Yearly Archives: 2016

Teaching Children How to Think Instead of What to Think

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By Will Stanton

Source: The Mind Unleashed

Right now our education system is doing more to indoctrinate our children than to educate them. In fact, that has been the case for quite some time. Our young minds are being told to accept authority as truth instead of truth as authority, and teachers talk at the students instead of with them.

Teachers have become repeaters of information. They are merely regurgitating everything they once learned from their own teachers, and perpetuating the recycling of information; information that has managed to evade scrutiny for generations. Children are no longer the masters of their own learning, and instead, their minds are being treated as storage containers.

The factory model of education, with its focus on academic and economic elitism, is churning out obedient workers for the system, encouraged to conform every step of the way. We are not being treated as organic, creative, investigative human beings, but instead as parts in the machine. The education system is filtering out the inquisitive nature of our being, with the ultimate goal being to prevent dissent against the system. The system doesn’t want thinkers. It doesn’t want people to question its methods. It wants a population that can be easily manipulated and controlled so as to relinquish all its power to the elite.

There are those who say that skills cannot be taught in schools. Socrates would likely scoff at that notion, were he still alive today. It was Socrates who said, “I cannot teach anybody anything; I can only make them think.”

If we’re going to solve the problem of indoctrination in our school system, we have to learn to begin asking questions instead of giving answers. Real learning is achieved through the investigative process. Children have to be encouraged to search for the answers themselves. It is up to the teachers to provide the tools and resources necessary for the children to conduct these inquiries and make meaningful discoveries. One well-formed question will do more to inspire than any number of answers. In every facet of our educational pursuits, it becomes crucial to begin an open dialogue with our students, to encourage healthy debate and to have them form their own conclusions.

The importance of teaching philosophy in schools cannot be underestimated. In a world where most of humanity is running on the treadmill with the blinders on, it is paramount that we re-evaluate our own perspectives from time to time, and look at the big picture.

What teaching philosophy does is it gets us thinking, it gets us questioning, and it gets us contemplating. Without these skills, humanity will continue to function on autopilot, and we will allow those in power to continue to dominate, oppress and enslave us in every way.

We need to reclaim our own minds…

 

Saturday Matinee: Cutter’s Way

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“Cutter’s Way” (1981) is a thriller directed by Ivan Passer starring Jeff Bridges, John Heard and Lisa Eichhorn as a trio who get embroiled in a conspiracy when Richard (Bridges) witnesses the disposal of a body. When Richard becomes implicated in a related murder he turns to loose cannon Cutter (Heard) and wife Mo (Eichhorn) for help. Cutter becomes obsessed with finding the true killer and begins to suspect local oil tycoon J.J. Cord. Knowing such men are rarely if ever brought to justice, Cutter must find his own way to prove his friend’s innocence and make the true criminal pay.

Watch the entire film for free here.

The Real Reason Brazil’s Democratically Elected Dilma Rousseff Was Impeached

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By Graham Vanbergen

Source: TruePublica

The real reason for the democratically elected leader of the largest country in South America being ‘impeached’ was not alleged corruption by its socialist president Dilma Rousseff, but more about Brazil’s elite power class and their media oligarchs who have failed time and time again to be democratically elected.

This by David Miranda from Brazil, The Guardian – “Slowly, the outside world has begun to see past the pleasing, two-dimensional caricature manufactured by its domestic press, and to recognise who will be empowered once Rousseff is removed. It has now become clear that corruption is not the cause of the effort to oust Brazil’s twice-elected president; rather, corruption is merely the pretext.

The story of Brazil’s political crisis, and the rapidly changing global perception of it, begins with its national media. The country’s dominant broadcast and print outlets are owned by a tiny handful of Brazil’s richest families, and are steadfastly conservative. For decades, those media outlets have been used to agitate for the Brazilian rich, ensuring that severe wealth inequality (and the political inequality that results) remains firmly in place.

But what most outside Brazil did not see was that the country’s plutocratic media had spent months inciting protests (while pretending merely to “cover” them). The protesters were not remotely representative of Brazil’s population. They were, instead, disproportionately white and wealthy: the very same people who have opposed the PT and its anti-poverty programmes for two decades.”

A New York Times article last week reported that “60% of the 594 members of Brazil’s Congress” – the ones voting to impeach Rousseff – “face serious charges like bribery, electoral fraud, illegal deforestation, kidnapping and homicide”. By contrast, said the article, Rousseff “is something of a rarity among Brazil’s major political figures: she has not been accused of stealing for herself”.

And from TruePublica columnist Stephen Lendman“President Dilma Rousseff’s ouster was orchestrated in Washington, complicit with corrupted Brazilian fascists – usurping power by removing her. Her impeachment was certain once the nation’s corruption-ridden Senate suspended her in May on trumped up budget-manipulation charges.

On August 31, it became official. Tyranny replaced Brazilian democracy. Telesur reported 49 senators voting for Rousseff’s impeachment “are themselves targets of criminal inquiries.” She committed no crimes. Nothing justified her removal. Allegations against her were fabricated. 

Wednesday’s vote combined tragedy and farce – annulling 54 million votes electing her, returning the country to fascist rule, a sad moment for millions of Brazilians deserving better.”

Back in May this year The Guardian also headlined with “Brazil minister ousted after secret tape reveals plot to topple President Rousseff” in which “The credibility of Brazil’s interim government was rocked on Monday when a senior minister was forced to step aside amid further revelations about the machiavellian plot to impeach president Dilma Rousseff.

Just 10 days after taking office, the planning minister, Romero Jucá, announced that he would “go on leave” following the release of a secretly taped telephone conversation in which he said Rousseff needed to be removed to quash a vast corruption investigation that implicated him and other members of the country’s political elite.”

A plot was hatched to put into power one Michel Temer. He has since been implicated by corruption allegations himself following the release of a plea-bargain testimony implicating him in an enormous scandal centered on the country’s state oil company that included funds being illegally diverted to his party.

Perhaps it should be of no surprise then that as The Wall Street Journal said “It was the first time Mr. Temer has been directly implicated in the blockbuster corruption investigation known as Operation Car Wash, which has ensnared dozens of high-profile business and political figures, including leading members of Mr. Temer’s Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, or PMDB.”

At the time of the WSJ report in June this year, Mr. Temer was leading a government with an 11.3% approval rating – woeful by any estimation. Even George W. Bush had an approval rating of 22% at the end of his disastrous tenure as President of the USA.

And ZeroHedge was clearly taking no prisoners with its headline Another US-Sponsored Coup? Brazil’s New President Was An Embassy Informant For US Intelligence – “the Temer presidency may be nothing more than the latest manifestation of the US state department’s implementation of yet another puppet government. We know this because earlier today, Wikileaks released evidence via a declassified cable that Brazil’s new interim president was an embassy informant for US intelligence and military.”

The ousting of Brazil’s democratically elected President is yet more evidence that money and power leads to corruption on a grand scale. A propaganda war was waged against the electorate by a tiny elite who own the media and are a part of what is now a plutocratic regime. Yet again, we see another ‘scalp’ for America’s neocon lust and blood campaign for global domination as the evidence suggests CIA involvement and government support.

Lament for Humanity: A 50 Year Reflection

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Beryl & James Burrowes 1942 & 2016

Beryl & James Burrowes 1942 & 2016

By Robert J. Burrowes

Source: RINF

Deeply affected by the death of my two uncles in World War II, on 1 July 1966, the 24th anniversary of the USS Sturgeon sinking of the Japanese prisoner-of-war ship Montevideo Maru which killed the man after whom I am named, I decided that I would devote my life to working out why human beings are violent and then developing a strategy to end it.

The good news about this commitment was that it was made when I was nearly 14 so, it seemed, anything was possible. Now I am not so sure.

Here is my report on 50 years of concerted effort to understand and end human violence.

In 1966 one of my immediate preoccupations was war. The US genocidal war on Vietnam was raging and, as a sycophantic ally of the United States, Australia had been drawn into it some years previously. Trying to understand what this war was really about was challenging, particularly given the limited (mainstream) sources of information available to me at the time.

But I was deeply troubled by another problem too. I had seen a photo of a starving African child in the newspaper when I was ten and I found this most disturbing. Why did adults let children starve? I wondered. And trying to make sense of this by reading newspaper reports or asking those around me was utterly unenlightening.

By the early 1970s the environmental crisis was starting to impact on my awareness too, including through environmental campaigns I heard about and the ‘limits to growth’ literature published by the Club of Rome, which I read at University.

So where are we today?

Well, the most casual perusal of the state of our world reveals the ongoing (and recently heightened) threat of nuclear war and obliteration (on top of the ongoing and rapidly spreading radioactive contamination generated by Fukushima and the use of Depleted Uranium weapons), ongoing phenomenal levels of military spending and the endless push from corporate and other elite interests for more wars. Hence, we are witness to and, through our taxes, active supporters of an endless sequence of wars, military invasions, occupations and coups, virtually all of them instigated by the US elite and its allies, as well as a sequence of ‘local’ wars, also instigated by western elites and supplied with weapons by western corporations.

The global economy teeters on the brink of collapse and, of course, from the viewpoint of those 100,000 people in Africa, Asia and Central/South America who starve to death each day or those one billion people who live in a state of semi-starvation and abject poverty in many parts of the world, it has already ‘collapsed’. This all happens at the instigation of insane elites who continue to accumulate and hoard their wealth, much of it in illegal offshore tax havens. Given the enormous psychological damage that individual members of the elite have suffered, millions or even billions can never be enough.

And the environmental crisis has only become vastly worse with the synergistic impact of our combined assaults on the environment causing human extinction-threatening strain on the biosphere. These devastating assaults include those inflicted by military violence (often leaving vast areas uninhabitable), the emission of vast quantities of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere, rainforest destruction, industrial farming, mining, commercial fishing and spreading radioactive contamination.

We are also systematically destroying the limited supply of fresh water on the planet and inducing the collapse of hydrological systems. Human activity drives 200 species of life (birds, animals, fish, insects, reptiles, amphibians, plants) to extinction each day and 80% of the world’s forests and over 90% of the large fish in the ocean are already gone.

Despite this readily available information, governments continue to prioritize spending $US2,000,000,000 each day on military violence, the sole purpose of which is to terrorize and kill fellow human beings, now or in the future.

In addition, you might have noticed the ongoing attacks on everything from our civil liberties and right to privacy to our right to eat healthy food that has not been poisoned and/or genetically mutilated.

So why does all of this happen? Well, 50 years of research and decades of nonviolent activism have had some rewards and particularly the research that Anita McKone and I conducted during our 14 years in seclusion (1996-2010) which fully explained why human beings are violent. In essence, it is an outcome of the visible, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence inflicted by adults on children. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

Moreover, this research also gave us enormous insight into the insanity of the global elite and those who serve them in order to maintain this worldwide system of violence and exploitation that is killing us all while destroying the biosphere. Whether it be the politicians who implement elite policies, the academics who ‘justify’ or remain silent about this violence and exploitation, the business people who manage it, the judges, magistrates, lawyers and prosecutors who defend and ultimately enforce it, the teachers and media personnel who teach and promote (or distract us from) it, or the soldiers, private military contractors, police and prison officers who inflict its most direct violence, the global elite is served by a ready stream of witting or unwitting people, many of whom are paid by your taxes to do its bidding. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane’.

And just to ensure that you are endlessly frightened into accepting this worldwide system of violence and exploitation, and to support its further encroachment into your life, the global elite conducts an ongoing terrorist campaign against you. See ‘Terrorism: Ultimate Weapon of the Global Elite’ and ‘Why Elites Love Drones’.

But there is another huge problem too: Lack of solidarity.

Elites know that they can divide us and that enables them to conquer us. Despite our efforts to build solidarity over recent decades, elites keep finding new ways to emphasize our ‘differences’. We need to start thinking of our selves as ‘We are all each other’. Does it matter if the ‘big’ difference between us is our gender, our race, our class, our religion, our nationality or something else (or even all of these)?

While elites can easily manipulate us, especially via education systems and the corporate media, into projecting our fear and self-hatred onto others who are ‘different’ and then inflicting violence on, or even killing, each other because, in effect, ‘I am an adult and you are a child’, ‘I am a man and you are a woman’, ‘I am non-indigenous and you are indigenous’, ‘I am a Christian/Jew/Hindu/Buddhist and you are a Muslim’, ‘I am working class and you are middle class’, ‘I am white and you are not’, ‘I am straight and you are LGBTQIA’, ‘I am one nationality and you are another’, ‘I am a feminist and you are a socialist’, or even ‘I am human and you are a bird/animal/fish/insect/reptile/amphibian/plant’ then we haven’t even begun to realize that the real issue is that we are all living beings and this insane elite is willing to do anything they can to exploit and, if necessary, kill us all.

Isn’t it time we started to see what makes us the same – victims of violence and exploitation – rather than focusing on what, after all, are the rather less significant differences in our bodily characteristics, in our beliefs or even the causes of our exploitation (which is not meant to diminish the significance of the outcomes of direct and structural violence which undoubtedly have variable impact)? Fear divides us.

One interesting personal outcome of this lifetime of effort, apart from the many arrests, terms of imprisonment (including once in a psychiatric ward where I was forcibly injected with ‘antipsychotic’ drugs), bankruptcy and seizure of my passport that have been direct results of my nonviolent activism, is that Anita and I have been homeless since 1999: conscience has its costs. Moreover, a worldwide search has failed to identify more than a handful of individuals (but pre-eminently my parents, James and Beryl, both veterans of World War II and now 93) or an organization of any kind that is willing to fund our research or our work to end human violence. Of course, there is a psychological explanation for this as well. See ‘Why Don’t We Try to Understand and End Human Violence?’

So what of human prospects? Not good. With an insane elite controlling the US (and other) military/nuclear arsenals and the highly exploitative global economy (with the secret corporate governance deals, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, designed to further consolidate corporate control of our world), as well as the dominant discourse via the education systems and corporate media, very few people have the emotional and intellectual capacities to critique this world order and then strategically and nonviolently resist the rush to extinction in which we now find ourselves. In short, most human beings are utterly (unconsciously) terrified and remain politically inert despite time and opportunities slipping rapidly away.

And those who do courageously resist this violent world order face a phalanx of violent institutions, ranging from psychiatry – see ‘Defeating the Violence of Psychiatry’ – and the pharmaceutical – see ‘Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients’ – and agribusiness – see ‘Monsanto, America’s Monster’ – industries to the corporate media – see ‘Propaganda & Engineering Consent for Empire’ – and the police, legal and prison systems – see ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’ – designed to neutralize or stop us, one way or another.

So what do I suggest? Well, with the scientific evidence now indicating that near term human extinction is the most likely outcome – see ‘Why is Near Term Human Extinction Inevitable?’ – it is increasingly clear that if we are to end human violence in all of its many and complex manifestations, and prevent human extinction, then we need an integrated and comprehensive strategy for doing so that also provides many meaningful avenues for involvement by individuals and organizations who wish to respond powerfully: token gestures have no value. Over many years I have endeavoured to create this overarching strategy and I invite you to participate in it by doing one or more of the following.

If you are an adult, you might consider dramatically modifying your treatment of children in accordance with ‘My Promise to Children’. You might also find this article useful in better understanding how to do so: ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

If these suggestions seem beyond you, then perhaps your own emotional healing should be your priority. Despite its title, this article explains what you need to do: ‘An Open Letter to Soldiers with “Mental Health” Issues’. And remember this: if you don’t believe that you are ‘important’ enough to spend time learning to know yourself more deeply, I disagree. You are important.

Separately from the above, you might like to join those participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’. You might also consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

And if you would like to learn how to make your nonviolent action campaign for a peace, environmental or social justice outcome more strategically effective, you can do so here: ‘Nonviolent Campaign Strategy’. To nonviolently defend against coups and invasions, remove a dictatorship or conduct a liberation struggle, check out ‘Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy’.

I am not going to get another 50 years to try to create the world of peace, justice and sustainability for which many of us strive but I am going to use every single moment of the time I have left.

Why? Because I love the Earth and everything on it. And you?

 

Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

 

Stripping the veneer off America’s propaganda menagerie

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By Wayne Madsen

Source: Intrepid Report

National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have doubled down recently on the games being played in cyberspace by America’s cyberwarriors. Snowden suggests that many of NSA’s most damaging malware programs are now in the hands of America’s opponents, thanks to enterprising foreign counterintelligence hackers known as the Shadow Brokers. Snowden believes that the malware, including destructive programs such as Stuxnet, are being auctioned off, via Bitcoin payments, by the Shadow Brokers. Snowden stated that the malware was obtained through hacking from a murky NSA operation called the “Equation Group.”

Assange, fearful that a new Ecuadorian president will hand him over to a Clinton administration in 2017, claims to have more hacked bombshells to drop on Team Clinton, courtesy of weak security in Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign computer systems.

We have entered a new phase of cyberwarfare, one in which America’s (and Israel’s) most damaging computer hacking and disruption programs are available to anyone willing to pay in Bitcoins on the cyberblack market. The Democratic Party’s leaked emails, coupled with the leaked State Department cables, has Hillary Clinton in an outrage. These disclosures, along with the Snowden disclosures that illustrate how America spies on friend and foe, have stripped the veneer off of America’s propaganda menagerie. Two of the three culprits Mrs. Clinton would like to see in prison for the rest of their lives are, for the time being, outside of Gulag America. Snowden is enjoying political asylum in Russia and Assange has asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The third, Chelsea Manning, is serving a 35-year prison term at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas and allegedly recently attempted suicide.

Paul Ceglia, who claims to have been the co-founder of Facebook, says he is on the run from the CIA after he filed suit against Facebook and its owner Mark Zuckerberg. Although Zuckerberg admits to having a past business relationship with Ceglia, the US Justice Department criminally charged Ceglia for trying to defraud Facebook after the former associate of Zuckerberg brought a civil suit in federal court in Buffalo against the company. Interestingly, Facebook has donated more money to Hillary Clinton than any other presidential candidate. But what is really at issue in the bizarre case is that Ceglia claims that Facebook’s seed money came from the CIA’s venture capital firm IN-Q-TEL, a charge to which WMR can attest after compiling a massive list of CIA front companies and proprietaries in the soon-to-be-published book: “The Almost Classified Guide to CIA Front Companies, Proprietaries and Contractors.”

The CIA and its partners at Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and other social media firms have striven to control the new media in the same manner that the CIA controlled the “old media” through operations like MOCKINGBIRD. During the Cold War era, the CIA claimed that all the world’s ills were due to Communist front organizations that influenced the media. The truth is that the so-called “fronts” often provided actual accounts of the misdeeds of the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies. However, with U.S. newspapers, magazines, and broadcast networks carrying the water for the CIA, it was Langley’s interpretation of the news that made Western headlines. The “Communist” reports were relegated to the nether regions of “Soviet disinformation” campaigns and “active measures.” The CIA laughably put out a periodical report on such “disinformation” tactics. In reality, what was called “disinformation” was actually bona fide news.

Today, when the CIA wants to debase a news article, it uses such operations as Snopes.com and Wikipedia to engage in CIA disinformation tactics. Uncomfortable truthful news items are quickly dispatched with the term “conspiracy theory.” There is little doubt that Facebook, Wikipedia, and Snopes are part of a “new MOCKINGBIRD” designed for the digital age. Like them or not, Snowden, Assange, Manning, Ceglia, and others have pulled the veil off of the new MOCKINGBIRD.

A formerly secret February 1987 CIA report on Soviet disinformation tactics illustrates that what was described then as “propaganda” was, in fact, the truth.

  • The CIA called baseless charges in a Soviet book that Jonestown, Guyana was a CIA behavioral control operation. It was.
  • The Soviets accused Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) of having the goal of weaponizing outer space. Not only was that the goal then, but it remains the goal of present incarnations of SDI.
  • The Soviets and the Afghan president, Najibullah of the Afghan Communist Party, said that they reached out to 50,000 Afghan mujaheddin in Afghanistan and Pakistan, who agreed to lay down their arms and join a coalition government, with eight opposition parties joining the Communists. The CIA and Western media called the news bogus. It was true with television footage of Afghan refugees returning to their homeland from India. The Soviets wanted an internationally-guaranteed neutral Afghanistan before withdrawing their troops. The CIA wanted a radical Islamic Afghanistan from which to launch attacks on the southern Soviet Union. That decision came back to bite the United States on September 11, 2001.
  • The CIA accused the Sandinista government of Nicaragua and the Soviets of being behind the Christian “Evangelical Committee for Development Aid” as a Communist front group. If so, it would have been the first time Communists and Christian evangelicals broke bread together. The CIA’s charge was fatuously false.
  • The Soviets accused the U.S. of using Africans as test subjects for a new AIDS vaccine. This charge has been proven with Africans being used as “guinea pigs” for various new vaccines in programs funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative, Pfizer Corporation, and other entities linked to CIA biological and genetic warfare operations.
  • Articles in two Bolivian newspapers that stated that the U.S. Information Service in La Paz was trying to recruit Bolivian journalists to write pro-Pentagon articles were deemed by the CIA to be bogus. The CIA charge was false and it included smearing the Federation of Bolivian Press Workers as a Communist front. That is the usual practice by the CIA when it’s caught red-handed.
  • The Soviet news agency Novosti was accused of running a false article, titled “The Relationship Between Journalists and the CIA: Hundreds of Them in International Press.” The article was spot on.
  • The CIA charged as Soviet disinformation charges that the CIA killed nine nonaligned leaders, including Indian Prime Ministers Indira and Rajiv Gandhi. In fact, the CIA has killed many more than nine nonaligned leaders.

In the digital world of YouTube, Facebook, Google, and other social and news media sites, the CIA continues its game of disinformation while accusing others of conducting the same game plan. Some three decades after the Cold War, the CIA’s charges of Soviet disinformation can now be seen as disinformation in their own right.

 

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).

BREAKING: Leaked FBI Alert Admits Hackers Penetrated US Election Systems

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By Matt Agorist

Source: The Free Thought Project

On Monday, an official FBI alert from August 18 was leaked to Yahoo News. The alert stated the FBI had uncovered evidence showing that at least two state election systems were penetrated by hackers in recent weeks. The FBI quickly issued warnings to election officials across the country to ramp up security on their systems.

It appears from the Flash Alert that the public was not supposed to know about it.

This FLASH has been released TLP: AMBER: The information in this product is only for members of their own organization and those with DIRECT NEED TO KNOW. This information is NOT to be forwarded on beyond NEED TO KNOW recipients.

The FBI then goes on to describe the nature of the attack and lists the IP addresses associated with the intrusion.

Summary

The FBI received information of an additional IP address, 5.149.249.172, which was detected in the July 2016 compromise of a state’s Board of Election Web site. Additionally, in August 2016 attempted intrusion activities into another state’s Board of Election system identified the IP address, 185.104.9.39 used in the aforementioned compromise.

Technical Details

The following information was released by the MS-ISAC on 1 August 2016, which was derived through the course of the investigation. In late June 2016, an unknown actor scanned a state’s Board of Election website for vulnerabilities using Acunetix, and after identifying a Structured Query Language (SQL) injection (SQLi) vulnerability, used SQLmap to target the state website. The majority of the data exfiltration occurred in mid-July. There were 7 suspicious IPs and penetration testing tools Acunetix, SQLMap, and DirBuster used by the actor, detailed in the indicators section below.

“This is a big deal,” said Rich Barger, chief intelligence officer for ThreatConnect, a cybersecurity firm, who reviewed the FBI alert at the request of Yahoo News. “Two state election boards have been popped, and data has been taken. This certainly should be concerning to the common American voter.”

According to the FBI, the hack is the work of a ‘foreign entity.’ However, they have not named the country of origin. This has not stopped other officials from quickly blaming the Russians.

Also absent from the alert are the names of the states involved in the hack.

According to the report from Yahoo News:

The bulletin does not identify the states in question, but sources familiar with the document say it refers to the targeting by suspected foreign hackers of voter registration databases in Arizona and Illinois. In the Illinois case, officials were forced to shut down the state’s voter registration system for ten days in late July, after the hackers managed to download personal data on up to 200,000 state voters, Ken Menzel, the general counsel of the Illinois Board of Elections, said in an interview. The Arizona attack was more limited, involving malicious software that was introduced into its voter registration system but no successful exfiltration of data, a state official said.

“The FBI is requesting that states contact their Board of Elections and determine if any similar activity to their logs, both inbound and outbound, has been detected,” the alert reads. “Attempts should not be made to touch or ping the IP addresses directly.”

While the alert lists the IP addresses from which the attacks originated, it is highly unlikely that the hackers would use any traceable address.

“This is a wake-up call for other states to look at their systems,” said Tom Hicks, chairman of the federal Election Assistance Commission.

This news comes on the heels of a report earlier this month in which a professor from Princeton University and a graduate student proved electronic voting machines in the U.S. remain astonishingly vulnerable to hackers — and they did it in under eight minutes.

Professor Andrew Appel, a Princeton University computer science professor who has studied election security, and grad student Alex Halderman took just seven minutes to break into the authentic Sequoia AVC Advantage electronic voting machine Appel purchased for $82 online — one of the oldest models, but still used in Louisiana, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Appel notes that the only “reasonably safe” voting method is paper ballots as they can be counted alongside the electronic tally. However, crucial swing states, as Appel notes, rely on more vulnerable paperless touchscreen voting which does not back up any of the numbers.

“Then whatever numbers the voting computer says at the close of the polls are completely under the control of the computer program in there,” Appel wrote in a recent blog post entitled “Security Against Election Hacking.” “If the computer is hacked, then the hacker gets to decide what numbers are reported. … All DRE (paperless touchscreen) voting computers are susceptible to this kind of hacking. This is our biggest problem.”

The fact that the FBI is now admitting to the vulnerability of the election should raise serious concern for Americans. Before 2016, talk of vote rigging, or hacking elections, remained on the fringe — in spite of whistleblowers showing the easily provable insecure nature of electronic voting machines.

As the famous quote, often attributed to Joseph Stalin, notes:

The people who cast the votes don’t decide an election, the people who count the votes do.

And now, with electronic voting and this news of how easily hackable it is, even the vote counters may not decide.

BREAKING: Benghazi Documents FINALLY Found – Hidden In Hillary’s Deleted Email File

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By Melissa Davis

Source: US Herald

Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton may have thought she could breathe a sigh of relief when FBI Director James Comey did not recommend charges be filed against her in connection with her unprecedented secret server set-up, but she hadn’t counted on federal judges, who are not quite as forgiving.

U.S. District Court Judge William P. Dimitrouleas has ordered the State Department to search 14,900 newly found Clinton emails to determine if any are responsive to requests in a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed last year.

The FOIA requests sought all communications between then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Obama White House related to the 2012 terror attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi from the day it took place – the anniversary of 9/11 – through the following week.

This week, the State Department was forced to admit in court filings it had “received positive hits” for Benghazi-related documents among the nearly 15,000 Clinton emails uncovered by the FBI during its more than year-long investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s unauthorized use of a private server housed at her home during her tenure as President Obama’s first Secretary of State.

Judge Dimitrouleas gave the Department until September 13 to review the emails, in addition to other communications, and turn over responsive records, but Clinton’s former department claimed it cannot comply with the order by the deadline due to the large number of emails to be reviewed, estimating that it will take until well after the November 8 election.

In a potentially devastating development it was learned that not only did Clinton withhold emails from State when she left the position, contrary to federal law and regulation, but utilized software to degrade the digital data to the extent that it cannot be retrieved.

The use of “bleach bit” technology could, conceivably, lead to allegations of obstruction of justice and evidence of intent.