International
Is the US intelligence apparatus preparing the public for future election interference?
From LifeSiteNews
Is the warning perhaps not what it seems? Is it an attempt to provide camouflage — a strategy known as ‘pre-bunking’ — for future election interference sanctioned by the Washington political machine?
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) together with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released a joint statement ostensibly intended to assure U.S. voters in advance that the 2024 election that, despite anticipated attacks on the country’s voting systems that might make getting election information hard for citizens to obtain, election results would nonetheless be unaffected and election integrity would be maintained.
The FBI is responsible for investigating and prosecuting election crimes and malicious cyber activity targeting election infrastructure. The CISA plays a role in securing election infrastructure from physical and cyber threats.
The joint statement, however, has been met with skepticism based on the earlier roles of both agencies in past elections and their participation in massive suppression of conservative voices in social media.
As such, is the warning perhaps not what it seems? Is it an attempt to provide camouflage — a strategy known as “pre-bunking” — for future election interference sanctioned by the Democrat-powered Washington political machine — a.k.a., the Deep State — that wants to maintain control of the White House and Congress at any cost?
“CISA & FBI issue bulletin that upcoming cyberattacks may ‘prevent the public from receiving timely information’ about the 2024 election,” conservative commentator Emerald Robinson wrote on X.
“These same agencies told you: America’s voting machines were never connected to the Internet,” Robinson noted.
BREAKING: CISA & FBI issue bulletin that upcoming cyberattacks may "prevent the public from receiving timely information" about the 2024 election.
These same agencies told you: America's voting machines were never connected to the Internet.
— Emerald Robinson ✝️ (@EmeraldRobinson) August 2, 2024
Jeanette Manfra, Acting Under Secretary for Cybersecurity and Communications at the Department of Homeland Security, told Congress in 2017 that America’s voting machines “are not connected to the internet.”
Manfra was responsible for the security of the nation’s voting system. Yet according to a 2020 report by NBC News, a team of 10 cybersecurity experts who specialize in voting systems and elections found nearly three dozen U.S. voting systems connected to the internet.
“We found over 35 (voting systems) had been left online and we’re still continuing to find more,” Kevin Skoglund, a senior technical adviser at the election security advocacy group National Election Defense Coalition, told NBC News at the time.
“We kept hearing from election officials that voting machines were never on the internet,” Skoglund said. “And we knew that wasn’t true. And so we set out to try and find the voting machines to see if we could find them on the internet, and especially the back-end systems that voting machines in the precinct were connecting to report their results.”
Can CISA be trusted?
“CISA has worked with Big Tech corporations to silence Americans since 2020,” noted Logan Washburn, writing at The Federalist last month. “A congressional report from last fall found it had become a “domestic intelligence and speech-police agency” whose behavior was ‘unconstitutional.’”
Last year, the Biden administration blocked the release of documents “revealing the extent to which deep state actors and their third-party allies interfered in the 2020 presidential election by pushing social media censorship,” according to a Breitbart report.
“The government seems particularly eager to stop the release of documents pertaining to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the closely linked Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), both of which are under intense scrutiny for their 2020 interference efforts,” Breitbart’s Allum Bokhari wrote.
Bokhari reported in May 2023 on the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee’s hearing on the government’s “laundering” of censorship through NGOs and private entities:
In the runup to the 2020 election, the consortium created a system whereby state actors including the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department could file “tickets” alongside news stories, flagging them so that Big Tech platforms could subsequently suppress or attach warning labels to them.
Beyond this blatant case of a private-public censorship coalition, the EIP also engaged in partisan politics, allowing the Democratic National Committee to file tickets through the system, as well as the Democrat-aligned groups Common Cause and the NAACP.
News outlets targeted by the EIP included Breitbart News, Fox News, the New York Post, and the Epoch Times, as well as the social media accounts of prominent conservatives Charlie Kirk, Tom Fitton, Jack Posobiec, Mark Levin, James O’Keefe, and Sean Hannity, amongst others.
President Donald Trump was also frequently flagged by the consortium, as well as his sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.
In April, The Washington Examiner noted the connection of CISA and the suppression of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story just weeks before the election, which no doubt had a big impact on the election’s outcome, in favor of leftist Joe Biden and against incumbent Republican Donald Trump:
On Oct. 14, 2020, hours after the New York Post published a story based on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop that Twitter blocked from being shared online, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center reached out to “misinformation” researchers behind the Election Integrity Partnership, a collaboration between universities, left-wing think tanks, social media companies, and the U.S. government to thwart alleged falsehoods online in the lead-up to the presidential election. That outreach from the GEC, a foreign-focused office Republican lawmakers are investigating for its ties to anti-speech projects in the United States, was apparently thanks to guidance from the DHS and its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, according to internal documents.
The newly unearthed coordination underscores the major role that CISA, an agency under scrutiny from the House GOP for allegedly colluding “with Big Tech and ‘disinformation’ partners to censor Americans” in 2020, played in the Election Integrity Partnership, or EIP. Both CISA and Alex Stamos, who directed the Stanford Internet Observatory, a Stanford University office behind the EIP, have appeared to downplay CISA’s role in the partnership despite some since-released records indicating a closer relationship than previously known, the Washington Examiner reported.
CISA and the FBI: paving the way for domestic election interference?
“With Election Day less than 100 days away, it is important to help put into context some of the incidents the American public may see during the election cycle that, while potentially causing some minor disruptions, will not fundamentally impact the security or integrity of the democratic process,” CISA senior advisor Cait Conley said.
“DDoS attacks are one example of a tactic that we have seen used against election infrastructure in the past and will likely see again in the future, but they will NOT affect the security or integrity of the actual election. They may cause some minor disruptions or prevent the public from receiving timely information,” Conley suggested.
“It is important to talk about these potential issues now, because nefarious actors, like our foreign adversaries or cybercriminals, could use DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) incidents to cast doubt on the election systems or processes,” Conley said.
“Congress is still exposing the extent of the detailed coordination platform between Big Tech platforms and the Censorship Industrial Complex,” noted Republican Rep. Darrell Issa of California, who sits on the House Judiciary Committee, in April. “Rather than promote free speech and free expression, this partnership was dedicated to denying it to those it did not favor.”
Questions remain: Did government agencies facilitate cheating and lie to the American people in 2020 in order to drag Biden across the finish line? Are they preparing to unconstitutionally install Kamala Harris in 2024?
Daily Caller
Former FBI Asst Director Warns Terrorists Are ‘Well Embedded’ In US, Says Alert Should Be ‘Higher’
Chris Swecker on “Anderson Cooper 360” discussing terror threat
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Hailey Gomez
Former FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker warned Friday on CNN that terrorists are “well embedded” within the United States, stating the threat level should be “higher” following an attack in Germany.
A 50-year-old Saudi doctor allegedly drove his car into a crowded Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany on Friday leaving at least two people dead and nearly 70 injured so far. On “Anderson Cooper 360,” Swecker was asked if he believes there is a potential “threat” to the U.S. as concerns have risen since the “fall of Afghanistan.”
“I think so,” Swecker said. “I mean, we’ve heard FBI Director Chris Wray talk about this in conjunction with the relative ease of getting across the southern border. And, you know, there’s no question that terrorists have come across that border, whether they’re lone terrorists or terrorist cells. And they’re well embedded inside this country.”
WATCH:
“I’ve worked terrorist cases. Hezbollah has always had a presence here. They raise funds here, and they can always be called into action as an active terrorist cell,” Swecker added. “So I think the alert here, especially around Christmas time, is elevated. It probably ought to be higher than what it is right now, because I mentioned that complacency earlier. And I fear that complacency as someone who has a background in this field.”
Concerns over the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the U.S. southern border have raised questions over the vetting process of illegal immigrants entering the country.
On Tuesday United States Border Patrol (USPB) Chief Jason Owens announced in a social post that an unidentified South African national who was “suspected of terror” was arrested in Brooklyn, N.Y. The illegal immigrant had originally been detained in Texas for criminal trespassing but was released due to the “information available at the time.”
In August an estimated 99 individuals on the U.S. terrorist watch list had been released into the country after crossing through the southern border, according to a congressional report. The report found that between fiscal years 2021 and 2023 USBP agents encountered more than 250 illegal migrants on the terrorist watchlist, with nearly 100 of those individuals being later released into the U.S. by the Department of Homeland Security.
Daily Caller
LNG Farce Sums Up Four Years Of Ridiculous Biden Energy Policy
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By David Blackmon
That is what happens when “science” isn’t science at all and energy reality is ignored in favor of the prevailing narratives of the political left.
As Congress struggled with yet another chaotic episode of negotiations over another catastrophic continuing resolution, all I could think was how wonderful it would be for everyone if they just shut the government down and brought an end to the Biden administration and its incredibly braindead and destructive energy-policy farce a month early.
What a blessing it would be for the country if President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were forced to stop “throwing gold bars off the Titanic” 30 days ahead of schedule. What a merry Christmas we could have if we never had to hear silly talking points based on pseudoscience from the likes of Biden’s climate policy adviser John Podesta or Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm or Biden himself (read, as always, from his ever-present TelePrompTer) again!
What a shame it has been that the rest of us have been forced to take such unserious people seriously for the last four years solely because they had assumed power over the rest of us. As Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead spent decades singing: “What a long, strange trip it’s been.”
Speaking of Granholm, she put the perfect coda to this administration’s seemingly endless series of policy scams this week by playing cynical political games with what was advertised as a serious study. It was ostensibly a study so vitally important that it mandated the suspension of permitting for one of the country’s great growth industries while we breathlessly awaited its publication for most of a year.
That, of course, was the Department of Energy’s (DOE) study related to the economic and environmental impacts of continued growth of the U.S. liquified natural gas (LNG) export industry. We were told in January by both Granholm and Biden that the need to conduct this study was so urgent, that it was entirely necessary to suspend permitting for new LNG export infrastructure until it was completed.
The grand plan was transparent: implement the “pause” based on a highly suspect LNG emissions draft study by researchers at Cornell University, and then publish an impactful DOE study that could be used by a President Kamala Harris to implement a permanent ban on new export facilities. It no doubt seemed foolproof at the Biden White House, but schemes like this never turn out to be anywhere near that.
First, the scientific basis for implementing the pause to begin with fell apart when the authors of the draft Cornell study were forced to radically lower their emissions estimates in the final product published in September.
And then, the DOE study findings turned out to be a mixed bag proving no real danger in allowing the industry to resume its growth path.
Faced with a completed study whose findings essentially amount to a big bag of nothing, Granholm decided she could not simply publish it and let it stand on its own merits. Instead, someone at DOE decided it would be a great idea to leak a three-page letter to the New York Times 24 hours before publication of the study in an obvious attempt to punch up the findings.
The problem with Granholm’s letter was, as the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board put it Thursday, “the study’s facts are at war with her conclusions.” After ticking off a list of ways in which Granholm’s letter exaggerates and misleads about the study’s actual findings, the Journal’s editorial added, “Our sources say the Biden National Security Council and career officials at Energy’s National Laboratories disagree with Ms. Granholm’s conclusions.”
There can be little doubt that this reality would have held little sway in a Kamala Harris presidency. Granholm’s and Podesta’s talking points would have almost certainly resulted in making the permitting “pause” a permanent feature of U.S. energy policy. That is what happens when “science” isn’t science at all and energy reality is ignored in favor of the prevailing narratives of the political left.
What a blessing it would have been to put an end to this form of policy madness a month ahead of time. January 20 surely cannot come soon enough.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
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