90 Miles From Tyranny

Saturday, June 11, 2016

Girls With Guns

REMINDER: OBAMA TRIED TO FORCE IRANIAN JUDGE TO RECUSE HERSELF FROM CASES INVOLVING IRANIAN NATIONALS

Two years ago, Los Angeles-based immigration Judge Ashley Tabaddor, an Iranian woman, launched a lawsuit against President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice over its order that she recuse herself from immigration cases pertaining to Iranian nationals.

Cue NPR for the back story:

Tabaddor has been handling immigration cases since 2005. She says her battle with her superiors at Justice started three years ago when she was invited to a White House meeting with other Iranian-American community leaders. She asked for permission to attend and it was granted. But her bosses also recommended that if she attended the meeting she should recuse herself from all immigration cases involving Iranians. In her lawsuit, Tabaddor claimed that when she returned from Washington the recommended recusal turned into an order.

I guess that Obama’s DOJ felt that her ties to Iranian activism made her unfit to handle cases involving Iranian nationals, huh?

Does the DOJ’s line of thinking sound at all familiar with you? It should, because ...

The Chinese Hackers in the Back Office

BELLEVILLE, Wis. — Drive past the dairy farms, cornfields and horse pastures here and you will eventually arrive at Cate Machine & Welding, a small-town business run by Gene and Lori Cate and their sons. For 46 years, the Cates have welded many things — fertilizer tanks, jet-fighter parts, cheese molds, even a farmer’s broken glasses.

And like many small businesses, they have a dusty old computer humming away in the back office. On this one, however, an unusual spy-versus-spy battle is playing out: The machine has been taken over by Chinese hackers.

The hackers use it to plan and stage attacks. But unbeknown to them, a Silicon Valley start-up is tracking them here, in real time, watching their every move and, in some cases, blocking their efforts.

“When they first told us, we said, ‘No way,’” Mr. Cate said one afternoon recently over pizza and cheese curds, recalling when he first learned the computer server his family used to manage its welding business had been secretly repurposed. “We were totally freaked out,” Ms. Cate said. “We had no idea we could be used as an infiltration unit for Chinese attacks.”

On a recent Thursday, the hackers’ targets appeared to be a Silicon Valley food delivery start-up, a major Manhattan law firm, one of the world’s biggest airlines, a prominent Southern university and a smattering of targets across Thailand and Malaysia. The New York Times viewed the action on the Cates’ computer on the condition that it not name the targets.

The activity had the hallmarks of Chinese hackers known as the C0d0s0 group, a collection of hackers for hire that the security industry has been tracking for years. Over the years, the group has breached banks, law firms and tech companies, and once hijacked the Forbes website to try to infect visitors’ computers with malware.

There is a murky and much hyped emerging industry in selling intelligence about attack groups like the C0d0s0 group. Until recently, companies typically adopted a defensive strategy of trying to make their networks as impermeable as possible in hopes of repelling attacks. Today, so-called threat intelligence providers sell services that promise to go on the offensive. They track hackers, and for annual fees that can climb into the seven figures, they try to spot and thwart attacks before they happen.

These companies have a mixed record of success. Still, after years of highly publicized incidents, Gartner, a market research company, expects the market for threat intelligence to reach $1 billion next year, up from $255 million in 2013.

Remarkably, many attacks rely on a tangled maze of compromised computers including those mom-and-pop shops like Cate Machine & Welding. The hackers aren’t after the Cates’ data. Rather, they have converted their server, and others like it, into launchpads for their attacks.

These servers offer the perfect cover. They aren’t terribly well protected, and rarely, if ever, do the owners discover that their computers have become conduits for spies and...

Elizabeth Warren doesn’t seem to understand that by endorsing the favorite candidate of Wall Street, she has shredded her persona as a warrior against Wall Street.

We all knew she was a fraud for the whole Native American thing, but her endorsement of Hillary cements Warren’s fraud status.

Seth Mandel writes at the New York Post:

Endorsing Hillary is the just latest sign that Warren is a fraud.

American politics may have no bigger fraud than Elizabeth “Fauxcahontas” Warren.

So I got a good chuckle from Politico’s Thursday story saying the Massachusetts Democratic senator had called Donald Trump, among other grade-school taunts, a fraud.

I don’t know whether Warren fancies herself the pot or the kettle in this one, but she’s definitely a hypocrite.

In fact, while she was preparing to call Trump a fraud, her advisers were leaking to every major press outlet they could find that she was finally going to endorse Hillary Clinton for president, now that she has secured the necessary delegates. What a profile in courage.

Endorsing Hillary could be the most fraudulent act of Warren’s brief political career, since Warren is a less compelling version of Bernie Sanders on economics and even once boasted she essentially “created” Occupy Wall Street.

But there’s stiff competition.

Start with that Fauxcahontas moniker. She earned it during her...