallowed pills from Dems before.

They've brought me debt, disgrace and war.

So try to jam Hill down my throat

and watch me give the Greens my vote.

Prez Trump is your fault, DNC.

You could have had support from me.

If Hill's the nom, then I'm with Stein.

To stop Trump you should fall in line.

#SeeYouInPhilly

New World Progress Has Become Old World Obstructionism

The Solar Impulse (a zero-fuel airplane) successfully completed its transatlantic flight earlier this week when it landed in Seville, Spain on Thursday after taking off from New York on Monday.

Pilot Bertrand Piccard remarked after the landing: "The Atlantic has always been this symbol of going from the Old World to the New."

The jarring thing about Piccard's comment is that in the strict geographical sense, he didn't travel from the Old World (Eurasia) to the New (the Americas). He plainly went from the New World (New York) to the Old (Spain).

But if we look at the world through the lens of energy paradigms, there's a sense in which Piccard got things exactly right.

Only in America (the New World) do we have significant numbers of people (with an even more significant amount of political clout) who deny that carbon emissions from fossil fuels are impacting the global climate.

Our fossil fuel lobbyists (and the political machinery that they fund and keep in place) have seen to it that America does everything possible to keep the entire world trapped in the fossil fuel era despite the fact that billions of human beings recognize that energy paradigm for the destructive and unhealthy process that it is.

Clean energy alternatives to fossil fuels pose an economic threat not only to America's energy corporations, but to the banking industry that supports those interests and the war profiteers who use conflicts in the Middle East and Latin America to tinker with oil prices worldwide.

If the world ran on clean energy, the recent coup in Brazil would have been impossible (because the bankers and their political puppets would have had no motive to conspire with the petroleum companies to subvert democracy). If the world ran on clean energy, Dick Cheney would never have had a motive to embroil the U.S. in a war with Iraq over non-existent weapons of mass destruction. If the world ran on clean energy, the American approach to global finance and diplomacy would simply be unrecognizable compared to what it is today.

But since the special interests that benefit from the current state of affairs are determined to perpetuate that state of affairs for as long as possible, the American government has become a tool for trapping the entire world in the status quo. The nation that once stood as a beacon of progress and democracy now serves as a bastion of stasis and oligarchy.

All the accusations that previous generations of Americans leveled against Europe and the Old World (e.g. being mired in systems of political corruption and cronyism) now apply to the current generation of U.S. citizens and the political machinery that is beyond their control.

So I don't think Piccard could have put things more accurately. America has become the Old World, the world of stifling and entrenched power structures that serve only to squelch new ideas and deter progress in the name of ensuring that the profit pipelines of crony capitalists continue to spew dollars into their coffers (and, of course, the wallets of the puppet politicians who do their bidding).

The progressive and democratic ideals that will lead us out of our current self-destructive path will have to come from the other side of the Atlantic or the Pacific--because America has become too old and crotchety to consider changing its ways.