While at the WikLeaks website, I noticed another press release from last month announcing the early release of a document from the Vault 7 tranche that revealed the extensive attempts by the CIA to influence the 2012 French presidential elections. This has not received much media attention.
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In maintaining this blog, I have to deal with the occasional commenter who tends to hijack the comments to pursue some pet issue, sometimes using a form of argumentation that I have now learned is called sealioning. Bloggers take different attitudes to this phenomenon. There are those who treat the blog platform as similar to their homes and all commenters as visitors. This results in relatively quick ejections for those who violate the rules of the house. I view this blog as more of an online magazine with me as the editor with the right to moderate comments but where the rules of behavior are less strict than those of a private home. I initially tried to treat the blog as a completely open platform where people were free to say what their liked but I found that my tolerance had its limits and I had to ban one commenter.
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Every day brings with it fresh reports of acts of hate aimed at Jews in the US. ProPublica has been monitoring these acts as part of a project called Documenting Hate and has published a lengthy report, listing incidents ranging from swastikas painted on the homes and cars of people that had some kind of indicator that the owner was Jewish, to bomb threats.
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As a result of the way that the CIA leaks have fueled the coverage of the links between Donald Trump and his associates, partisan opinions about the CIA have shifted dramatically from the way it was perceived when this question was last polled in 2015
The poll, which measured Republican and Democratic sentiment toward the CIA, showed that Democrats had started to view the CIA with a net favorability of 32%, compared with 4% net favorability for Republicans.
An NBC/WSJ poll from 2015 showed Republicans viewing the CIA with a net favorability of 27%, versus -4% from Democrats.
The divide in the latest poll was even steeper between Trump supporters and those who supported his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. The CIA had net favorability of 39% among Clinton supporters in December, compared with 2% among Trump supporters.
I was surprised that the leaks from within the CIA of nearly 9,000 documents that WikiLeaks has labeled ‘Vault 7’ that revealed information about its spying methods on Americans and how they lost control of the systems it was using have not received much greater prominence in the news, though it is now receiving more scrutiny as both the FBI and CIA launch criminal investigations into the leaks.
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Fortunately for us, Conan O’Brien has recordings of the conversations.
It was disgusting to see how the media fawned over Donald Trump’s speech to the joint session of Congress. Simply for acting like a normal human being for a brief time, they gushed that he had suddenly become presidential. But as Trevor Noah astutely pointed out, Trump knows exactly how to fake the media into thinking he is presidential and has mocked them in the past about how easy it was to fool them. In the speech, he did exactly what he said he would do and they still fell for it.
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WikiLeaks has issued a blockbuster press release today along with a tranche of documents that were leaked to it that describe the CIA’s efforts to infiltrate people’s communications systems. The documents reveal that the CIA targeted smartphones and computers and turned so-called Smart TVs into eavesdropping devices. The documents allege that the CIA then lost control of this spying arsenal which means that others may now possess these same capabilities, which would constitute a massive breach in its security systems.
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