The inevitable end result of our last 56 years

[Kirk Gallaway]

Agreed, Dave. everybody's sort of a pawn in their game.

Hate to say it, but I did mention at the time that Pelosi should have taken the deal in October. Everybody seemed to give her a pass.

[James DiEugenio]

Mitch McConnell makes Darth Vader look like a nice guy.

Meanwhile the House GOP has gone over the cliff.  QAnon reigns.

[Douglas Caddy]

[Joe Bauer]

41 minutes ago, Douglas Caddy said:

The middle and lower classes ( the huge majority of Americans ) would still be early 1900's criminally used, abused and unprotected by the wealthiest class if it wasn't for our common good defending Democratic party and leadership during the last 88 years and the incredibly courageous progressive movement led by so many heroic women during those early years. 

 

Include also the much more tolerant policies towards the tens of millions of illegals and the children they gave birth to after arriving.

When I see Hispanics voicing support for Republicans and especially Donald Trump I want to ask them which party has treated them and their newly arriving shared lineage poor better by far for generations and still today?

 

 

[Douglas Caddy]

SolarWinds adviser says his warnings were ignored

Austin-based company now finds itself at center of cybersecurity attack

By Ryan Gallagher BLOOMBERG NEWS 12/22/2020

A former security adviser at the IT monitoring and network management company SolarWinds Corp. said he warned management of cybersecurity risks and laid out a plan to improve it that was ultimately ignored.

In a 23-page PowerPoint presentation reviewed by Bloomberg News, Ian Thornton-Trump recommended to company executives in 2017 that Solar-Winds appoint a senior director of cybersecurity, and said he told them that “the survival of the company depends on an internal commitment to security.”

The following month, he terminated his relationship with the company, saying he believed its leadership wasn’t interested in making changes that would have “meaningful impact.”

Thornton-Trump, as well as a former SolarWinds software engineer who talked to Bloomberg News, said that given the cybersecurity risks at the company, they viewed a major breach as inevitable. Their concerns about SolarWinds are shared by several cybersecurity researchers, who discovered what they described as glaring security lapses at the company, whose software was used in a suspected Russian hacking campaign.

“My belief is that from a security perspective, Solar-Winds was an incredibly easy target to hack,” said Thornton-Trump, now the chief information security officer at threat intelligence firm Cyjax Ltd.

Hard to detect

Last week, the Austin-based SolarWinds found itself at the center of the largest cybersecurity attack in recent memory. Suspected Russian hackers breached the internal networks of at least 200 customers, including U.S. government agencies and an as-yet-unknown number of private companies, a cybersecurity firm and people familiar with the investigation told Bloomberg.

In an operation that cybersecurity experts have described as exceedingly sophisticated and hard to detect, the hackers installed malicious code in updates to SolarWinds’ widely used Orion software, which was sent to as many as 18,000 customers.

The malicious code provided the hackers access to the customers’ computer networks and, as clients around the world continue to comb their systems for signs of the Russian hackers, the list of victims is expected to grow.

In a statement posted on the SolarWinds website Friday, Kevin Thompson, the company’s chief executive officer, said that the company’s top priority was “to ensure that our and our customers’ environments are secure.”

“Security and trust in our software are the foundations of our commitment to our customers,” he said. “We strive to implement and maintain appropriate safeguards, processes, and procedures designed to protect our customers.”

Responding to Bloomberg News’ questions about the 2017 presentation and other security issues identified by researchers, a Solar-Winds spokesperson said in a statement, “Our top priority is our work with our customers, our industry partners and government agencies to determine whether a foreign government orchestrated this attack, best understand its full scope, and to help address any customer needs that develop. We are doing this work as quickly and transparently as possible. There will be plenty of time to look back and we plan to do that in a similarly transparent way.”

In addition, the company said it is collaborating with law enforcement and “will continue gathering all relevant information to ensure an incident like this does not happen again.”

Password leaked online

Cybersecurity researchers also said they’ve discovered flaws with SolarWinds’ security practices.

One of them, Vinoth Kumar, said he notified Solar-Winds in 2019 that the password to one of its servers had leaked online. The password, according to Kumar, was “solarwinds123.” SolarWinds told Kumar that the password had been visible due to a “misconfiguration,” and removed it.

In addition, until recently SolarWinds advised its customers on its website to disable virus scanning for Orion platform products so those products could run more efficiently, according to several cybersecurity researchers who posted about it on Twitter. The SolarWinds’ webpage has subsequently been removed from public view.

Jake Williams, a former hacker for the U.S. National Security Agency who is now president of cybersecurity firm Rendition Info-sec, said technology companies such as SolarWinds that build and produce computer code often “don’t do security well.”

“Security is a cost center, not a profit center,” Williams said. “I think that probably has a lot to do with it. An underlying problem at SolarWinds has probably crept in through some missing security best practice.”

Even if SolarWinds had robust cybersecurity practices, however, it might not have deterred the alleged Russian hackers, who U.S. authorities described as highly skilled, patient and well resourced, demonstrating “complex trade-craft” in their attacks.

“The reality is that sophisticated threat actors, no matter how good the defenses, will eventually succeed,” said Costin Raiu, director of global research and analysis at the cybersecurity firm Kaspersky. “If the cost justifies the effort, the breach will happen.”

Though it isn’t a household name, SolarWinds’ software is popular in IT departments in the U.S. and elsewhere, with more than 320,000 customers, providing technology that monitors the performance of computers within a network. Company officials appear to be content with maintaining a low profile.

Since it was founded in 1999, SolarWinds and its partners have been awarded contracts with the U.S. government worth more than $230 million, according to sales records reviewed by Bloomberg News.

[Douglas Caddy]

I posted the following two days ago  in the Watergate topic on Nixon, Trump's Space Force and 2020:

 

THE SECOND CATACLYSMIC EVENT OF 2020

    

 

     Nixon predicted in 1972 that the year 2020 would be cataclysmic not only for America but for the whole planet 

    

     Indeed the Covid-19 pandemic has been cataclysmic this entire year.

 

     But there is now an even more serious cataclysmic event evolving as this is being written in December,

 

     The Russians have cyber-hacked into America’s vital national secrets. This was done from March 2020 to the present time and actually will continue until our system is cleared completely from their electronic tunnel spying that may take years. No one in the government or private sector for nine months realized that the system had been hacked. It was only discovered recently when a security breach alarm went off on a computer in a private company, a breach that could easily have been overlooked but fortunately was not. How serious is the hacking? Senator Nick Romney on NBC’s Meet The Press said Sunday that the Russians now have the capability of disconnecting all electricity and distribution of water in our country, turning the U.S. into dead zone without the population even knowing what was going on.

 

     Fortunately only the unclassified information was breached. The classified information is still secure. This means that if Russia did turn the country into a dead zone, our nuclear armed submarines prowling the world’s waters could still be alerted and given counterattack orders that would in turn transform Russia and China into dead zones.

    

     How could this cyber-hacking have happened?

 

     To understand this one merely has to go back to Robert Merritt’s third meeting with President Nixon in mid-July 1972 that took place in Nixon’s hideaway office deep underneath the White House. This is what Nixon told Merritt as previously recounted in this topic:

 

     “Nixon disclosed that he had prepared research dossiers on the FBI, CIA, Military Intelligence and one other that Merritt cannot remember. Nixon criticized all the agencies, declaring that should the country be attacked in a nuclear war these agencies would not be up to the task of defending the country. He said he was tired of reading reports from these agencies that were composed with the primary intention of the agencies’ claiming questionable accomplishments designed to make themselves look good….

 

      “The President spoke about the goals of his presidency that were now in jeopardy. He said it might be years before the historians would realize what he had hoped to accomplish, which was to assure the security and well being of Americans alive and those of future generations.

 

     “Then the President swore Merritt to secrecy. Once Merritt had assured him of this the President said that he had prepared a document that would explain why and what he had done to assure national and international security. The document was his “Message to the American People.” He had hidden this historical document inside the White House in a secret location where it might be many decades before it was discovered. He informed Merritt of the secret location and told him that if the time came when Merritt was still alive and believed it was the right time for the document to be revealed he was giving permission to Merritt to reveal its secret location.” 

 

     Nixon created the Huston Plan to bypass these agencies tasked to defend our country in which Nixon had lost confidence. The Plan’s purpose was to defend America from its enemies, internal and external, using extra-judicial means. These were so strong and shocking that the contents of the multi-faced Huston Plan have never been disclosed publicly.

 

    Today hundreds of thousands of persons are employed by the government and in private firms operating under government contracts in intelligence gathering. Yet not a single one from March to December discovered that the Russians had cyber-hacked our national security, penetrating a large number of government agencies, private firms and corporations.

 

     So Nixon was right when he disclosed to Merritt in July 1972 that “he had prepared research dossiers on the FBI, CIA, Military Intelligence and one other that Merritt cannot remember. Nixon criticized all the agencies, declaring that should the country be attacked in a nuclear war these agencies would not be up to the task of defending the country.”

 

     Nixon understood what communism was and is all about. So did J. Edgar Hoover. So did Alice Widener, a journalist in whose Park Avenue condo I lived in the 1960’S while I worked in Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s private Manhattan office and attended New York University Law School at night. Alice was the widow of Sergei Nicholas Berezowsky who had escaped Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution and fled to America where he became a famed orchestra conductor. Alice, as Berezowky’s widow, donated monies to the Communist Party U.S.A. and gained entre in the party’s inner sanctum when in reality she was a patriot and an informant who sent reports regularly to Hoover at the FBI’s headquarters in Washington.

 

     What Nixon, Hoover and Alice could not have imagined is that beginning in 2017 the Russians would succeed in placing agents of influence, assets and traitors in the highest government offices, including the Oval Office in the White House. These persons gained access to the key information about our national security system and gave this to the Russians. The Russia cyber-hack was an inside job.

 

    Two weeks ago a person whose name I did not recognize put the following on my Fa   cebook homepage: “50,000 Chinese troops poised on our Canadian border, Chinese armed submarines off our Pacific Coast and Russian armed submarines off our Atlantic coast.” At the time I did not know what to make of this insertion on my homepage and neither did others who read it there. I now wonder if this person was on to something, maybe privy to the near future plans of our nation’s enemies.

 

     Earth is not the first planet that the Alien Presence has considered extending its offer of “A new World you will take it.” The Alien Presence views the leaders of Russia and China as dangerous threats to the cosmos. Trump has named his U.S. Space Force military personnel, “Guardians.” He may be the biggest criminal in the history of the world but his Guardians will be no match if the Alien Presence deems him and them undesirable and dangerous.

 

 

A secret hidden in plain sight: President Donald Trump's role as a Russian asset

 

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-putin-2649563857/

 

[Ty Carpenter]

18 minutes ago, Douglas Caddy said:

I posted the following two days ago  in the Watergate topic on Nixon, Trump's Space Force and 2020:

 

THE SECOND CATACLYSMIC EVENT OF 2020

    

 

     Nixon predicted in 1972 that the year 2020 would be cataclysmic not only for America but for the whole planet 

    

     Indeed the Covid-19 pandemic has been cataclysmic this entire year.

 

     But there is now an even more serious cataclysmic event evolving as this is being written in December,

 

     The Russians have cyber-hacked into America’s vital national secrets. This was done from March 2020 to the present time and actually will continue until our system is cleared completely from their electronic tunnel spying that may take years. No one in the government or private sector for nine months realized that the system had been hacked. It was only discovered recently when a security breach alarm went off on a computer in a private company, a breach that could easily have been overlooked but fortunately was not. How serious is the hacking? Senator Nick Romney on NBC’s Meet The Press said Sunday that the Russians now have the capability of disconnecting all electricity and distribution of water in our country, turning the U.S. into dead zone without the population even knowing what was going on.

 

     Fortunately only the unclassified information was breached. The classified information is still secure. This means that if Russia did turn the country into a dead zone, our nuclear armed submarines prowling the world’s waters could still be alerted and given counterattack orders that would in turn transform Russia and China into dead zones.

    

     How could this cyber-hacking have happened?

 

     To understand this one merely has to go back to Robert Merritt’s third meeting with President Nixon in mid-July 1972 that took place in Nixon’s hideaway office deep underneath the White House. This is what Nixon told Merritt as previously recounted in this topic:

 

     “Nixon disclosed that he had prepared research dossiers on the FBI, CIA, Military Intelligence and one other that Merritt cannot remember. Nixon criticized all the agencies, declaring that should the country be attacked in a nuclear war these agencies would not be up to the task of defending the country. He said he was tired of reading reports from these agencies that were composed with the primary intention of the agencies’ claiming questionable accomplishments designed to make themselves look good….

 

      “The President spoke about the goals of his presidency that were now in jeopardy. He said it might be years before the historians would realize what he had hoped to accomplish, which was to assure the security and well being of Americans alive and those of future generations.

 

     “Then the President swore Merritt to secrecy. Once Merritt had assured him of this the President said that he had prepared a document that would explain why and what he had done to assure national and international security. The document was his “Message to the American People.” He had hidden this historical document inside the White House in a secret location where it might be many decades before it was discovered. He informed Merritt of the secret location and told him that if the time came when Merritt was still alive and believed it was the right time for the document to be revealed he was giving permission to Merritt to reveal its secret location.” 

 

     Nixon created the Huston Plan to bypass these agencies tasked to defend our country in which Nixon had lost confidence. The Plan’s purpose was to defend America from its enemies, internal and external, using extra-judicial means. These were so strong and shocking that the contents of the multi-faced Huston Plan have never been disclosed publicly.

 

    Today hundreds of thousands of persons are employed by the government and in private firms operating under government contracts in intelligence gathering. Yet not a single one from March to December discovered that the Russians had cyber-hacked our national security, penetrating a large number of government agencies, private firms and corporations.

 

     So Nixon was right when he disclosed to Merritt in July 1972 that “he had prepared research dossiers on the FBI, CIA, Military Intelligence and one other that Merritt cannot remember. Nixon criticized all the agencies, declaring that should the country be attacked in a nuclear war these agencies would not be up to the task of defending the country.”

 

     Nixon understood what communism was and is all about. So did J. Edgar Hoover. So did Alice Widener, a journalist in whose Park Avenue condo I lived in the 1960’S while I worked in Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s private Manhattan office and attended New York University Law School at night. Alice was the widow of Sergei Nicholas Berezowsky who had escaped Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution and fled to America where he became a famed orchestra conductor. Alice, as Berezowky’s widow, donated monies to the Communist Party U.S.A. and gained entre in the party’s inner sanctum when in reality she was a patriot and an informant who sent reports regularly to Hoover at the FBI’s headquarters in Washington.

 

     What Nixon, Hoover and Alice could not have imagined is that beginning in 2017 the Russians would succeed in placing agents of influence, assets and traitors in the highest government offices, including the Oval Office in the White House. These persons gained access to the key information about our national security system and gave this to the Russians. The Russia cyber-hack was an inside job.

 

    Two weeks ago a person whose name I did not recognize put the following on my Fa   cebook homepage: “50,000 Chinese troops poised on our Canadian border, Chinese armed submarines off our Pacific Coast and Russian armed submarines off our Atlantic coast.” At the time I did not know what to make of this insertion on my homepage and neither did others who read it there. I now wonder if this person was on to something, maybe privy to the near future plans of our nation’s enemies.

 

     Earth is not the first planet that the Alien Presence has considered extending its offer of “A new World you will take it.” The Alien Presence views the leaders of Russia and China as dangerous threats to the cosmos. Trump has named his U.S. Space Force military personnel, “Guardians.” He may be the biggest criminal in the history of the world but his Guardians will be no match if the Alien Presence deems him and them undesirable and dangerous.

 

 

A secret hidden in plain sight: President Donald Trump's role as a Russian asset

 

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-putin-2649563857/

 

Ah yes, Senator Nick Romney. 

[Douglas Caddy]

[David Andrews]

50K Chinese troops massed on the Canadian border.  What, previously disguised as all the restaurant staff in Fort Erie, Ontario?  Parachuting in like at the end of Ice Station Zebra, a favorite Nixon film?

[Sandy Larsen]

 

17 hours ago, David Andrews said:

Yes, but there could have been a Democratic compromise or another Executive Order in October or November.  Why wasn't there?

 

I suspect that Pelosi feared that everybody getting $600 checks signed by Donald Trump would help him win the election. And so Pelosi was in no mood to compromise.

I suspect that McConnell felt the same way. He wasn't interested in a longer Trump term that would only serve to further split the party. Trump was already too powerful as it was. And so McConnell was in no mood to compromise.

 

[James DiEugenio]

She wanted four hundred billion more in October.

And she would not talk to Trump directly about it, which would have pressured Mitch.

So now she got a package half the amount.

I really hope this is her last term.

https://www.axios.com/pelosi-wolf-blitzer-covid-stimulus-apologist-7613bd85-0523-4ae2-9e63-1b9155ca764d.html

[Cliff Varnell]

1 hour ago, James DiEugenio said:

She wanted four hundred billion more in October.

And she would not talk to Trump directly about it, which would have pressured Mitch.

She negotiated directly with the White House — Treasury Sec Mnuchin.  Trump doesn’t personally do negotiations since he doesn’t know anything.

Trump pressured Mitch by crying for a larger relief package.  Mitch stiffed him.

1 hour ago, James DiEugenio said:

So now she got a package half the amount.

I really hope this is her last term.

https://www.axios.com/pelosi-wolf-blitzer-covid-stimulus-apologist-7613bd85-0523-4ae2-9e63-1b9155ca764d.html

I hope when 2023 rolls around Pelosi and Feinstein both enjoy their spectacular views of the Golden Gate Bridge.

[James DiEugenio]

Introducing Joe Biden, aka Obama Part 2:

 

https://www.dailyposter.com/p/bidens-austerity-zealotry-cut-the

[Guest]

7 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

Introducing Joe Biden, aka Obama Part 2:

 

https://www.dailyposter.com/p/bidens-austerity-zealotry-cut-the

Outch 

[David Andrews]

4 hours ago, Sandy Larsen said:

I suspect that Pelosi feared that everybody getting $600 checks signed by Donald Trump would help him win the election. And so Pelosi was in no mood to compromise.

I suspect that McConnell felt the same way. He wasn't interested in a longer Trump term that would only serve to further split the party. Trump was already too powerful as it was. And so McConnell was in no mood to compromise.

 

Right, but as I said, the $600 or $1200 checks to working Americans as well as to the unemployed was a patent sop to curry favor.  I questioned why an Executive order to continue the federal unemployment aid to the states - a $300 check weekly for the unemployed, atop rock-bottom state unemployment insurance - couldn't have been continued from October till now.  That would have been Trump's decision to make, without Congressional approval.  And his not making it may have cost him his victory margin.