Russia’s hacking? 8-15-2016

15, August 2016                   Russia’s hacking?

It is surprising that Democrats have expressed outrage that Russia has (allegedly) been hacking into their emails to upend their efforts to secure the keys to the White House.  They further accused the Kremlin of interfering in the US democratic process. Oh really? I seem to call a very high profile Prime Minister Netanyahu addressing Congress using his ‘red line’ fear tactics to try to torpedo the Iran nuclear deal and undermine President Obama’s reelection.  Would our intelligence agencies ever listen to private conversations of world leaders or UN officials? Do readers recall Angela Merkel’s cell phone being hacked by the NSA? Or, private conversations by participants at the Paris Climate summit?

Classified documents released by Edward Snowden show that the NSA was targeting the Chinese Huawei’s network in Shenzhen and monitored the company’s top executives.  The NSA is recording every single phone call made in an undisclosed foreign country. A surveillance system called MYSTIC stores the billions of phone conversations for up to 30 days. According to Ashkan Soltani, who co-wrote the Washington Post exposé on MYSTIC, revealed how the NSA uses Google cookies to pinpoint targets for hacking and how the NSA secretly broke into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world. Responding to mounting outrage of their citizens, foreign governments are shunning America’s cloud computer industry deemed to be unsafe to the prying eyes of the NSA. For example, Microsoft has lost customers, including the government of Brazil. IBM is spending more than a billion dollars to build data centers overseas to safeguard data of their foreign customers. Former President Jimmy Carter has revealed he limits his own email use out of fear he’s spied on by U.S. intelligence. In an interview with NBC News, Carter says he avoids emails when corresponding with foreign leaders — instead using old-fashioned "snail mail." Perhaps we should demand our own intelligence agencies halt their illegal activities before pointing fingers at foreign government. Or as the old proverb states more succinctly, -“what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.”