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Saturday, May 13, 2017

Who Should Replace Comey?

Comey’s firing is a gift to the FBI

May 13, 2017 | 10:14am | Updated

Let’s cut right to the chase: James Comey should have been fired immediately following his disastrous press briefing last July, in which he candidly laid out the case against Hillary Clinton over her mishandling of classified information and then refused to recommend charges. Overstepping his authority while radiating sanctimony, arrogating power while clumsily intervening in the election, Comey deserved to be sacked on the spot.
Everything since has been one long slow twist in the wind for Comey, a former US attorney in Manhattan, where his most notable accomplishment was sending Martha Stewart to jail.
Ignore for the moment Comey’s series of missteps resulting from the Clinton investigation and his increasingly erratic and unconvincing public fan dance as he sent the nation into electoral paroxysms over the past 10 months.
On his watch, the FBI continued its politically correct, see-no-evil attitude toward radical Islam and thus failed to prevent the atrocity in San Bernardino; it also investigated the Orlando nightclub shooter for 10 months before closing its case, allowing him to kill or wound 102 people. Meanwhile, the federal office of personnel management was hacked by the Chinese, resulting in a serious data breach. That’s failure on an unacceptable level.
Now the bureau’s tied up and bogged down in the almost certainly chimerical “Russian hacking” fantasy, which bubbled up out of the leftist fever swamp in the wake of Clinton’s loss in November, and for which there is exactly zero evidence.

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So when President Trump finally put Comey out of his — and our — misery last week, it was the best merited cashiering since Truman fired a showboating MacArthur.
Ignore the political firestorm that’s followed. Trump could cure cancer, solve the Israeli-Palestinian crisis and appoint Oprah as his special envoy to Mars and the Beltway press corps would still howl for his head. The fires fueling this politically motivated hatefest will abate only when the Democrats accept that they lost an election they fully expected to win.
As the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer, the FBI director shouldn’t be a political figure.
And that’s the key word — political. As the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer, the FBI director shouldn’t be a political figure.
The bureau began as a financial-crimes investigatory arm of the justice department in 1908, and grew to maturity under J. Edgar Hoover, monitoring domestic Bolshevik radicalism in the early 1920s, then tackling interstate violent crime during the wild and woolly ’30s: the birth of the “G-Men.”
Yet the temptation to be a Washington player is always present. Hoover, who served under eight presidents and whose reign lasted until his death in 1972, amassed a storehouse of inside dirt on politicians, which made him essentially unfireable and which led to congressional insistence on Senate confirmation of future directors and 10-year term limits.
What’s needed now is a restoration of what should be the FBI’s primary mission, as it was in the early Hoover days: counterterrorism. Since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it’s far less important for the bureau to be chasing bank robbers in Burlington and Butte than it is for it to function as the nation’s first line of homeland security defense.
The country doesn’t need another politician, jurist or prosecutor at the bureau. It needs someone dogged, determined, experienced, impartial and fearless.
Although the parallels are not exact, historical circumstances have demanded that the FBI now function in relation to the CIA and NSA similar to the way Britain’s MI5 (domestic) and MI6 (foreign) intelligence services work together. Nearly 16 years on, the Washington establishment still hasn’t accepted that 9/11 really did fundamentally change our notions of crime, prevention and punishment.
But the American people have, which is one of the many reasons Trump won the election. Further, far from damaging the president in the eyes of his supporters, Trump’s decisiveness in canning Comey will only endear him to them even more.
So who should replace Comey? The rumor mills are already churning out names of the usual suspects: a judge (Michael J. Garcia), a prosecutor (Assistant Attorney General Alice Fisher), a politician (Sen. John Cornyn of Texas) and a veteran fed (Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe)
But the country doesn’t need another politician, jurist or prosecutor at the bureau. It needs someone dogged, determined, experienced, impartial and fearless. Someone sworn to protect and serve, who will follow the evidence wherever it leads and make the appropriate recommendations in the name of justice. Incorruptible and impartial.
In other words, a cop — the best one we have.
Michael Walsh is an author, screenwriter and contributing editor at PJ Media. His most recent book is “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace.”
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Why Should A President Not Expect Loyalty?

Trump: 'In America we don't worship government, we worship God'

BY PAULINA FIROZI - 05/13/17 11:10 AM EDT





Speaking to a friendly crowd at the country's largest Christian university on Saturday, President Trump told the graduating class that "in America, we don’t worship government, we worship God.”
“America has always been the land of dreams because America is a nation of true believers,” Trump said at Liberty University on Saturday morning.
“When the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, they prayed. When the founders wrote the Declaration of Independence, they invoked our creator four times. Because in America, we don’t worship government, we worship God.”
"It is why our currency proudly declares, 'In God We Trust,'" Trump continued. "And it is why we proudly proclaim that we are one nation, under God, every time we say the Pledge of Allegiance."
Trump’s speech on Saturday was his first commencement address as president.
Trump noted that worshipping God is “why our elected officials put their hands on the Bible and say ‘so help me God’ as they take the oath of office.”
His remarks at the evangelical school come after days of swirling controversy over his decision to fire FBI director James Comey. As part of the controversy, The New York Times reported that in January, Trump demanded Comey pledge his loyalty to him. Comey was leading an investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election, including possible collusion between Moscow and Trump's campaign.
In an interview with Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro airing Saturday, Trump denied that he made any such request of the ousted FBI chief, but said he did not find it "inappropriate."
"I don’t think it’s inappropriate, number one," Trump told Pirro. "I don’t think it would be a bad question to ask. I think loyalty to the country, loyalty to the United States is important."
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World Wide Ransom Ware Attack.


Hackers Hit Dozens of Countries Exploiting Stolen N.S.A. Tool

Leer en español
By NICOLE PERLROTH and DAVID E. SANGER




Ambulance staff at a National Health Service hospital in London on Friday. Several hospitals across Britain were hit by a large-scale cyberattack, causing failures to computer systems.Andy Rain/European Pressphoto Agency

SAN FRANCISCO — Hackers exploiting malicious software stolen from the National Security Agency executed damaging cyberattacks on Friday that hit dozens of countries worldwide, forcing Britain’s public health system to send patients away, freezing computers at Russia’s Interior Ministry and wreaking havoc on tens of thousands of computers elsewhere.
The attacks amounted to an audacious global blackmail attempt spread by the internet and underscored the vulnerabilities of the digital age.
Transmitted via email, the malicious software locked British hospitals out of their computer systems and demanded ransom before users could be let back in — with a threat that data would be destroyed if the demands were not met.
By late Friday the attacks had spread to more than 74 countries, according to security firms tracking the spread. Kaspersky Lab, a Russian cybersecurity firm, said Russia was the worst-hit, followed by Ukraine, India and Taiwan. Reports of attacks also came from Latin America and Africa.
The attacks appeared to be the largest ransomware assault on record, but the scope of the damage was hard to measure. It was not clear if victims were paying the ransom, which began at about $300 to unlock individual computers, or even if those who did pay would regain access to their data.
Security experts described the attacks as the digital equivalent of a perfect storm. They began with a simple phishing email, similar to the one Russian hackers used in the attacks on the Democratic National Committee and other targets last year. They then quickly spread through victims’ systems using a hacking method that the N.S.A. is believed to have developed as part of its arsenal of cyberweapons. And finally they encrypted the computer systems of the victims, locking them out of critical data, including patient records in Britain.
The connection to the N.S.A. was particularly chilling. Starting last summer, a group calling itself the “Shadow Brokers” began to post software tools that came from the United States government’s stockpile of hacking weapons.
The attacks on Friday appeared to be the first time a cyberweapon developed by the N.S.A., funded by American taxpayers and stolen by an adversary had been unleashed by cybercriminals against patients, hospitals, businesses, governments and ordinary citizens.
Something similar occurred with remnants of the “Stuxnet” worm that the United States and Israel used against Iran’s nuclear program nearly seven years ago. Elements of those tools frequently appear in other, less ambitious attacks.
The United States has never confirmed that the tools posted by the Shadow Brokers belonged to the N.S.A. or other intelligence agencies, but former intelligence officials have said that the tools appeared to come from the N.S.A.’s “Tailored Access Operations” unit, which infiltrates foreign computer networks.
The attacks on Friday are likely to raise significant questions about whether the growing number of countries developing and stockpiling cyberweapons can avoid having those same tools purloined and turned against their own citizens.
They also showed how easily a cyberweapon can wreak havoc, even without shutting off a country’s power grid or its cellphone network.

GRAPHIC

Animated Map of How Tens of Thousands of Computers Were Infected With Ransomware

A new strain of ransomware spread rapidly around the world on Friday.
 OPEN GRAPHIC

In Britain, hospitals were locked out of their systems and doctors could not call up patient files. Emergency rooms were forced to divert people seeking urgent care.
In Russia, the country’s powerful Interior Ministry, after denying reports that its computers had been targeted, confirmed in a statement that “around 1,000 computers were infected,” which it described as less than 1 percent of its total. The ministry, which oversees Russia’s police forces, said technicians had contained the attack.
Some intelligence officials were dubious about that announcement because they suspect Russian involvement in the theft of the N.S.A. tools.
But James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said he suspected that criminals operating from Eastern Europe acting on their own were responsible. “This doesn’t look like state activity, given the targets that were hit,” he said.
Those targets included corporate computer systems in many other countries — including FedEx in the United States, one of the world’s leading international shippers, as well as Spain’s Telefónica and Russia’s MegaFon telecom giant.
It could take months to find who was behind the attacks — a mystery that may go unsolved. But they alarmed cybersecurity experts everywhere, reflecting the enormous vulnerabilities to internet invasions faced by disjointed networks of computer systems.
There is no automatic way to “patch” their weaknesses around the world.
“When people ask what keeps you up at night, it’s this,” said Chris Camacho, the chief strategy officer at Flashpoint, a New York security firm tracking the attacks. Mr. Camacho said he was particularly disturbed at how the attacks spread like wildfire through corporate, hospital and government networks.
Another security expert, Rohyt Belani, the chief executive of PhishMe, an email security company, said the wormlike capability of the malware was a significant shift from previous ransom attacks. “This is almost like the atom bomb of ransomware,” Mr. Belani said, warning that the attack “may be a sign of things to come.”
The hackers’ weapon of choice on Friday was Wanna Decryptor, a new variant of the WannaCry ransomware, which encrypts victims’ data, locks them out of their systems and demands ransoms.
Researchers said the impact and speed of Friday’s attacks had not been seen in nearly a decade, when the Conficker computer worm infected millions of government, business and personal computers in more than 190 countries, threatening to overpower the computer networks that controlled health care, air traffic and banking systems over the course of several weeks.
One reason the ransomware on Friday was able to spread so quickly was that the stolen N.S.A. hacking tool, known as “Eternal Blue,” affected a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows servers.
Hours after the Shadow Brokers released the tool last month, Microsoft assured users that it had already included a patch for the underlying vulnerability in a software update in March.


The home page of the East and North Hertfordshire N.H.S. Trust website on Friday.East And North Hertfordshire NHS/Press Association, via Associated Press

But Microsoft, which regularly credits researchers who discover holes in its products, curiously would not say who had tipped the company off to the issue. Many suspected that the United States government itself had told Microsoft, after the N.S.A. realized that its hacking method exploiting the vulnerability had been stolen.
Privacy activists said if that were the case, the government would be to blame for the fact that so many companies were left vulnerable to Friday’s attacks. It takes time for companies to roll out systemwide patches, and by notifying Microsoft of the hole only after the N.S.A.’s hacking tool was stolen, activists say the government would have left many hospitals, businesses and governments susceptible.
“It would be deeply troubling if the N.S.A. knew about this vulnerability but failed to disclose it to Microsoft until after it was stolen,” Patrick Toomey, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, said on Friday. “These attacks underscore the fact that vulnerabilities will be exploited not just by our security agencies, but by hackers and criminals around the world.”
During the Obama administration, the White House created a process to review software vulnerabilities discovered by intelligence agencies, and to determine which should be “stockpiled” for future offensive or defensive cyberoperations and which should be reported to the companies so that they could be fixed.
Last year the administration said that only a small fraction were retained by the government. But this vulnerability appeared to be one of them, and it was patched only recently, suggesting that the N.S.A. may have concluded the tool had been stolen and therefore warned Microsoft.
But that was clearly too little, and far too late.
On Friday, hackers took advantage of the fact that vulnerable targets — particularly hospitals — had yet to patch their systems, either because they had ignored advisories from Microsoft or because they were using outdated software that Microsoft no longer supports or updates.
The malware was circulated by email. Targets were sent an encrypted, compressed file that, once loaded, allowed the ransomware to infiltrate its targets. The fact that the files were encrypted ensured that the ransomware would not be detected by security systems until employees opened them, inadvertently allowing the ransomware to replicate across their employers’ networks.
Employees at Britain’s National Health Service had been warned about the ransomware threat earlier on Friday. But it was too late. As the disruptions rippled through at least 36 hospitals, doctors’ offices and ambulance companies across Britain, the health service declared the attack a “major incident,” warning that local health services could be overwhelmed.
Britain’s health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, was briefed by cybersecurity experts, while Prime Minister Theresa May’s office said on television that “we’re not aware of any evidence that patient data has been compromised.”
As the day wore on, dozens of companies across Europe, Asia and the United States discovered that they had been hit with the ransomware when they saw criminals’ messages on their computer screens demanding $300 to unlock their data. But the criminals designed their ransomware to increase the ransom amount on a set schedule and threatened to erase the hostage data after a predetermined cutoff time, raising the urgency of the attack and increasing the likelihood that victims would pay.
Without the ability to decrypt their data on their own, security experts said that victims who had not backed up their data were faced with a choice: Either live without their data or pay. It was not clear how many victims ultimately paid.

Security experts advised companies to immediately update their systems with the Microsoft patch.
Until organizations use the Microsoft patch, Mr. Camacho said, they could continue to be hit — not just by ransomware, but by all kinds of malicious tools that can manipulate, steal or delete their data.
“There is going to be a lot more of these attacks,” he said. “We’ll see copycats, and not just for ransomware, but other attacks.”

Nicole Perlroth reported from San Francisco and David E. Sanger from Washington. Reporting was contributed by Dan Bilefsky, Sewell Chan and Yonette Joseph from London, Ivan Nechepurenko from Moscow, Raphael Minder from Fátima, Portugal, and Rick Gladstone from New York
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Colbert Is A Great Example Of What Is Wrong With America

From Johnny Carson to Stephen Colbert

The descent from Johnny Carson to Stephen Colbert is just one example of how America has lost her greatness.

Wikimedia Commons
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By DENNIS PRAGER Published on May 9, 2017 • 24 Comments

Dennis Prager
In a monologue considered witty by teenagers, teenagers in adult bodies and those who hate President Trump, CBS Late Show host Stephen Colbert said about President Trump, “The only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s c*** holster,” and “You’re turning into a real p****-tator.”
Witty?
Not to many of us.
And not just not witty but obscene, which is particularly disturbing because it was broadcast on network television, not cable television.
But more than anything, it exemplified a trend in American life that one could identify without any exaggeration as the unraveling of civil society. To anyone — liberal or conservative — who grew up watching Johnny Carson on late-night TV, the descent from Carson to Colbert is as breathtaking as it is heartbreaking.
Along with virtually every other American, I never knew Johnny Carson’s politics. I would not have been surprised if he was a liberal or a conservative, a Democrat or a Republican. In his 30 years as host of The Tonight Show on NBC, he never so much as hinted as to how he identified politically. He poked fun at whoever was in power.
To anyone — liberal or conservative — who grew up watching Johnny Carson on late-night TV, the descent from Carson to Colbert is as breathtaking as it is heartbreaking.
The reason he didn’t let on where he stood politically is he believed that he had a much greater responsibility: to offer Americans of all political persuasions an island of good-natured fun, a place where all Americans could laugh together every night.
And, of course, it is inconceivable that he would have used the language Colbert used. Kids could watch The Tonight Show because he — and we — lived in a pre-left age, when grown-ups thought they had a responsibility to be good models to young people — in other words, a responsibility to be adults. But the left has never been comfortable with growing up.

What Many Mean by “Make America Great Again”

Those who mock the Trump motto, “Make America Great Again,” who claim they don’t understand how anyone could think America was ever great, might begin to understand what many of us mean, in at least this one way: Prior to the Age of the Left, during which we have lived since the mid-1960s, there were places in America where Americans could enjoy life and one another without politics intruding, not to mention hate-filled politics like Colbert’s.
Americans could watch sports events without athletes showing contempt for the American flag and the national anthem; without sportscasters and sports writers labeling as racist anyone who used the team name “Redskins”; without sports shows injecting politics into their programming, as ESPN does now so often that many sports fans no longer watch it.
It was an America where elementary teachers referred to their students as “boys and girls.” Today, teachers in more and more states are directed not to use those terms, as some 6-year-old may not identify as a boy or a girl.
Prior to the Age of the Left, during which we have lived since the mid-1960s, there were places in America where Americans could enjoy life and one another without politics intruding, not to mention hate-filled politics like Colbert’s.
It was an America where kids were proud of the American flag. Today, in the Age of the Left, students on a growing number of American campuses vote to have the flag removed from their campus because in their view, it symbolizes not freedom and sacrifice but slavery, oppression and imperialism — ideas put into their heads by leftist high school teachers and college professors.
And it was an America in which Superman’s self-proclaimed mission was “truth, justice and the American way.” A few years ago, however, Superman announced that he was renouncing his American citizenship to become a “world citizen.”
One could list a hundred ways America was indeed great (without ever ignoring serious moral flaws). Now, one can list a hundred ways in which America has lost that greatness. The descent from Johnny Carson to Stephen Colbert is just one example.
But it is a powerful one.
And it is but one more result of perhaps the most important rule of life of the past 100 years in America and around the world: Whatever the left touches, it ruins.
The universities, the news media, the entertainment media, the fine arts, the courts, the high schools and the elementary schools (and soon, the preschools — once they’re government-funded and universal) — all ruined wherever leftism has achieved dominance.
Now it is the turn of late-night TV as embodied by Stephen Colbert. Or, as he himself put it on election night on Showtime, “I’m your host, Stephen f****** Colbert.”
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