Aubrey Cottle, the hacker claiming credit for stealing convoy donor info, has boasted of work with the FBI and Canadian law enforcement. The data was published by DDoSecrets, an anti-Wikileaks non-profit which has targeted states in the crosshairs of US intelligence.

By Kit KLARENBERG

On February 13th, the names and personal details of almost 100,000 individuals who donated sums to support the Canadian truckers’ protest against vaccine mandates through the crowdfunding site GiveSendGo appeared online via Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), an online archive seeking to easily connect journalists and researchers with leaked information.

The mainstream media used the trove to frame the convoy as essentially foreign-funded, and harass small donors from average backgrounds. Numerous fascinating nuggets, such as the gifting of $215,000 by a donor whose identity, email, IP address and ZIP code was not recorded by the website, unlike every other giver, were in the process ignored.

The hack-and-leak represented just the latest broadside against the convoy activists. Hours later, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau activated the Emergencies Act for the very first time in Canadian history, an unprecedented move effectively suspending the civil rights of the protesters and granting federal law enforcement the power to seize their bank accounts without a court order.

An alleged founder of hacktivist collective Anonymous, Canadian Aubrey Cottle, took credit for the hack of the convoy donors’ information in the form of an online “manifesto” and accompanying video overlaying a clip from the Disney musical Frozen. Echoing Liberal Canadian politicians, Cottle accused the convoy of holding Ottawa “hostage for weeks while terrorizing the peaceful citizens who live there.”

The hacker went on to baselessly allege the donations were being used “to fund an insurrection,” and that individuals who had contributed had also bankrolled the January 6th, 2021 riot at the US Capitol.

Next, Cottle warned without evidence that the global “convoy movement” could be “a cover for a type of Trojan Horse attack where extremists and militia groups arrive in large numbers with weapons,” as “large convoys of trucks moving in capital cities will look normal given the theme of these world wide protests.”

Absolutely nothing I say could EVER prepare you for this video of Aubrey Cottle, dude who hacked #GiveSendGo, writhing, preening, full-throated screaming into the camera “WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO TO ME HUHHHH??!?”pic.twitter.com/852h2RB6UB

— Mandy Stadtmiller (@mandystadt) February 18, 2022

It was a characteristically volatile outburst from the eccentric hacker, who has been praised in mainstream media for taking on the far-right despite his history of overtly anti-Semitic commentary.

Operating in broad daylight for many years, the prolific cyber-warrior has somehow been able to function freely without any legal repercussions.

Cottle’s impunity may stem in part from his apparently intimate relationship with a variety of intelligence services. In 2007, Cottle was reportedly visited at home by a representative of Canada’s Security Intelligence Service, the nation’s equivalent to the CIA, which wished to exploit his hacking nous to battle “al-Qaeda and terrorist groups.” He allegedly declined the offer after some consideration.

Nonetheless, Cottle claims to have “often…dealt with feds” such as the FBI and Royal Canadian Mountain Police. His activities include running “child porn honeypot operations” involving multiple sites that “still give [him] nightmares.”

“I’ve done work for the fbi before and i give zero fucks,” Cottle wrote on Twitter on January 20, 2017.

As the right-wing outlet American Greatness noted, Cottle has boasted that he has been “lucky” enough to be granted “the blessing of alphabet agencies” – slang for intelligence services – to “weaponize Anonymous” for “antiterrorism” purposes.

Further indications of Cottle’s ties to law enforcement arrived in July 2021 when journalist Barrett Brown released documents revealing how the hacker had collaborated with notorious neo-Nazi cyber-activist “weev” to conduct major hacks that could be blamed on Antifa. Brown suggests this “just happened” via GiveSendGo.

We released documents in July showing FBI assets led by Nazi leader Weev and fronted by racist police asset Aubrey “Kirtaner” Cottle were planning to conduct major #Anonymous hacks that would be blamed on #Antifa. It just happened via #GiveSendGo. https://t.co/VnSb7NK5TY

— Barrett Brown (@BarrettB) February 17, 2022

Cottle has recently taken to Twitter to praise the Canadian government for activating the Emergencies Act. The hacker declared that “THEY F***ED AROUND AND FOUND OUT.” Though his Twitter account has since been locked, he has continued to brag about his GiveSendGo hack in a series of bizarre videos.

In another possible hint of national security state involvement, a non-profit self-styled whistleblower site called Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDoSecrets, has taken possession of the information supposedly obtained by Cottle, and begun distributing it to mainstream media outlets.

Besides targeting right-wing websites, DDoSecrets has previously been implicated in hacking operations against the Russian government. Its founder, Emma Best, is a vitriolic antagonist of Julian Assange and has gone to extreme lengths to paint him as an asset of the Kremlin.

Emma Best of DDoSecrets

DDoSecrets’ founder smears Assange, implicates Wikileaks

Before its role in publicizing the GiveSendGo donors list, DDoSecrets published lists of GiveSendGo donors to causes such as the heavily-FBI penetrated Proud Boys, Kyle Rittenhouse, and an effort to fight “voter fraud” in the 2020 US Presidential election.

Clearly aligned with liberal and Democratic Party objectives, DDoSecrets has also been a key hosting ground for terabytes of hacked data on private and public communications between members of militias, neo-Nazi and far-right groups hacked from social networks Gab and Parler, which Cottle claims to have obtained themself. Data scraped from Parler, including video from the January 6th riot, was subsequently used in the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump in February 20201.

DDoSecrets is a largely opaque outfit. Operated by an almost entirely anonymous or pseudonymous team living across the globe, its founder, Emma Best, is the group’s only public-facing member. A former WikiLeaks collaborator and prolific Freedom of Information requester, Best’s dissident bona fides seem on the surface to be beyond doubt.

In 2016, after hammering the FBI with seemingly endless FOI demands, the Bureau appears to have considered prosecuting Best for “vexsome” activities. Five years later, it outright banned Best from filing such requests at all, but the decision was later overturned. Best also played a pivotal role in compelling the CIA to publish its 13 million-strong declassified document archive online in 2017.

Likewise, DDoSecrets’ June 2020 release of 269 gigabytes of sensitive US law enforcement fusion center data – dubbed “BlueLeaks” – exposed all manner of abuses, corruption, criminality and excesses on the part of American police forces, leading to official investigations, and the seizure of servers hosting the information in Germany by local authorities.

So why have mainstream media enthusiastically embraced DDoSecrets while advancing the Western security state’s crusade against WikiLeaks?

The latter organization has faced condemnation, censure, and designation by the CIA as a “non-state hostile intelligence agency,” leading to the Agency hatching plots to kidnap or even kill its founder, Julian Assange, while subjecting his collaborators to intensive surveillance and harassment.

By contrast, in 2019, the same year Julian Assange was arrested in London’s Ecuadorian embassy and hauled off to Belmarsh Prison to face extradition to the US, the federally funded Congressional Research Service recognized Best’s organization as a legitimate “transparency collective” – and not long after the IRS granted it 501(c)(3) non-profit status.

The repeated hailing by mainstream and US government sources of DDoSecrets as a WikiLeaks successor – or even its replacement – is all the more perverse given that Best has repeatedly published private Twitter communications between the Wikileaks collaborators.

The contents of these private discussions were dished out to corporate news outlets like Buzzfeed, which presented them as proof Assange was deliberately seeking to secure the election of Donald Trump, and knowingly collaborating with Russian intelligence to do so.

You now have evidence? Emma Best’s role in 2016 was to obtain evidence for BuzzFeed that would tie Guccifer2 to WikiLeaks. Emma shopping leaks that we’re already in WikiLeaks possession is the proverbial dish “best served” cold. Thanks for playing. Game over. https://t.co/MHiZEbLtSf

— Pirate Party Weekly (@PiratePartyINT) April 6, 2018

Numerous interviews conducted by Best over the years amplified the fraudulent narratives used to frame Assange as a Russian asset. In the eyes of many, they have played a role in justifying or minimizing his life-threatening incarceration in Britain’s Gitmo on trumped up, bogus charges.

A handful of independent journalists have been harshly critical of Best as a result, wondering how the public interest was served by publishing private communications that implicated Wikileaks in a security state intrigue. The DDoSecrets founder has consistently attempted to parry criticism by claiming their actions were not an attempt to attack or undermine Assange, and were “curated for relevance.”

However, Best overwhelmingly curated comments and interactions painting Assange and WikiLeaks in the worst possible light, which inevitably proved extremely alluring to a hostile media. Any exculpatory content included in the leaks was summarily and unsurprisingly ignored.

What’s more, the DDoSecrets founder’s own surging contempt for Assange is unambiguous. Over the years, Best has branded Assange as among things a “cowardly, transphobic, antisemitic trash person made of tepid mayo and a bleached wig.”

1. I am going through the #AssangeLeaks by @NatSecGeek @DDoSecret: I still haven’t found a single problematic exposé/scenario/scandal.What I do find really problematic is to publish internal communications/meetings of a media org, UNLESS this is necessary to reveal serious crimes

— Stefania Maurizi (@SMaurizi) July 14, 2020

CIA hack-and-dump ops against Iran and Russia raise further suspicions

In November 2021, Yahoo! News reported that the administration of US President Donald Trump authorized the CIA to “run wild” with covert actions in a bid to destabilize Iran. In 2018, Trump sanctioned the Agency to conduct “much more aggressive” offensive cyber activities, leading to the CIA launching “covert hack-and-dump operations” against Iran and Russia and “cyberattacks on Iranian infrastructure” with “less White House oversight” than before.

Given that DDoSecrets was launched in December that same year, the timing of the effort was striking. The first major coup of DDosSecrets arrived weeks later when it published 175 gigabytes of “messages and files from Russian politicians, journalists, oligarchs, religious figures, and nationalists/terrorists in Ukraine.” The collection was dubbed “The Dark Side of the Kremlin,” and avowedly sourced from a “hacking spree” conducted against Russian targets.

Transparency activists release massive trove of hacked, leaked Russian documents https://t.co/pyYTBtsW7W pic.twitter.com/hd550XKTXX

— The Hill (@thehill) January 26, 2019

Best claimed to The New York Times that the tranche was not published “explicitly as payback” for Russia’s alleged release of the DNC emails in 2016, while remarking that “it does add some appreciable irony.” She also used the opportunity to take aim once again Assange and WikiLeaks, stating she was “disappointed” at their “dishonest and egotistic behavior.”

Best insisted that her organization had also posted material favorable to Assange “leaked from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.” This refers to internal files from National Intelligence Secretariat (SENAIN), a now-defunct Ecuadorian intelligence agency charged with protecting the WikiLeaks chief and extracting him to safety. The Guardian reported on these documents in 2018 and went to great pains to present SENAIN as villains in the process.

Oddly, those files have since been removed from the DDoSecrets archive.

In November of that year, The Intercept and New York Times published a number of articles titled “The Iran Cables” based on an “unprecedented leak” of 700 pages of reports supposedly compiled by Tehran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security. The series sought to expose the scale of Iranian “influence” in Iraq, in the process revealing “the surprising ways in which Iranian and US interests often aligned” in the years following the illegal war.

News about Trump’s loosening restrictions on CIA cyberwarfare to authorize hack-and-dump ops makes me wonder if Langley was behind the ICIJ’s #ChinaCables and the Intercept’s Iran Leaks, among other leaks targeting designated enemies https://t.co/YMl3XbPMgM pic.twitter.com/MdDskVoRHB

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) July 16, 2020

The release of the leaked files may have played a role in escalating conflict between the US and Iran. A New York Times story based on the material focused heavily on the alleged role of Iranian General Qasem Suleimani as the shadowy puppet master of the Iraqi government, claiming he “more than anyone else” had employed “the dark arts of espionage and covert military action to ensure that Shiite power remains ascendant.” Two months later, Soleimani was incinerated in an illegal US drone strike launched as he left Baghdad International Airport for a peace conference.

An Intercept article purporting to tell the true “story behind” the cables’ release wove a dramatic narrative straight out of a Le Carré novel, and which may have been just as fictional, claiming a nameless Iraqi approached the publication with the material in order to “let the world know what Iran is doing in my country.”

Even if the outlet’s narrative was accurate, and the Russian and Iranian document troves had not been obtained through the CIA “hack-and-dump operations” sanctioned under Trump, it would be an extraordinary if not inexplicable coincidence that content which precisely matched that description was released the following year.

CIA hack-and-leak operations are an increasingly common information warfare tactic. For example, in June 2021 a US government official acknowledged Washington was secretly financing “investigative journalists and investigative NGOs” and employing “components of the intelligence community” including the Agency to expose corruption by public officials abroad, having created the Organized Crime and Corruption Project (OCCRP) to serve as a funnel for this material.

OCCRP is funded by a welter of US intelligence cutouts, including the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy.

In October 2021, the OCCRP released the Pandora Papers, raising obvious questions about whether the underlying information was obtained through a US intelligence-related hack.

Back in December 2019, DDoSecrets partnered with the OCCRP to publish documents and data related to the operations of Formations House, which registered and operated companies for organized crime syndicates, dubious state-owned companies, and fraudulent banks.

Whether DDoSecrets and its founder are witting or unwitting pawns of the CIA is a moot point. Its commitment to publishing and hosting as much leaked material as possible makes the organization an extremely attractive conduit for ill-gotten sensitive documents, and the origins of this material is never questioned by news outlets that report upon it. After all, the imprimatur of DDoSecrets lends its releases credibility and legitimacy.

DDoSecrets has been scrupulous about attributing sources in particular cases. For example, the DDoSecrets entry on the DNC emails released by WikiLeaks forcefully asserts the documents were “hacked by Russian intelligence services.” This claim was undermined, however, by the admission of the CEO of CrowdStrike – the cybersecurity firm that made the attributions – admitting under oath there is no “concrete evidence” the emails were “actually exfiltrated” by anyone.

Meanwhile, other entries are careful to note constituent material was released by individuals associated with Russian intelligence, and may include “forged” documents.

The only comparable disclaimer that can be found in respect of any Western intelligence service anywhere else on the DDoSecrets website today relates to Syrian government emails originally dumped by WikiLeaks. The emails now include an accompanying blurb noting “the hack itself was not [emphasis in original] directly sponsored or conducted” by Washington, although its subsequent release was “carried out under the direct supervision of the US via FBI informant Hector ‘Sabu’ Monsegur.”

Since its foundation, DDoSecrets has provided a reliable archive for compromising information and data tranches stolen from the servers of foreign states which happen to be in the US government’s crosshairs.

Following Biden’s call to Trudeau, during which he demanded swift action against the truckers’ convoy filling downtown Ottawa and blockading US-Canadian border crossings in protest of vaccine mandates, DDoSecrets surfaced once again as a promotional platform for hacked data on convoy donors.

And while Assange languishes in prison, DDoSecrets is once again shopping its data to mainstream media outlets and advancing the critical interests of crisis-wracked Western governments.

thegrayzone.com

By Dan COHEN

Imagine a country where there’s no separation between the government, the military, and the media. A lot of Americans would think of China, Russia or North Korea, but it’s a perfect description of the United States today. And here in Washington, the think tank inside this nondescript building – Center For A New American Security (CNAS) – is the clearest example of just that.

CNAS is a premier militarist think tank in the nation’s capital, especially for Democratic Party administrations. It is funded by the State Department and Pentagon and has taken more money from weapons companies over the last several years than any other think tank. On top of that, it’s funded by oil companies, big banks, and right wing governments – basically the most destructive forces on the planet.

For President Joe Biden, CNAS serves as a farm, from which key positions in his administration are cultivated. In fact, at least 16 CNAS alumni are now in key positions in the Biden Pentagon and State Department.

But what’s most shocking is that several national security and foreign policy reporters from elite U.S. media outlets are affiliated with CNAS – and therefore indirectly affiliated with, and likely paid by, the U.S. government and corporations – the very forces that they should be holding accountable.

For more than twenty years, New York Times Washington correspondent David Sanger has relentlessly pushed deceptions to con the public into supporting U.S. aggression and war.

From the George W. Bush administration’s lies about WMDs in Iraq to lies about Iran attempting to create nuclear weapons and evidence-free claims from intelligence agencies about Russian cyberattacks – these incendiary allegations were taken at face value with a clear goal to pressure then-President Donald Trump to ramp up aggression against Moscow while conveniently filling the pockets of Sanger’s weapons-industry benefactors.

Sanger’s neocon cyberwar fantasy was even turned into a movie by HBO. Today, David Sanger is onto the COVID-19 lab leak theory. He’s been at the forefront of every propaganda campaign that not only provides justification for aggression and war but also helps generate huge profits for CNAS funders.

Sanger is just one of several New York Times, Washington Post and Foreign Policy reporters who have residencies at CNAS. Presumably, that comes with a sizable financial component. I emailed CNAS to ask whether it pays these reporters but they didn’t respond.

Sanger’s colleague Eric Schmitt, senior correspondent covering national security for The New York Times, is also in residence at CNAS.

Back in 2020, Schmitt was promoting the obviously false Russian bounties story, which was later retracted after it had served its political purpose to force Trump to take a harder anti-Russia stance.

Of course, Schmitt was a reliable promoter of intelligence claims about Russian hacking – never displaying a scintilla of skepticism.

And he dutifully portrayed the Trump administration’s aggression against Iran as defensive.

The Washington Post, at one point, found this kind of blatant media corruption at least questionable. In 2011, Time magazine launched a series in collaboration with CNAS to promote war propaganda; the Post published an article questioning the ethics of that partnership.

Fast-forward to 2013: billionaire Jeff Bezos buys the Post, and its correspondent, David Finkel, becomes a writer in residence at CNAS. During that time, Finkel wrote two books on the U.S. war in Iraq: “The Good Soldiers” and “Thank You For Your Service.” Just the kind of whitewash of the war that CNAS’s funders would want the public to consume.

Michael Gordon is another. He spent three decades at the Times. Among his greatest accomplishments was, alongside Judith Miller, promoting the Bush administration’s Iraqi WMD deception. Gordon wrote that “Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb” – citing anonymous U.S. officials.

Now at The Wall Street Journal, Gordon has spent months pumping out Wuhan lab-leak propaganda – once again promoting claims of intelligence officials without any skepticism.

Greg Jaffe is a Washington Post national security reporter and another writer in residence at CNAS. His article on the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan quotes Eliot Cohen – a former Bush administration official who is now a fellow at CNAS. Jaffe and Cohen’s shared affiliation is never disclosed in the article – an obvious breach of the most basic journalistic ethics.

Thom Shanker used to be part of the CNAS writer-in-residence program when he was at the Times writing on U.S. wars. In 2012, Shanker wrote this blog post promoting a CNAS study without revealing his affiliation. Once again, a major conflict of interest and ethics out the window.

There’s also Rajiv Chandrasekaran, who spent two decades doing public relations for U.S. wars at the Post and is now doing PR for Starbucks.

And Thomas Ricks, whose career has spanned posts at The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and Foreign Policy magazine. Ricks is a cold-warrior who has publicly stated that Putin is attacking the United States just like Osama Bin Laden did and that Americans defending Putin are no different from those defending Bin Laden.

Some of this information isn’t new. It was reported in The Nation more than a decade ago, but the issue has only gotten worse as U.S. politics have shifted right, spy agencies have gained more power in the media, and the new cold war has accelerated.

There’s no real separation between the myriad of revolving doors and cash flow between the weapons manufacturers, think tanks, the U.S. government and media. It’s an incestuous, bloviating blob capable of producing one thing and one thing only: war.

So when you think of the military industrial complex and the permanent war state, don’t forget about what might be the most important component of all: the media.

mintpressnews.com

How is a citizenry to respond to Evil, to publicly made threats that they are now in a period where novel viruses, cyberterrorism, and food shortages may strike at any moment?

What about the fact that making threats to achieve political or ideological aims is the very definition of terrorism itself, or the fact that using the internet to do this is the definition of cyberterrorism? When we look at those who have benefited politically and financially from the lockdowns, and who will undoubtedly do the same with the coming cyberterrorism seasons, we are reasonable in asking: Is the World Economic Forum website in fact a terrorist website?

Are the Davos people terrorists? Certainly, the plausible deniability here is that these ‘threats’ are actually just warnings, warnings that other nefarious actors like the so-called DarkSide, “thought” to be behind the Colonial Pipeline attack, are lurking in the shadows of supposed anonymity may carry out attacks or make threats.

What about the rising phenomenon of censorship, and the taking of political prisoners?

Well how about a bit of wisdom from wiseguys and gangsters, new and old, which goes something like this: those delivering warnings work for those behind the threats.

We ought to be able to warn about impending doom without being accused of being the agent of said doom. But in normal criminology, we ask – who benefited, and who had the power to carry it out. When a single agent can both gain from something, and had the power to execute it, they become a suspect.

It is reasonable therefore to look at those giving ‘warnings’, because they become threats when understanding that they also have the most to gain from their own proposed ‘solutions’ to said threats, and also have the power to carry out the attacks themselves. These aren’t solutions, they are the ultimatums.

They furthermore have direct control over political actors whose nominal obligations are to protect and serve the public. In many ways, it is a perfect crime. And if it can happen, then it will happen, and likely has already happened. We should go so far as to propose that this is indeed what has happened, and is happening to us right now.

Fascism at Home

We are nevertheless asked to believe that it’s merely an incredible coincidence that just as the U.S. deep state failed to make victory in a whole array of geopolitical endeavors, that they launch an attack on civil society called ‘the new normal’. It was reasoned by Marxist revolutionaries Antonio Gramsci and Leon Trotsky a hundred years ago that the roots of Fascism lie in dying and frustrated empires; that when the costs of empire exceeded the gains, that the final solution was to turn the gears of the machinery of the state apparatus against the home population of the empire itself.

Then the politics of divide and conquer, deceit and confusion – normal within parliamentary systems anyhow – becomes a deadly game of cancel culture but with mass graves and concentration camps. This is how evil operates in the world

Perhaps this is what we are seeing today. Because we really need to ask, does anyone else find it amazing that right as this series of imperial failures happened all within the short span of a few years, that magically the entire narrative of society transmogrifies overnight into a giant ritual sacrifice to prevent novel viruses, cyberterrorism, and food shortages?

Here we are also asked to suspend rational thinking and science, in the name of rationalizing and trusting the science. Provisions that governments make against an ever-mutating virus are more often at odds with science and the pre-Covid understanding of how transmission works, or what infected means, and what the significance of symptoms are or aren’t. All of the provisions seem aimed at stoking fear, furthering divisions, and transforming this fear into an anger, but yet not at those who created the virus in a laboratory – as U.S. Senator Rand Paul has explained in hearings.

Instead we are required in our obligatory two-minutes of hate, to redirect this weaponized anger at those who question the entire narrative.

Indeed the hallmarks of fascism are abundant, even if in a very superficial and superstructural way the apparent ‘roles’ were reversed. Fascistic gangs (despite their leftist ideology) financed by big business in the form of Antifa and BLM ran rampant for a whole year, in protests that were 95% peaceful and 5% arson and murder. But going back to wiseguys and gangsters, maybe one only needs to take out 5% of adversaries to instill fear in the other 95%. On the streets it’s called ‘making an example’.

Of Stolen Elections & Political Prisoners

Once the populist forces – ‘the Historical Block’ – a united front of minorities, workers, veterans, students, the unemployed, and small and medium business owners nevertheless won the battle of democracy in what appeared as a Trump landslide on election night 2020, the election was stolen.

But the real affront was that it wasn’t truly stolen, it was taken – and taken in broad daylight in front of everyone and God – in an openly publicized non-conspiracy by the Transition Integrity Project, financed by the World Economic Forum’s Nicolas Berggruen and led by Clinton favourite John Podesta, working with Big Tech oligarchs like Zuckerberg and advertised by Jeff Bezos’ The Washington Post.

Even Time Magazine’s write-up read as a confession. No doubt this was to inoculate the last dozen or so geriatric readers of Time Magazine, before they heard about it from friends. First impressions, after all, are lasting impressions.

Then on January 6^th, when a tiny fraction of the historical block, still numbering countless tens of thousands, mobilized in a peaceful march on the Capitol, the FBI may have launched a false-flag attack that justified a coordinated parliamentary ‘about-face’ which brought to a halt the hopes of more than 70 million voters that the steal could be stopped. The corrupt DOJ would then proceed to hold a number of political prisoners, as they do to this very day, in grotesquely delayed proceedings on charges that in fact do not resemble the media charge of ‘insurrection’. And there are mounting credible reports that these political prisoners face torture and permanent bodily injury.

As attorney Joseph McBride, representing January 6^th prisoners, stated in no uncertain terms in an interview that aired on NewsMax and reported by The Gateway Pundit:

“What I can say about the Jan. 6 protesters who remain incarcerated or detained at this point, is that their constitutional rights and human rights are being violated by the Department of Justice and the Federal Government at this very moment. The law is clear that no type of punishment is appropriate for a detainee. Despite that numerous detainees are being held in solitary confinement for long periods of time. They’re being denied medical care. They’re taking beatings. They’re being denied sleep. They’re being psychologically, emotionally, and physically tortured on a regular basis [by guards,],”

That the torture and abuse of political prisoners is being ignored by the same corporate media that promoted the fraudulent electoral outcome which in turn provoked the demonstration in the first place, is of course no surprise.

But the eminent threat besides the fact that this torture is occurring, is that social media – which until five years ago was a relatively safe bastion for free expression – is now openly collaborating with government to silence dissent.

The ‘real cyber-terrorism’ from the point of view of the corporate-state apparatus aren’t the false flags, past and future, which they have planned for the public. Rather, the threat is citizens utilizing the horizontal, peer-to-peer nature of social media as real people to communicate the real existing dangers in an authentic way.

We Are Plagued by Evil

In conclusion we can say that we are plagued – plagued by an elite which has come to view authority and the correct exercise of power through the lens of the corporate boardroom’s social Darwinism. We have meditated on the utility of this term, of evil, knowing very well the metaphysical connotations it carries.

But we use it now with certainty. There were other ways to carry out changes in society, if in fact climate change and human overpopulation were the actual problems to be solved – if indeed these are problems (questions we have debated elsewhere).

As we have written, this would largely include a process of manufacturing consent through a system of positive reinforcement, not punitive measures, isolation, and coercive technologies. Planned obsolescence would have been done away with, making the production of goods which are the primary cause of carbon emissions, to decrease many-fold almost overnight. This actual solution also happens to fit precisely with the needs of a rising multipolarity which, at least for some intermediate time, appears to necessitate a slow-down of global supply chains. It also fits with the rise of automation and an increasingly post-labor economic system, if we admit that the planned obsolescence model was as much at keeping people employed as it was about increasing the velocity of money in the economy.

Similar goes with cyberterrorism, and as the public has become increasingly aware but reluctant to admit, the over-use of online systems to manage critical infrastructure and food distribution.

It had been noted with great alarm that consequences of the ‘attacks’ such as the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack on May 7^th of this year, were unnecessary. There is no rational underlying reason why the computerized system that Colonial uses, which regulates its pipelines, needs to be connected to computers which are in turn connected to the internet.

This raises serious questions about why it was deemed a good practice to have arranged this in the first place. And it also raises serious questions as to whether its computerized system controlling valves, measuring pressure, etc., was indeed connected to the internet. After all, Colonial’s shutting down in turn calls the entire official narrative into question, leading up to more and more on the ‘Russian hackers’ narrative.

In truth, whatever attack occurred or did not really occur, was claimed in thorough reportage to have affected its billing system, not the systems governing physical distribution. And yet, access to the pipeline was cut-off, affecting countless citizens in the process. Why? Was Colonial simply saying that if they don’t have a way to process payments, then we shut down distribution until further notice? Did Colonial attack itself?

The writing is on the wall. The medium is the message. For reasons explained in our works on this subject, the present elite in the west is governed by a misanthropic principle, which views the exercise of power as something measured by the degree to which it can be exercised in the most painful way.

So long as activists on the left and activists on the right are fighting over whether the Great Reset, lockdowns, and cyberterrorism is actually a capitalist plot or a communist plot, then it will be difficult for the public to organize an effective resistance to what this really all is: Evil.

It is perhaps not necessary to point out how the mainstream media in the United States as well as in Europe and Oceania persist in ignoring or otherwise covering up stories that make the Israelis look bad. Recent accounts of the slaughter of children and mostly civilians in Gaza by Israeli planes, missiles and artillery consistently try to depict the conflict as warfare between two comparable opponents, ignoring the enormous disparity in the military force available to the two sides. Israel has a modern army, air force and navy while Hamas has nothing but some small arms as well as improvised rockets and incendiary balloons.

The reluctance to criticize Israeli behavior is largely attributable to the power of the Zionist lobbies in the respective countries but it is also at least in part due to the complicity of Western governments in conniving at the Jewish state’s actions in its own region. The persistence in Israeli demands for war against Iran, preferable fought by the United States, was clear again this past week when the new government in Jerusalem declared that it would be increasing its military budget in anticipation of war with the Islamic Republic. Perhaps not surprisingly, the U.S. Congress also has several bills pending that would increase military assistance to Israel by a factor of three.

Aside from their overwhelming affection for the Jewish state, politicians and talking heads in Washington have always sought to have an enemy to explain why the foreign and national security policies have been such failures. Russia was so designated during the long years of the Cold War and more recently both the White House and Congress have begun to warn that it is China that is seeking to confront democratic norms and “export its authoritarian model.”

Given all of that, there must have been shock in a number of newsrooms when it turned out that the guilty party behind an explosive spy story that was revealed recently appears to be none other than America’s “closest ally and best friend.” It seems that a private Israeli surveillance plus security firm consisting of former cyberwarfare military and intelligence officers and having close ties to the Benjamin Netanyahu government has been selling advanced spyware to at least 45 governments. The sales are in theory restricted for use only in terrorism and criminal cases, but somehow the resource has instead been routinely used against journalists, political activists, business executives, and politicians. Saudi Arabia, for example, used the spyware to track dissident journal Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered by Saudi agents in Istanbul in 2018.

And even though the software has been regularly used against U.S. government officials and journalists, it appears that the Biden Administration has been aware of its capabilities and has done nothing to stop it. In its own defense, the Israeli company NSO that developed the spyware has claimed, implausibly, that it can no longer be used to hack U.S. phones. That assertion was debunked by former NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who tweeted “NSO’s claim that it is ‘technologically impossible’ to spy on American phone numbers is a bald-faced lie: a exploit that works against Macron’s iPhone will work the same on Biden’s iPhone. Any code written to prohibit targeting a country can also be unwritten. It’s a fig leaf.”

The surprise revelation of the Israeli activity came not from a government counter-intelligence agency, but rather from a group of 17 international media organizations that formed a consortium to investigate a data leak relating to hacked telephones. The group included major news outlets that had apparently been targeted using the Pegasus hacking spyware developed by the NSO Group, which was primarily designed to penetrate the security features of smartphones. One former cybersecurity engineer from the U.S. intelligence community described Pegasus as an “eloquently nasty” tool that could be used to “spy on almost the entire world population.” The spyware “can be installed remotely on a targeted person’s smartphone without requiring them to take any action such as clicking on a link or answering a call. Once installed, it allows clients to take complete control of the device, including accessing messages from encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal, and turning on the microphone and camera.” It can also reveal the phone’s location.

The software was designed with a backdoor which allowed NSO to monitor the surveillances and it is presumed that the information was also shared with Israeli intelligence. By one estimate 50,000 smartphones were accessed worldwide, including 10 prime ministers, three presidents including Emmanuel Macron of France, a king, foreign ministers and assorted journalists and government officials both in the U.S. and elsewhere.

A more cautious estimate from the Washington Post, which participated in the investigation, states only that “1,000 people spread across 50 different countries were identified as having numbers on the list, among them are ‘several Arab royal family members, at least 65 business executives, 85 human rights activists, 189 journalists, and more than 600 politicians and government officials.’ This includes Robert Malley, the Biden administration’s lead Iran negotiator, and journalists for CNN, the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times.” Other news agencies that were hacked by Pegasus include Agence France-Presse, Al Jazeera, France 24, Radio Free Europe, Mediapart, El País, the Associated Press, Le Monde, Bloomberg, the Economist, Reuters and Voice of America.

Some are inevitably wondering why the Biden White House has been silent about NSO. It has not identified the Israeli firm as a threat to national security and made demands to the Israeli government that it intercede with NSO and shut down the use of Pegasus until some international regulation of the use of hacking software can be developed. Part of the explanation for the reluctance might be that Biden’s senior adviser Anita Dunn’s consulting firm SKDKickerbocker was hired by NSO in 2019 to provide “public relations” advice to improve the company’s image.

The reluctance, of course, also derives from the fact that Israel is involved, but those with longer memories of the Jewish state’s record in stealing American secrets should not be surprised by this latest venture. Israeli-recruited U.S. Navy analyst Jonathan Pollard was, for example, the most damaging spy in U.S. history. And Israel has, in fact, a long history of stealing U.S. technology and military secrets to include sharing them with countries that Washington has regarded as enemies, including China and Russia.

Israel always features prominently in the annual FBI report called Foreign Economic Collection and Industrial Espionage. The 2005 report states: “Israel has an active program to gather proprietary information within the United States, these collection activities are primarily directed at obtaining information on military systems and advanced computing applications that can be used in Israel’s sizeable armaments industry.” It adds that: “Israel recruits spies, uses electronic methods, and carries out computer intrusion to gain the information.” A 1996 Defense Investigative Service report noted that: “Israel has great success stealing technology by exploiting the numerous co-production projects that it has with the Pentagon.” It says: “Placing Israeli nationals in key industries is a technique utilized with great success.” A General Accounting Office (GAO) examination of espionage directed against American defense and security industries described how: “Israeli citizens residing in the U.S. had stolen sensitive technology to manufacture artillery gun tubes, obtain classified plans for reconnaissance systems, and pass sensitive aerospace designs to unauthorized users.” The GAO concluded that: “Israel conducts,” and this is a quote, “conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the United States of any U.S. ally.” More recently, FBI counterintelligence officer John Cole has reported how many cases of Israeli espionage are dropped under orders from the Justice Department. He has provided a conservative estimate of 125 viable investigations into Israeli espionage — involving both American citizens and Israelis — that were stopped due to political pressure.

So Israel gets yet another pass on its spying against the United States. Indeed, the Biden Administration has yet to definitively comment on the latest impropriety. One wonders when the penny will drop and the American people will rise up and say “enough is enough.”

By Whitney WEBB

This past Sunday, an investigation into the global abuse of spyware developed by veterans of Israeli intelligence Unit 8200 gained widespread attention, as it was revealed that the software – sold to democratic and authoritarian governments alike – had been used to illegally spy on an estimated 50,000 individuals. Among those who had their communications and devices spied on by the software, known as Pegasus, were journalists, human rights activists, business executives, academics and prominent political leaders. Among those targeted political leaders, per reports, were the current leaders of France, Pakistan, South Africa, Egypt, Morocco and Iraq.

The abuse of Pegasus software in this very way has been known for several years, though these latest revelations appear to have gained such traction in the mainstream owing to the high number of civilians who have reportedly been surveilled through its use. The continuation of the now-years-long scandal surrounding the abuse of Pegasus has also brought considerable controversy and notoriety to the Israeli company that developed it, the NSO Group.

While the NSO Group has become infamous, other Israeli companies with even deeper ties to Israel’s intelligence apparatus have been selling software that not only provides the exact same services to governments and intelligence agencies but purports to go even farther.

Originally founded by former Israeli Prime Minister and Jeffrey Epstein associate Ehud Barak, one of these companies’ wares are being used by countries around the world, including in developing countries with the direct facilitation of global financial institutions like the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the World Bank. In addition, the software is only made available to governments that are “trusted” by Israel’s government, which “works closely” with the company.

Despite the fact that this firm has been around since 2018 and was covered in detail by this author for MintPress News in January 2020, no mainstream outlet – including those that have extensively covered the NSO Group – has bothered to examine the implications of this story.

Worse than Pegasus

Toka was launched in 2018 with the explicit purpose of selling a “tailored ecosystem of cyber capabilities and software products for governmental, law enforcement, and security agencies.” According to a profile of the company published in Forbes shortly after it launched, Toka advertised itself as “a one-stop hacking shop for governments that require extra capability to fight terrorists and other threats to national security in the digital domain.”

Toka launched with plans to “provide spy tools for whatever device its clients require,” including not only smartphones but a “special focus on the so-called Internet of Things (IoT).” Per the company, this includes devices like Amazon Echo, Google Nest-connected home products, as well as connected fridges, thermostats and alarms. Exploits in these products discovered by Toka, the company said at the time, would not be disclosed to vendors, meaning those flaws would continue to remain vulnerable to any hacker, whether a client of Toka or not.

Today, Toka’s software suite claims to offer its customers in law enforcement, government and intelligence the ability to obtain “targeted intelligence” and to conduct “forensic investigations” as well as “covert operations.” In addition, Toka offers governments its “Cyber Designers” service, which provides “agencies with the full-spectrum strategies, customized projects and technologies needed to keep critical infrastructure, the digital landscape and government institutions secure and durable.”

Given that NSO’s Pegasus targets only smartphones, Toka’s hacking suite – which, like Pegasus, is also classified as a “lawful intercept” product – is capable of targeting any device connected to the internet, including but not limited to smartphones. In addition, its target clientele are the same as those of Pegasus, providing an easy opportunity for governments to gain access to even more surveillance capabilities than Pegasus offers, but without risking notoriety in the media, since Toka has long avoided the limelight.

A slide from an April 20, 2021 presentation given by Toka’s VP of Global Sales, Michael Anderson

In addition, while Toka professes that its products are only used by “trusted” governments and agencies to combat “terrorism” and maintain order and public safety, the sales pitch for the NSO Group’s Pegasus is remarkably similar, and that sales pitch has not stopped its software from being used to target dissidents, politicians and journalists. It also allows many of the same groups who are Toka clients, like intelligence agencies, to use these tools for the purpose of obtaining blackmail. The use of blackmail by Israeli security agencies against civilian Palestinians to attempt to weaken Palestinian society and for political persecution is well-documented.

Toka has been described by market analysts as an “offensive security” company, though the company’s leadership rejects this characterization. Company co-founder and current CEO Yaron Rosen asserted that, as opposed to purely offensive, the company’s operations are “something in the middle,” which he classifies as bridging cyber defense and offensive cyber activities — e.g., hacking.

The company’s activities are concerning in light of the fact that Toka has been directly partnered with Israel’s Ministry of Defense and other Israeli intelligence and security agencies since its founding. The company “works closely” with these government agencies, according to an Israeli Ministry of Defense website. This collaboration, per Toka, is meant to “enhance” their products. Toka’s direct IDF links are in contrast to the NSO Group, a company that does not maintain overt ties with the Israeli security state.

Toka’s direct collaboration with Israel’s government is also made clear through its claim that it sells its products and offers its services only to “trusted” governments, law enforcement agencies and intelligence agencies. Toka’s Rosen has stated that Russia, China, and “other enemy countries” would never be customers of the company. In other words, only countries aligned with Israeli policy goals, particularly in occupied Palestine, are permitted to be customers and gain access to its trove of powerful hacking tools. This is consistent with Israeli government efforts to leverage Israel’s hi-tech sector as a means of countering the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement globally.

A profile photo of former Chief of Cyber Staff for the IDF and Toka co-founder, Yaron Rosen. Credit | Spy Legends

Further evidence that Toka is part of this Israeli government effort to seed foreign governments with technology products deeply tied to Israel’s military and intelligence services is the fact that one of the main investors in Toka is Dell Technologies Capital, which is an extension of the well-known tech company Dell. Dell was founded by Michael Dell, a well-known pro-Israel partisan who has donated millions of dollars to the Friends of the IDF and is one of the top supporters of the so-called “anti-BDS” bills that prevent publicly employed individuals or public institutions in several U.S. states from supporting non-violent boycotts of Israel, even on humanitarian grounds. As MintPress previously noted, the fact that a major producer of consumer electronic goods is heavily investing in a company that markets the hacking of that very technology should be a red flag.

The government’s initial admitted use of the hi-tech sector to counter the BDS movement coincided with the launch of a new Israeli military and intelligence agency policy in 2012, whereby “cyber-related and intelligence projects that were previously carried out in-house in the Israeli military and Israel’s main intelligence arms are transferred to companies that, in some cases, were built for this exact purpose.”

One of the reasons this was reportedly launched was to retain members of Unit 8200 engaged in military work who were moving to jobs in the country’s high-paying tech sector. Through this new policy that has worked to essentially merge much of the private tech sector with Israel’s national security state, some Unit 8200 and other intelligence veterans continue their work for the state but benefit from a private sector salary. The end result is that an unknown – and likely very high – number of Israeli tech companies are led by veterans of the Israeli military and Israeli intelligence agencies and serve, for all intents and purposes, as front companies. A closer examination of Toka strongly suggests that it is one such front company.

Toka — born out of Israel’s national security state

The company was co-founded by Ehud Barak, Alon Kantor, Kfir Waldman and retired IDF Brigadier General Yaron Rosen. Rosen, the firm’s founding CEO and now co-CEO, is the former Chief of the IDF’s cyber staff, where he was “the lead architect of all [IDF] cyber activities,” including those executed by Israeli military intelligence Unit 8200. Alon Kantor is the former Vice President of Business Development for Check Point Software, a software and hardware company founded by Unit 8200 veterans. Kfir Waldman is the former CEO of Go Arc and a former Director of Engineering at technology giant Cisco. Cisco is a leader in the field of Internet of Things devices and IoT cybersecurity, while Go Arc focuses on applications for mobile devices. As previously mentioned, Toka hacks not only mobile devices but also has a “special focus” on hacking IoT devices.

A slide from an April 20, 2021 presentation given by Toka’s VP of Global Sales, Michael Anderson

In addition to having served as prime minister of Israel, Toka co-founder Ehud Barak previously served as head of Israeli military intelligence directorate Aman, as well as several other prominent posts in the IDF, before eventually leading the Israeli military as minister of defense. While minister of defense, he led Operation Cast Lead against the blockaded Gaza Strip in 2009, which resulted in the deaths of over 1,000 Palestinians and saw Israel illegally use chemical weapons against civilians.

Toka is the first start-up created by Barak. However, Barak had previously chaired and invested in Carbyne911, a controversial Israeli emergency services start-up that has expanded around the world and has become particularly entrenched in the United States. Carbyne’s success has been despite the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, given that the intelligence-linked pedophile and sex trafficker had invested heavily in the company at Barak’s behest. Barak’s close relationship with Epstein, including overnight visits to Epstein’s now-notorious island and apartment complexes that housed trafficked women and underage girls, has been extensively documented.

Barak stepped away from Toka in April of last year, likely as the result of the controversy over his Epstein links, which also saw Barak withdraw from his chairmanship of Carbyne in the wake of Epstein’s death. Considerable evidence has pointed to Epstein having been an intelligence asset of Israeli military intelligence who accrued blackmail on powerful individuals for the benefit of Israel’s national security state and other intelligence agencies, as well as for personal gain.

Another notable Toka executive is Nir Peleg, the company’s Vice President for Strategic Projects. Peleg is the former head of the Research and Development Division at Israel’s National Cyber Directorate, where he led national cybersecurity projects as well as government initiatives and collaborations with international partners and Israeli cybersecurity innovative companies. Prior to this, Peleg claims to have served for more than 20 years in leading positions at the IDF’s “elite technology unit,” though he does specify exactly which unit this was. His LinkedIn profile lists him as having been head of the IDF’s entire Technology Department from 2008 to 2011.

While at Israel’s National Cyber Directorate, Peleg worked closely with Tal Goldstein, now the head of strategy for the World Economic Forum’s Partnership against Cybercrime (WEF-PAC), whose members include government agencies of the U.S., Israel and the U.K., along with some of the world’s most powerful companies in technology and finance. The goal of this effort is to establish a global entity that is capable of controlling the flow of information, data, and money on the internet. Notably, Toka CEO Yaron Rosen recently called for essentially this exact organization to be established when he stated that the international community needed to urgently create the “cyber” equivalent of the World Health Organization to combat the so-called “cyber pandemic.”

Claims that a “cyber pandemic” is imminent have been frequent from individuals tied to the WEF-PAC, including CEO of Checkpoint Software Gil Shwed. Checkpoint is a member of WEF-PAC and two of its former vice presidents, Michael Anderson and Alon Kantor, are now Vice President for Global Sales and co-CEO of Toka, respectively.

The Wolrd Economic Forum does little to hide its partnership with former Israeli intelligence officials

Toka’s Chief Technology Officer, and the chief architect of its hacking suite, is Moty Zaltsman, who is the only chief executive of the company not listed on the firm’s website. Per his LinkedIn, Zaltsman was the Chief Technology Officer for then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Last January, when Toka was covered by MintPress News, his profile stated that he had developed “offensive technologies” for Israel’s head of state, but Zaltsman has since removed this claim. The last Toka executive of note is Michael Volfman, the company’s Vice President of Research and Development. Volfman was previously a cyber research and development leader at an unspecified “leading technology unit” of the IDF.

Also worth mentioning are Toka’s main investors, particularly Entrèe Capital, which is managed by Aviad Eyal and Ran Achituv. Achituv, who manages Entrée’s investment in Toka and sits on Toka’s board of directors, was the founder of the IDF’s satellite-based signals intelligence unit and also a former senior vice president at both Amdocs and Comverse Infosys. Both Amdocs and Comverse courted scandal in the late 1990s and early 2000s for their role in a massive Israeli government-backed espionage operation that targeted U.S. federal agencies during that period.

Despite this scandal and others in the company’s past, Comverse subsidiary Verint was subsequently contracted by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) to bug the telecommunications network of Verizon shortly after their previous espionage scandal was covered by mainstream media. The contract was part of Operation Stellar Winds and was approved by then-NSA Director Keith Alexander, who has since been an outspoken advocate of closer Israeli-American government cooperation in cybersecurity.

In addition to Entrèe Capital, Andreessen Horowitz is another of Toka’s main investors. The venture capital firm co-founded by Silicon Valley titan Marc Andreessen is currently advised by former Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers, a close friend of the infamous pedophile Jeffery Epstein. Early investors in Toka that are no longer listed on the firm’s website include Launch Capital, which is deeply tied to the Pritzker family — one of the wealthiest families in the U.S., with close ties to the Clintons and Obamas as well as the U.S.’ pro-Israel lobby — and Ray Rothrock, a venture capitalist who spent nearly three decades at VenRock, the Rockefeller family venture capital fund.

In light of the aforementioned policy of Israel’s government to use private tech companies as fronts, the combination of Toka’s direct Israeli government ties, the nature of its products and services, and the numerous, significant connections of its leaders and investors to both Israeli military intelligence and past Israeli espionage scandals strongly suggests that Toka is one such front.

If this is the case, there is reason to believe that, when Toka clients hack and gain access to a device, elements of the Israeli state could also gain access. This concern is born out of the fact that Israeli intelligence has engaged in this exact type of behavior before as part of the PROMIS software scandal, whereby Israeli “superspy” Robert Maxwell sold bugged software to the U.S. government, including highly sensitive locations involved in classified nuclear weapons research. When that software, known as PROMIS, was installed on U.S. government computers, Israeli intelligence gained access to those same systems and devices.

The U.S. government was not the only target of this operation, however, as the bugged PROMIS software was placed on the networks of several intelligence agencies around the world as well as powerful corporations and several large banks. Israeli intelligence gained access to all of their systems until the compromised nature of the software was made public. However, Israel’s government was not held accountable by the U.S. government or the international community for its far-reaching espionage program, a program directly facilitated by technology-focused front companies. The similarities between the products marketed and clients targeted by Maxwell during the PROMIS scandal and currently by Toka are considerable.

World Bank, IDB aid Toka in targeting Palestine’s allies

While the ties between Toka and Israel’s national security state are clear as day, what is also significant and unsettling about this company is how its entry into developing and developed countries alike is being facilitated by global financial institutions, specifically the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. Notably, these are the only deals with governments that Toka advertises on its website, as the others are not made public.

Several projects funded by one or another of these two institutions have seen Toka become the “cyber designer” of national cybersecurity strategies for Nigeria and Chile since last year. Significantly, both countries’ populations show strong support for Palestine and the BDS movement. In addition, Toka garnered a World Bank-funded contract with the government of Moldova, an ally of Israel, last September.

The World Bank selected Toka in February of last year to “enhance Nigeria’s cyber development,” which includes developing “national frameworks, technical capabilities and enhancement of skills.” Through the World Bank contract, Toka has now become intimately involved with both the public and private sectors of Nigeria that it relates to the country’s “cyber ecosystem.” The World Bank’s decision to choose Toka is likely the result of a partnership forged in 2019 by the state of Israel with the global financial institution “to boost cybersecurity in the developing world,” with a focus on Africa and Asia.

Toka executives pose with Nigerian officials in 2020. Photo | Israel Defense

“Designing and building sustainable and robust national cyber strategy and cyber resilience is a critical enabler to fulfilling the objectives of Nigeria’s national cybersecurity policy and strategic framework,” Toka CEO Yaron Rosen said in a press release regarding the contract.

Given Toka’s aforementioned use of its technology for only “trusted” governments, it is notable that Nigeria has been a strong ally of Palestine for most of the past decade, save for one abstention at a crucial UN vote in 2014. In addition to the government, numerous student groups, human rights organizations, and Islamic organizations in the country are outspoken in their support for Palestine. With Toka’s efforts to offer its products only to countries who align themselves with “friendly” countries, their now intimate involvement with Nigeria’s cyber development could soon have consequences for a government that has tended to support the Palestinian cause. This is even more likely given Toka CEO Rosen’s statements at an April 2021 event hosted by Israel’s Ministry of Economy, where he emphasized the role of cyber in developing countries specifically in terms of their national defense and economic strategy.

Three months after the deal was struck with Nigeria through the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) selected Toka to advise the government of Chile on “next steps for the country’s national cybersecurity readiness and operational capacity building.” As part of the project, “Toka will assess the current cybersecurity gaps and challenges in Chile and support the IDB project implementation by recommending specific cybersecurity readiness improvements,” per a press release. Toka claims it will help “establish Chile as a cybersecurity leader in South America.” Regarding the deal, Toka’s Rosen stated that he was “thankful” that the IDB had “provided us with this opportunity to work with the Government of Chile.”

Israel signed consequential agreements for cooperation with the IDB in 2015, before further deepening those ties in 2019 by partnering with the IDB to invest $250 million from Israeli institutions in Latin America specifically.

Toka executives are pictured with Chilean officials during a 2020 meeting in Santiago

Like Nigeria, Chile has a strong connection with Palestine and is often a target of Israeli government influence efforts. Though the current far-right government of Sebastián Piñera has grown close to Israel, Chile is home to the largest Palestinian exile community in the world outside of the Middle East. As a result, Chile has one of the strongest BDS movements in the Americas, with cities declaring a non-violent boycott of Israel until the Piñera administration stepped in to claim that such boycotts can only be implemented at the federal level. Palestinian Chileans have strong influence on Chilean politics, with a recent, popular presidential candidate, Daniel Jadue, being the son of Palestinian immigrants to Chile. Earlier this year, in June, Chile’s congress drafted a bill to boycott goods, services and products from illegal Israeli settlements.

While Toka frames both of these projects as aimed at helping the cyber readiness and economies of the countries it now services, Israeli media has painted a different picture. For instance, Haaretz wrote that Israel’s partnerships with development banks, specifically those made in 2019 that resulted in these Toka contracts, were planned by an inter-ministerial committee set up by then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “to realize the potential of international development to strengthen the Israeli economy, improve Israel’s political standing and strengthen its international role.” One source, quoted by Haaretz as being close to this undertaking, stated that “development banks are a way to help advance Israel’s interests and agenda in the developing world, including Latin America. But it’s not philanthropy.”

Given these statements, and Toka’s own modus operandi as a company and its background, it seems highly likely that the reason both Nigeria and Chile were chosen as the first of Toka’s development banks contracts was aimed at advancing the Israeli government’s agenda in those specific countries, one that seeks to counter and mitigate the vocal support for Palestine among those countries’ inhabitants.

The spyware problem goes far beyond NSO Group

The NSO Group and its Pegasus software is clearly a major scandal that deserves scrutiny. However, the treatment of the incident by the media has largely absolved the Israeli government of any role in that affair, despite the fact that the NSO Group’s sales of Pegasus to foreign governments has been approved and defended by Israel’s government. This, of course, means that Israel’s government has obvious responsibility in the whole scandal as well.

In addition, the myopic focus on the NSO Group when it comes to mainstream media reporting on Israeli private spyware and the threats it poses means that other companies, like Toka, go uninvestigated, even if their products present an even greater potential for abuse and illegal surveillance than those currently marketed and sold by the NSO Group.

Given the longstanding history of Israeli intelligence’s use of technology firms for international surveillance and espionage, as well as its admitted policy of using tech companies as fronts to combat BDS and ensure Israel’s “cyber dominance,” the investigation into Israeli spyware cannot stop just with NSO Group. However, not stopping there risks directly challenging the Israeli state, particularly in Toka’s case, and this is something that mainstream media outlets tend to avoid. This is due to a mix of factors, but the fact that NSO’s Pegasus has been used to spy on journalists so extensively certainly doesn’t help the matter.

Yet, Israel’s weaponization of its tech industry, and the global use of its spyware offerings by governments and security agencies around the world, must be addressed, especially because it has been explicitly weaponized to prevent non-violent boycotts of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, including those solely based on humanitarian grounds or out of respect for international laws that Israel routinely breaks. Allowing a government to engage in this activity on a global scale to stifle criticism of flagrantly illegal policies and war crimes cannot continue and this should be the case for any government, not just Israel.

If the outlets eagerly reporting on the latest Pegasus revelations are truly concerned with the abuse of spyware by governments and intelligence agencies around the world, they should also give attention to Toka, as it is actively arming these same institutions with weapons far worse than any NSO Group product.

mintpressnews.com

Blaming Russia for cyberattacks is not only a misdirection of the Western cybersecurity problems from its own commercial negligence. It is also risking setting up a catastrophic conflict based on disinformation.

Cyberattacks on American and European industries and government departments are increasingly reported, representing massive financial losses for victims who pay out hefty ransoms to avert damage. It has become fashionable in Western media to blame Russian state actors or criminal cyber gangs based in Russia.

NATO leaders this week fingered Russia for the upsurge in ransomware attacks, either through malign state agents or from turning a blind eye to organized crime. There is no evidence to support such claims against Russia but of course, they play into Western media narratives that have sought to demonize Russia over a range of other malign conduct.

There is, however, a cogent explanation for why there appears to be a recent spike in computer hacking in the United States and other Western countries, and why the blame is being pushed so intensely onto Russia.

Randy Martin, a U.S.-based political analyst who also worked for years in developing computer security systems, says that American companies are wide open to criminal attacks because the software industry there is “such a dismal failure”.

Unlike in many other countries, cybersecurity in the U.S. is commonly supplied by private firms that operate on a profit basis. That goes for government departments such as health and education, as well as for key utilities of power, water and fuel. Martin says that these companies have cut back on developing robust cybersecurity over several years in order to reduce costs and boost profits. The upshot is that industries and government departments are left acutely vulnerable to bad actors who can exploit the weaknesses with ransomware attacks.

This prevalent condition of poor cybersecurity was illustrated last month when an oil pipeline serving the entire U.S. east coast was shut down by cyber attackers who demanded a multi-million-dollar ransom for recovery. It’s not clear where the criminal gang operated from, although U.S. media claimed it was from Russia.

U.S. deputy attorney general Lisa Monaco admitted in a media interview that the problem of increasing ransomware rackets on U.S. firms lay with inadequate cybersecurity. She told CNBC: “The message needs to be to the viewers here, to the CEOs around the country, that you’ve got to be on notice of the exponential increase of these attacks… If you are not taking steps — today, right now — to understand how you can make your company more resilient, what is your plan?”

So, that’s the first point. The vulnerability of U.S. industries and businesses is largely due to dereliction in cybersecurity services because of the profit motive.

The second point, as analyst Randy Martin notes, is that the rush to blame Russia or Russia-based hackers is a handy way to shift liability for the damages.

“The US software industry is such a dismal failure when it comes to the security of its products it is using the ‘Blame Russia’ or blame criminal hackers to take the focus and liability off of themselves,” says Martin.

He further explains: “If the attack is blamed on a state actor and attributed by U.S. intelligence then liability will largely become a taxpayer burden. In that way, insurance companies and companies that sold or distributed the software or were responsible for security are largely exempted from litigation and costs. All of this is significant in understanding why everyone is so quick to attribute blame.”

In other words, if malware-hit companies were to direct complaints against the software firms that were paid to protect their computer systems, then those software services would be potentially slapped with massive bills for reparations. It is thus a big incentive for firms to scapegoat the perpetrator as some awesome, mysterious malign force (Russia) in order to let the real culprits (inferior U.S. cybersecurity services and management) off the hook. And an added incentive is that cyberattacks from a purported foreign actor can then qualify for generous U.S. government compensation on the taxpayers’ tab.

Says Martin: “All of the fancy dancing around ‘who done it?’ has everything to do with shifting the liability.”

He points out that this lack of accountability for U.S. computer security firms is exceptional compared with other industries. “If for instance, Microsoft is negligent due to hacker exploits not being fixed, and if the blame can be attributed to the attacker, then Microsoft is off the hook for negligence. This is unprecedented behavior in other industries. Automobile manufacturers and aircraft makers are often sued for being negligent for not installing specific safety devices on the products. Why shouldn’t Microsoft be sued for inadequate cybersecurity?”

But this cybersecurity scam has even bigger and more grave implications. Blaming Russia or Russia-based hackers is not simply a neat way to offset costs, it is a dangerous escalation of national security tensions at a time when relations are already fraught with animosity.

At this week’s summit in Brussels of the U.S.-led NATO military alliance, Moscow was accused of carrying out cyber attacks on Western industries and government departments as part of an alleged “hybrid warfare”. The Kremlin was also accused of turning a blind eye to alleged criminal cyber gangs operating from Russia. No evidence was presented, as usual, but the insinuation is that the Kremlin is using cyber gangs as proxies to disrupt Western states. More alarming is that the NATO leaders cited this purported Russian malign conduct as being equivalent to acts of war and in the context of invoking Article 5, the common defense clause of the 30-member military alliance.

Blaming Russia for cyberattacks is not only a misdirection of the Western cybersecurity problems from its own commercial negligence. It is also risking setting up a catastrophic conflict based on disinformation.

It should be borne in mind that Russia has repeatedly urged the United States and its allies to formulate an international cybersecurity treaty to enable joint safeguards. Those appeals by Moscow have been repeatedly spurned by Washington and NATO.

American publication Newsweek reported this week on revelations of a massive U.S. military effort to control and influence the internet including social media.

The report is based on a lengthy investigation that took two years to complete, according to Newsweek. Its granular detail and multiple interviews with involved personnel certainly give the information credibility which merits further investigation, if not a Congressional inquiry. Tellingly, the report was largely ignored by other American corporate news outlets.

What it found is the existence of a “secret cyber army” within the regular U.S. armed forces numbering 60,000 personnel with an operational budget of $900 million a year. The cyber army operates domestically and overseas. It is not overseen by Congress which is a violation of the U.S. constitution. It is also, on the face of it, as Newsweek notes, in violation of the Geneva Convention which regulates the open conduct of conventional military.

There is every reason to believe that the cyber “special forces” work in conjunction with American military intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency. The labyrinthine nature has the sinister aspect of a police state apparatus, the like of which the Americans accuse Russia and China of running.

The report states: “The explosion of Pentagon cyber warfare, moreover, has led to thousands of spies who carry out their day-to-day work in various made-up personas, the very type of nefarious operations the United States decries when [allegedly] Russian and Chinese spies do the same.”

Newsweek goes on: “The newest and fastest-growing group is the clandestine army that never leaves their keyboards. These are the cutting-edge cyber fighters and intelligence collectors who assume false personas online, employing non-attribution and misattribution techniques to hide the who and the where of their online presence [and] even engage in campaigns to influence and manipulate social media.”

The Newsweek report is not the first time it has been revealed that the Americans and other Western military intelligence agencies have developed mechanisms for influencing social media and public discourse through the deployment of false persona known as “bots”. But what is eye-opening is the vast scale of the Pentagon’s cyberwarfare which is conducted against its own population as well as foreign nations.

This makes an absurdity of Washington’s relentless accusations against Russia of malign cyber conduct. Similar accusations are made by the Americans against China, Iran, and other nations. The reality is, however, that the Pentagon has built the largest, illegal undercover force in the world, according to Newsweek. The fact that the Western public doesn’t see this reality is a feat of perception management, or propaganda.

It has become a mantra for American and European politicians and media to accuse Russia of interfering in Western elections through supposed mischievous influence over social media. This mantra has been repeated so often that it has taken on the status of “fact”. It is said to be one of the issues that U.S. President Joe Biden wants to bring up in person with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin if the two leaders meet this summer.

In addition, Russia is alleged to have inflicted last year a massive cyber attack on American government departments and commercial corporations – the so-called SolarWinds Hack.

The ransomware attack on a U.S. oil pipeline earlier this month which hit nearly a dozen states on the east coast was also blamed on a Russian cyber gang with the implication that the Kremlin was partially responsible.

The scale of the Pentagon’s cyber army puts these issues into perspective. For a start, there has never been any verifiable evidence presented by Western governments that could in any court incriminate Russia over the allegations of malign conduct. But secondly what we have instead is voluminous evidence that it is the Americans who have the capability for systematic cyber crimes.

It was the Americans under the George W Bush and Barack Obama administrations who developed and deployed the Stuxnet malware virus which crippled Iran’s nuclear industry over a decade ago. No other nation has been caught so red-handed in an act of cyber warfare.

The revelations in 2013 and later by former CIA contractor Edward Snowden documenting in devastating detail a global campaign of illegal surveillance covering the internet and telecommunications by the American National Security Agency is another astounding facet. Snowden provided the Wikileaks whistleblower site archives showing how the CIA and NSA worked with U.S. internet tech companies to illegally infiltrate the private communications of governments and citizens all around the world. Not only that but the CIA has developed techniques for falsely incriminating others with their cybercrimes.

Aiding and abetting the Americans in their illegal global endeavors are the spy agencies of Britain and the other Five Eye allied nations, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Sergei Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, said categorically in an interview this week that Russia has not been involved in cyber hacking or malign influence against the United States or other Western nations. Naryshkin pointed out the absolute lack of evidence, to which the BBC interviewer flustered from having no intelligible answer.

What’s more, the Russian spy chief introduced some reality to the oft-vacuous allegations by citing the revelations made by Edward Snowden that it is the American NSA and CIA who have the known capability for massive malign cyber warfare. It is not unreasonable to speculate that these agencies have sought to incriminate Russia over the SolarWinds Hack and other attacks.

In conjunction with the Pentagon’s cyber army, the whole realm of American and Western accusations against Russia is a mockery of their own guilt-projection.

The U.S. Congress wants answers on what has been apparent foot-dragging by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) in answering congressional questions about NSA forcing the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) into incorporating a NSA-engineered back door into the Dual_EC_DRBG encryption algorithm standard developed for use in federal government computer systems and networks. On January 28, Democratic Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Cory Booker of New Jersey, along with eight of their Democratic colleagues in the House of Representatives – Tom Malinowski of New Jersey, Ted Lieu of California, Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts, Bill Foster of Illinois, Suzan DelBene of Washington, Yvette Clarke of New York, and Anna Eshoo of California – sent a letter to NSA director General Paul Nakasone requesting information on the forced introduction by NSA of the Dual_EC_DRBG algorithm into the products of Juniper Networks that permitted a massive breach of its customers’ systems in 2015, five years before a similar breach occurred with the products of SolarWinds, another vendor reliant on the same NSA-manipulated encryption algorithm.

The gist of the Congressional inquiry into the role NSA may have played in manipulating the U.S. civilian government technical standards development and approval process is not the first time the legislative branch of government has smelled a rat when it comes to NSA inserting “Trojan horses” into standards developed for civilian government and commercial use. In the case of Dual_EC_DRBG, NSA’s zeal in providing itself with a hidden back door to spy on targeted computers and networks relying on the NIST standard may have boomeranged. Back doors of any nature in information technology products is a hack waiting to happen. There is also a suggestion that the U.S. Intelligence Community’s haste in blaming “Russian,” “Chinese,” “North Korean,” “Iranian,” and other hackers for the SolarWinds breach was to cover its own tracks in pushing for widespread use of an encryption standard for which it had implanted a serious security design flaw.

In their letter to Nakasone, the Senators and Representatives wrote, “The American people have a right to know why NSA did not act after the Juniper hack to protect the government from the serious threat posed by supply chain hacks. A similar supply chain hack was used in the recent SolarWinds breach, in which several government agencies, including the Departments of Commerce, Defense, Homeland Security, Justice and Treasury, were infected with malware contained in the updates to SolarWinds software that permitted access by hackers.

A problem in the U.S. government’s supply chain suggests that traditional configuration management controls were abandoned by NIST and NSA, as well as federal agency end-users when it came to approving the contracts with Juniper and SolarWinds for their services.

The history of NSA and civilian and commercial encryption standards is replete with examples of what is the subject of the current congressional probe into the Juniper Networks and SolarWinds events. In the 1990s, the NSA, with the backing of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), pushed for a backdoor in an encryption micro-circuit developed by NSA engineers. Marketed as the “Clipper Chip,” the backdoor technology that foresaw law enforcement holding, in escrow, the decryption mechanism immediately came under attack by privacy and civil liberties advocates, as well as major high-tech computer and telecommunications companies, including AT&T, Microsoft, and Apple. The Clipper Chip backdoor technology was developed in concert with a military contractor, Mykotronx.

Civilian government and commercial users of the 56-bit Data Encryption Standard (DES) algorithm, developed by IBM and issued as a federal standard in 1977 by the National Bureau of Standards, the forerunner of NIST, were content with its security and performance. It would later be discovered that an original 128-bit DES algorithm developed by IBM was scaled back to 56-bits under pressure from NSA. At the time, the code-breaking ability of NSA to crack a 128-bit DES would have taxed other code-breaking priorities, for example those employed against Soviet, Chinese, Israeli, and French diplomatic and military encryption codes. NSA believed it had mastered breaking international diplomatic, military, banking, and industrial encryption ever since it was able to install backdoor decryption capabilities in many Western commercial encryption products, including the Hagelin cipher machines that were produced by Crypto AG of Switzerland. Advances in encryption technology forced NSA to become more aggressive in its demand for a backdoor advantage in cracking encryption products, including the 250-bit RSA algorithm for commercial end-users and the freeware encryption product “Pretty Good Privacy” (PGP).

The Senate-House letter to NSA contains a paragraph that provides some insight into the NSA Dual_EC_DRBG Trojan horse algorithm that was implanted in Juniper Network’s products. That paragraph states, “Sometime between 2008 and 2009, Juniper added the algorithm to several of its products. Juniper made this change secretly, which it kept from the public until 2013. In response to a recent congressional investigation, the company confirmed that it added support for the algorithm ‘at the request of a customer,’ but refused to identify that customer or even confirm whether that customer was a U.S. government agency. According to Juniper, no one involved in the decision to use this algorithm still works for the company.” Based on NSA’s similar efforts in the past, two facts can be ascertained. The “customer” that made the request was, in fact, NSA, and the company employees involved in the decision to use the algorithm were temporary employees provided by NSA.

The FBI also saw sophisticated encryption systems in the hands of the public to be an impediment to its longstanding access to communications systems, with or without a court order. For many years, the FBI enjoyed unhindered access to Washington, DC’s analog phone system from its own remote access wiretapping room located in the Old Post Office on Pennsylvania Avenue, now the Trump International Hotel.

With the current congressional inquiry into NSA blaming various state actors for the Juniper/Solar Winds hacking, it appears that we have come full circle. Some thirty years ago, the NSA back door in question was the Clipper Chip. Today, it is Dual_EC_DRBG. In the early 1990s, the chief critic of NSA’S actions was Democratic Representative Jack Brooks of Texas, the chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee and a cigar-chomping protégé of House Speaker Sam Rayburn and President Lyndon Johnson. NSA was able to withstand the heat placed on it by the likes of Brooks. They obviously believe they will be able to obfuscate on the encryption backdoor issue with Wyden, Booker, and the Democratic House members.

There is every likelihood that the “damaging” hacks from unnamed actors abroad into U.S. federal, state, and local government networks and computer systems, as well as those in the private sector, have been carried out by U.S. Cyber Command personnel testing their backdoor Trojan horse capabilities. For every well-publicized hacker attack blamed on foreign players, the NSA and Cyber Command enjoy huge boosts in their operating budgets. Victims of hacking attacks also bear responsibility for their dilemmas. The rush to outsource computing capabilities and data storage to “cloud” operations brings about inherent security vulnerabilities. Those who began worrying about computer security risks in the late 1960s, including those working for the Central Intelligence Agency, would have gone ballistic if they lived long enough to see the CIA outsource its cloud computing requirements to Amazon.

So, who is ultimately at fault for the succession of major hacking events in the United States? The quote from Cassius in William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” is germane, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”