Intelligence Community

Since the NSO / Pegasus investigation broke there are now 18 high end global media outlets that are working in consortium to track the story and the fallout. They have the data, and we rely on them. This is a very different set of circumstances than the Snowden revelations eight years ago. With that story, only two outlets had real access. Those outlets were firmly dealt with by the Anglo American intelligence community.

Republican conspiracy fetishists love to talk about a deep state family without talking about all the corporate cousins. If someone were to discuss the deep state with any level of rigor they would come away with the impression of an interlocking network that includes a vast seas of corporate power within it's globe. When the military industrial complex is mentioned, the focus of overlap examination is on the revolving door between the floors at the top. What is left out when this is considered are the connections between various entities in the banking intelligence complex.

Voting machines are not secure. This author has been reporting that simple fact for nearly 6 years. The security on voter registration systems or more correctly the vulnerability thereof, has also been the topic of multiple articles over the years. I once speculated to an ex-girlfriend that I could teach her 10 year old how to crack a voting machine in under one hour. Said 10 year old mastered the method of breaking a single alphabetic substitution cipher in under an hour and wandered off bored. The kid in question had no particular talent and very little interest.

Today, August 8th, the Wikileaks tweeted a copy of a letter to Julian Assange signed by both ranking members of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr (R-NC) and Mark Warner (D-VA) and dated August 1st. The letter, pictured below and thumbnailed at the top of this article and shown full size at the bottom, is labeled “Committee Sensitive” as if putting that at the top of a document and mailing it to the founder of Wikileaks will keep it from being leaked. Despite being a short masterpiece in political theater, it does raise some serious issues to be discussed in public.

Every question has a short answer and this case is that answer would be “likely yes and probably soon.” Assange faces imminent expulsion from the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he has been cut off from any and all communications for four months. Although charges against him in Sweden have been dropped, he still faces legal repercussions from his journalism in the United States and British authorities have the ability to hold him on rather weak bail jumping charges for seeking asylum from a now no-existent warrant.