Archive for the ‘NSA’ Category

Last man standing: McMaster for NSA? – Foreign Policy (blog)

I think Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster will be the next national security advisor. Like Vice Adm. Bob Harward, General David Petraeus reportedly has withdrawn over the issue of being able to bring in his own staff. And Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, the acting NSA, is probably too old for a job this demanding, especially in this administration.

That leaves just two. I dont know about Bolton. Id be surprised, though, if he fit the Trump template.

Picking McMaster is not a bad thing. Ive known him since he was major. Hes smart, energetic, and tough. He even looks like an armored branch version of Harward. (Thats him, working out with a punching bag in Iraq, in the foto. I took it in the citadel in downtown Tell Afar one sunny winter day about 10 years ago.) (Btw, Harward was scheduled to appear on ABCs This Week yesterday morning, but backed out an hour before airtime. )

As I said at the end of my Friday post, once Trump was turned down by Harward, it became more likely that he would turn to the active duty military for his 3rd pick for the job. McMaster is among the best of them out there. For his Ph.D. dissertation, he wrote one of the best books on the Vietnam War, Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam.

He has good combat experience, he was a good trainer, and he led the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment well in his deployment to Iraq, most notably in pacifying Tell Afar, to the west of Mosul.

I wrote about his operations there in my book The Gamble. I am traveling so I dont have it with me, but I remember him telling his soldiers that understanding counterinsurgency really wasnt hard: Every time you disrespect an Iraqi, youre working for the enemy. They even had Customer Satisfaction Forms that detainees were asked to fill out upon release: Were you treated well? How was the food? What could we do better?

There are two big differences between him and Harward: First, he is on active duty. (Though the Army inexplicably couldnt find a four star job for him, and had told him to plan to retire later this year.) Second, his wife wont kill him if he takes the job, as Harwards wife might have.

That said, the basic problems remain. To do the job right, McMaster needs to bring in his own people. And it remains unclear if he can get that.

As for relations with the Pentagon: McMaster knows Mattis, but not well. (They both spoke at a conference at the University of North Carolina in April 2010.) But they are similar people and will respect each other.

I dont know how McMaster will work Trump. McMaster once wrote that the American war plans for Afghanistan and Iraq were at times . . . essentially narcissistic. (Good line, but I think it is more illuminating to say that they were minimalist plans for maximalist goals, which is of course a bad combination.) At any rate, McMaster may learn a lot more about narcissism in the coming months.

Over the weekend, I did an informal poll of people who have worked for McMaster, asking if they would be willing to follow him to the National Security Council staff. To a surprising degree, they replied, Yes, they would. Thats an indication of loyalty to and confidence in him.

For extra credit, here is a reading list from McMaster.

Meantime, over the weekend, an NSC staffer who had been hired by General Flynn was canned for criticizing the Trumps at a think tank meeting. I actually dont have a problem with this. Either you work for someone or you dont. If you cant be loyal, at least be discreet. I think we may be seeing more such departures throughout the Trump administration, people who are effectively resigning in public.

Photo credit: Thomas E. Ricks

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Last man standing: McMaster for NSA? - Foreign Policy (blog)

Trump Picks HR McMaster, Army Strategist, As National Security Adviser – New York Magazine

Ad will collapse in seconds CLOSE February 20, 2017 02/20/2017 4:23 p.m. By Adam K. Raymond

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President Donald Trump has found his national security adviser and once again, its a general. On Monday, Trump named Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster as his replacement for former NSA Michael Flynn and called the 54-year-old a man of tremendous talent and tremendous experience.

Trump made the announcement while sitting on a golden couch at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, where he also said that acting NSA Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general, will serve under McMaster as chief of staff. Additionally, Trump said that former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, a candidate for the NSA job, will be asked to work with us in a somewhat different capacity.

A career Army officer, McMaster previously served as the director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center, described by USA Today as an internal think tank that looks at future threats and how to deal with them. In 2014, he was named to Time magazines 100 most influential list and called the architect of the future U.S. Army. In the magazine, retired Lieutenant General Dave Barno described McMaster as an iconoclast who repeatedly bucked the system and survived to join its senior ranks.

The West Point graduate also has a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation was turned into the 1997 book Dereliction of Duty, which CNN said in 2006 is considered the seminal work on militarys responsibility during Vietnam to confront their civilian bosses when strategy was not working.

While McMasters academic bona fides may stand in contrast with Trumps the Times says hes seen as one of the Armys leading intellectuals he shares the presidents opinion that the U.S. military is too small. We are outranged and outgunned by many potential adversaries, he said at a 2016 hearing of the Air-Land subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Our army in the future risks being too small to secure the nation.

McMaster, who has been described as a blunt-spoken bulldog, joins Defense Secretary James Mattis, whose nickname is Mad Dog, and Homeland Security head John Kelly, a no-nonsense pragmatist, as one-time generals who have signed up to work in the Trump administration.

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The silly-sign makers were out in full force on Monday.

He was previously in charge of designing the Army of the future.

The right-wing provocateur came under fire for a video in which he defends relationships between younger boys and older men.

The Kremlin is trying to better understand Trump as worries reportedly grow in Moscow about his ability to lift sanctions.

The Defense Secretary arrives in Baghdad as a part of his world tour of walking back Trump statements.

Many opposed giving the right-wing provocateur a speaking slot even before seeing his defense of relationships between younger boys and older men.

The other two people involved with the plan were a pro-Putin Ukrainian lawmaker and a Trump business associate with links to the mafia.

Trumps fake Swedish news reflects a misleading right-wing narrative about refugee-perpetrated crime.

He warned that suppressing the media is how dictators get started, though he mostly avoided direct references to the president.

Trump has already chosen his 2020 opponents: the press and any version of reality that doesnt come from him.

Meanwhile, Trump is still looking for his next national-security adviser.

But the White House insists nobody is getting enhanced access to the president.

The senator (ambivalently, agonizingly) takes on the president.

An elite school allegedly had to cancel a field trip to the Central Parks Trump-affiliated Wollman Rink.

The Associated Press has a draft of a memo that suggests deploying as many as 100,000 National Guard troops.

Scott Pruitt will spearhead the Trump administrations efforts to increase water pollution and accelerate man-made climate change.

Michels displacement by Newt Gingrich is widely seen as a landmark on the road to partisan polarization. The path continues ever downward today.

25-year-old Siti Aisyah had apparently been paid for similar acts before.

The House Oversight chair is seeking charges against the exState Department employee who helped set up Hillary Clintons private email server.

A quest to repeat the Bush tax cuts, but without the fatal weakness.

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Trump Picks HR McMaster, Army Strategist, As National Security Adviser - New York Magazine

Surprise: At the End, Obama Administration Gave NSA Broad New Powers – The Christian Truther

(PJMedia) This story, from the Jan. 12, 2017, edition of the New York Times, was little-remarked upon at the time, but suddenly has taken on far greater significance in light of current events:

In its final days, the Obama administration has expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the governments 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections.

The new rules significantly relax longstanding limits on what the N.S.A. may do with the information gathered by its most powerful surveillance operations, which are largely unregulated by American wiretapping laws. These include collecting satellite transmissions, phone calls and emails that cross network switches abroad, and messages between people abroad that cross domestic network switches.

The change means that far more officials will be searching through raw data. Essentially, the government is reducing the risk that the N.S.A. will fail to recognize that a piece of information would be valuable to another agency, but increasing the risk that officials will see private information about innocent people.

One of the central questions behind the Mike Flynn flap that should have been asked but largely wasnt is: who was wiretapping the general? The answer, we know now, was the National Security Agency, formerly known as No Such Agency, the nations foremost signals-intelligence (SIGINT) collection department.

The remainder of this article is available in its entirety at pjmedia.com

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Surprise: At the End, Obama Administration Gave NSA Broad New Powers - The Christian Truther

Product Support – SonicWALL NSA Series

Customizations policy for SonicWall Software products

A customization indicates functionality and configurations added to a product that are not provided as part of the core product release and, as such, would be outside the scope of normal support and maintenance. Customizations may take the form of new or modified scripts used within or alongside our products, as well as additional functionality such as custom reports, dashboards, rules, automated actions, etc. developed by you, your partners, or our Professional Services Organization.

Support and Customizations

We do not perform or maintain customizations. The design and development of customizations to our products is your responsibility. Assistance from Support will be limited to helping ensure that the product's functionality which enables the addition of customizations is functioning as expected. Alternatively, you may obtain guidance through product specific community sites or the Support Knowledge Base.

Advanced Assistance

If more thorough and detailed assistance is needed to design and develop customizations, we recommend that you engage our Professional Services Organization or fully certified partners to assist. Their expertise in designing customized solutions will ensure customers receive maximum value and product adoption. In addition to providing post-implementation expert services, Professional Services also offers a variety of pre-packaged customizations for some products which may meet your specific requirements.

Training & Certification

We recommend that you obtain the appropriate product training before attempting to design, develop, and implement any customization to our products. Our training courses will equip you with the necessary knowledge and ability to design and implement effective changes to our products. For more detail on the training services available, please refer to Training & Certification Services .

Maintaining Customizations

Careful consideration should be given to all customizations during future migration or upgrade exercises to new product and platform versions. Customizations could inhibit the upgrade itself and may require a level of re-work to continue functioning properly. Support does not take ownership for any customizations. We strongly encourage you to document and maintain records on any implemented customization work. These records can be useful in isolating problems that may be attributable to the customization or a defect in the core product.

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Product Support - SonicWALL NSA Series

Is the NSA the real president of the United States? – Personal Liberty – Personal Liberty Digest

The US intelligence community continues its war to kick Donald Trump to the curb and destroy his presidency.

Obviously, the NSA, the CIA, and their silent partners want to continue to run this country.

So they spy and leak, spy and leak.

Well get to the guts of the problem in a minute, but first a word from Bill Binney.

William Binney, a former highly placed NSA official turned whistleblower, contended in an exclusive interview today that the National Security Agency (NSA) is absolutely monitoring the phone calls of President Donald Trump.

Binney was an architect of the NSAs surveillance program. He became a famed whistleblower when he resigned on October 31, 2001 after spending more than 30 years with the agency.

Asked whether he believes the NSA is tapping Trump, Binney replied: Absolutely. How did they get the phone call between the president and the president of Australia? Or the one that he made with Mexico? Those are not targeted foreigners.

Binney further contended the NSA may have been behind a data leak that might have revealed that Michael Flynn, Trumps national security adviser, allegedly misled Vice President Mike Pence and other Trump administration officials about the contents of his phone calls with Russias ambassador to Washington.

Regarding Flynns case, Binney stated of the NSA:

If they werent behind it, they certainly had the data. Now the difference here is that FBI and CIA have direct access inside the NSA databases. So, they may be able to go directly in there and see that material there. And NSA doesnt monitor that. They dont even monitor their own people going into databases.

So, they dont monitor what CIA and FBI do. And theres no oversight or attempted oversight by any of the committees or even the FISA court. So, any way you look at it, ultimately the NSA is responsible because they are doing the collection on everybody inside the United States. Phone calls. Emails. All of that stuff.

Utilizing data provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the Guardian and Washington Post in June 2013 released a series of articles reporting that the NSA was collecting the telephone records of millions of Americans.

they [the NSA, Binney said]] are given too much money anyway. When they are given too much money, they get to do wild and crazy things. And this is wild and crazy. Violations of the Constitutions 4th, 5th, and 6th amendments.

Now we come to the guts of the problem. Here is my complete article from April 10, 2014:

The Surveillance State has created an apparatus whose implications are staggering. Its a different world now. And sometimes it takes a writer of fiction to flesh out the larger landscape.

Brad Thors novel, Black List, posits the existence of a monster corporation, ATS, that stands alongside the NSA in collecting information on every move we make. ATS intelligence-gathering capability is unmatched anywhere in the world.

On pages 117-118 of Black List, Thor makes a stunning inference that, on reflection, is as obvious as the fingers on your hand:

For years ATS had been using its technological superiority to conduct massive insider trading. Since the early 1980s, the company had spied on anyone and everyone in the financial world. They listened in on phone calls, intercepted faxes, and evolved right along with the technology, hacking internal computer networks and e-mail accounts. They created mountains of black dollars for themselves, which they washed through various programs they were running under secret contract, far from the prying eyes of financial regulators.

Those black dollars were invested into hard assets around the world, as well as in the stock market, through sham, offshore corporations. They also funneled the money into reams of promising R&D projects, which eventually would be turned around and sold to the Pentagon or the CIA.

In short, ATS had created its own license to print money and had assured itself a place beyond examination or reproach.

In real life, whether the prime criminal source is one monster- corporation or a consortium of companies, or elite banks, or the NSA itself, the outcome would be the same.

It would be as Thor describes it.

We think about total surveillance as being directed at private citizens, but the capability has unlimited payoffs when it targets financial markets and the people who have intimate knowledge of them.

Total security awareness programs of surveillance are ideal spying ops in the financial arena, designed to suck up millions of bits of inside information, then utilizing them to make investments and suck up billions (trillions?) of dollars.

It gives new meaning to the rich get richer.

Taking the overall scheme to another level, consider this: those same heavy hitters who have unfettered access to financial information can also choose, at opportune moments, to expose certain scandals and crimes (not their own, of course).

In this way, they can, at their whim, cripple governments, banks, and corporations. They can cripple investment houses, insurance companies, and hedge funds. Or, alternatively, they can merely blackmail these organizations.

We think we know how scandals are exposed by the press, but actually we dont. Tips are given to people who give them to other people. Usually, the first clue that starts the ball rolling comes from a source who remains in the shadows.

What we are talking about here is the creation and managing of realities on all sides, including the choice of when and where and how to provide a glimpse of a crime or scandal.

Its likely that the probe Ron Paul had been pushingaudit the Federal Reservehas already been done by those who control unlimited global surveillance [NSA]. They already know far more than any Congressional investigation will uncover. If they know the deepest truths, they can use them to blackmail, manipulate, and control the Fed itself.

The information matrix can be tapped into and plumbed, and it can also be used to dispense choice clusters of data that end up constituting the media reality of painted pictures which, every day, tell billions of people whats news.

In this global-surveillance world, we need to ask new questions and think along different lines now.

For example, how long before the mortgage-derivative crisis hit did the Masters of Surveillance know, from spying on bank records, that insupportable debt was accumulating at a lethal pace? What did they do with that information?

When did they know that at least a trillion dollars was missing from Pentagon accounting books (as Donald Rumsfeld eventually publicly admitted on September 10, 2001), and what did they do with that information?

Did they discover where billions of dollars, in cash, shipped to post-war Iraq, disappeared to?

When did they know the details of the Libor rate-fixing scandal? Press reports indicate that Barclays was trying to rig interest rates as early as January 2005.

Have they tracked, in detail, the men responsible for recruiting hired mercenaries and terrorists, who eventually wound up in Syria pretending to be an authentic rebel force?

Have they discovered the truth about how close or how far away Iran is from producing a nuclear weapon?

Have they collected detailed accounts of the most private plans of Bilderberg, CFR, and Trilateral Commission leaders?

For global surveillance kings, what we think of as the future is, in many respects the present and the past.

Its a new world. These overseers of universal information-detection can enter and probe the most secret caches of data, collect, collate, cross reference, and assemble them into vital bottom-lines. By comparison, an operation like WikiLeaks is an old Model-T Ford puttering down a country road.

Previously, we thought we needed to look over the shoulders of the men who were committing major crimes out of public view. But now, if we want to be up to date, we also have to factor in the men who are spying on those criminals, who are gathering up those secrets and using them to commit their own brand of meta-crime.

And in the financial arena, that means we think of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan as perpetrators, yes, but we also think about the men who already know everything about GS and Morgan, and are using this knowledge to steal sums that might make GS and Morgan blush with envy.

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Is the NSA the real president of the United States? - Personal Liberty - Personal Liberty Digest