On January 14 and 15, 2020, the German Federal Constitutional Court will be holding a hearing to reevaluate the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) Act, which gives the BND agency (similar to the National Security Agency in the United States) broad surveillance authority. The hearing comes after a coalition of media and activist organizations including the Gesellschaft fr Freiheistrechte filed a constitutional complaint against the BND for its drag net collection and storage of telecommunications data. This new hearing continues a renewed effort on the part of countries around the world to re-access the high cost of liberty that comes with operating an invasive drag net surveillance program and may increase global pressure on the United States intelligence community.

One of the coalitions leading arguments against massive data collection by the foreign intelligence service is the fear that sensitive communications between sources and journalists may be swept up and made accessible by the government. Surveillance which, purposefully or inadvertently, sweeps up the messages of journalists jeopardizes the integrity and health of a free and functioning press and could chill the willingness of sources or whistleblowers to expose corruption or wrongdoing in the country.

In September 2019, based on similar concerns about the surveillance of journalists, South Africas High Court issued a watershed ruling that the countrys laws do not authorize bulk surveillance. In part, because there were no special protections to ensure that the communications of lawyers and journalists were not also swept up and stored by the government.

In EFFs own landmark case against the NSAs dragnet surveillance program, Jewel v. NSA, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press recently filed an Amicus brief making similar arguments about surveillance in the United States. When the threat of surveillance reaches these sources, the brief argues, there is a real chilling effect on quality reporting and the flow of information to the public.

This new complaint comes years after the revelations of global surveillance coalitions exposed by Edward Snowden, and only two years after a report revealed that BND had surveyed at least 50 phone numbers, fax numbers, and email addresses of known foreign journalists starting in 1999.

In 2016, Germanys Bundestag passed intelligence reform that many argued did not go far enough. Under the post-2016 order, an independent panel oversees the BND and any foreign intelligence collected from international communications networks must be authorized by the chancellor. However, the new reform explicitly allowed surveillance to be conducted on EU states and institutions for the purpose of foreign policy and security, and permitted the BND to collaborate with the NSAboth of which allow for the privacy of foreign individuals to be invaded.

It is worth noting that part of what allows a case like this to move forward is the ability of German citizens to know more about the surveillance programs their nation operates. In the United States, our lawsuit against NSA mass surveillance is being held up by the government argument that it cannot submit into evidence any of the requisite documents necessary to adjudicate the case. In Germany, both the BND Act and its sibling, the G10 Act, as well as their technological underpinnings, are both openly discussed making it easier to confront their legality.

We eagerly await the outcome of the German hearing and hope that the BND will be another fallen domino in the movement to restore global privacy. Meanwhile, EFF will continue to litigate our constitutional challenge to the U.S. governments mass surveillance of telephone and internet communications and will complete briefing in the Ninth circuit in late January 2020.

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The German Constitutional Court Will Revisit the Question of Mass Surveillance, Will the U.S.? - EFF

LONDON (Reuters) - As the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division departed for the Middle East amid rising tensions with Iran, their divisional commander gave a simple order. All personnel entering the region were told to leave smartphones and personal devices in the United States.

It was a clear sign of growing official nervousness over the potential vulnerability of items that had become an unquestioned fact of life for soldiers and civilians alike, but which Washington fears potential foes could track, exploit and use for targeting. Such concerns are far from new, but were regarded less seriously when Americas primary enemies were seen as non-state groups such as Islamic State, the Taliban and al Qaeda. Now Washington is worried about other nations not just Iran, but Russia and China which are seen as a much more existential threat.

It also points to a much greater trend. Across the board, the communications revolution and the vast sea of data it produces has made surveillance much easier, a trend likely to be magnified by the growth of artificial intelligence. It has also facilitated the mass leaking of phenomenal amounts of information, as demonstrated by NSA contractor Edward Snowden. And simultaneously, it has overturned decades of tradecraft in espionage and associated fields, where despite the rise in fake news and online trickery, spy agencies like the CIA now reportedly find it almost impossible to maintain the multiple false identities on which they once relied.

The foundations of the business of espionage have been shattered, former CIA official Duyane Norman said in a Yahoo news report, which outlined how foreign governments have become much better at tracking real and covert U.S. identities through phone and bank records, facial recognition and even the records of off-the-shelf DNA tests. The debate [within the intelligence community] is like the one surrounding climate change. Anyone who says otherwise just isnt looking at the facts.

For military commanders, the options are also becoming limited. In Russias war with Ukraine, Moscows forces have shown remarkable skill in targeting counterparts on the battlefield as soon as they use their phones or radios. According to the U.S.-based Military Times, the U.S. Marine Corps already bans troops from taking personal devices on Middle East combat deployments. The U.S. Navy says it is reconsidering its rules, while the Army says such decisions - as with the 82nd Airborne - are at the personal discretion of commanders.

Decisions are inevitably compromises. Taking away devices reduces the ability of personnel not just to talk to their families, but can complicate communications and organization. But concerns are growing fast. This month, the Pentagon also demanded personnel stop using the Chinese-owned TikTok application, with other similar platforms including WhatsApp also added to some blacklists.

Reducing careless talk and unnecessary radio and other emissions is hardly new. As far back as World War One, British commanders discovered telephone systems in forward trenches had often been compromised by German signallers and did everything they could to ensure the most sensitive messages were instead carried by hand or word-of-mouth. Naval vessels, military aircraft and particularly submarines have long done everything possible to mask their signatures, particularly near enemy territory. Recent years, however, have seen growing lapses, including from those who might have been expected to know better.

In early 2018, data released by fitness app Strava identified assorted U.S., Russian and even Iranian secret bases in Syria where military personnel and contractors appeared to have recorded their exercise runs without realizing they would be highlighted and widely shared. The U.S. military has now gone so far as to incorporate such mistakes into training exercises, killing off an entire unit in one drill after a soldier posted a selfie photo whose geo-tagging gave away their position.

Authorities are also nervous about non-accidental release of information. This November, White House and military staff removed smartphones from reporters and presidential aides for the duration of President Donald Trumps unannounced Thanksgiving trip to Afghanistan, which appeared as much about ensuring the news did not leak as worries the phones themselves might be tracked.

In terms of the latter, the greatest threat will come when artificial intelligence and voice recognition software reach the point where phones can be used to monitor nearby conversations without use of a human analyst or translator. That may come sooner rather than later one reason why some security experts are extremely nervous about Chinese firm Huawei being at the heart of 5G phone networks in several European countries. That may include Britain, due to make its own choice soon. This week, the head of Britains Security Service told the Financial Times he believed that risk can be managed without barring the Chinese firm altogether. U.S. counterparts, however, are much more cautious.

For authoritarian states like China and Iran, both witnessing a major spike in often smartphone-coordinated protest and unrest, being able to access and track electronic devices and the population at large is seen as a priority. Most notably in Xinjiang province but also across the country, Beijing is turning China into the most sophisticated surveillance state in human history. Within its borders, China already has considerable, sometimes almost exhaustive, access to data and devices. Faster and more incisive artificial intelligence and machine learning will dramatically extend that reach.

The question for Western states will be how effectively their potential foes can repurpose that technology to gather information outside their borders. The United States and its allies have become used to being able to use whatever devices and communications they wished since the Berlin wall fell. Those days are ending fast.

*** Peter Apps is a writer on international affairs, localization, conflict and other issues. He is the founder and executive director of the Project for Study of the 21st Century; PS21, a non-national, non-partisan, non-ideological think tank. Paralysed by a war-zone car crash in 2006, he also blogs about his disability and other topics. Hewas previously areporter for Reuters and continues to be paid by ThomsonReuters. Since 2016, he has been a member of the British Army Reserve and the UK Labour Party, and is an active fundraiser for the party.

(The opinions expressed here are those of the author, a columnist for Reuters)

Originally posted here:
In next war, soldiers will leave their smartphones at home: Peter Apps - Reuters

Australias Pine Gap spy base likely involved in the assassination of Qassem Suleimani By Patrick OConnor 14 January 2020

In the aftermath of the illegal assassination of Iranian General Qassem Suleimani on January 2, no-one within the Australian media and political establishment has raised the question as to whether the Pine Gap spy base in central Australia played a role in the killing.

If it did so, senior Australian government officials are implicated in war crimes. The failure of the press and the opposition Labor Party to demand an explanation from the government of Prime Minister Scott Morrison is another demonstration of the ruling elite closing ranks behind US imperialism. The Morrison government, with the tacit backing of Labor leader Anthony Albanese, has responded to Washingtons drive for war against Iran by doubling down on its support for US imperialism in the Middle East and internationally (see Australian government backs US provocations against Iran).

The Pine Gap facility began operations in 1970, when it was falsely billed as a space research centre. In reality it functioned as a major signals intelligence gathering facility for the US, primarily directed against the Soviet Union. Since the end of the Cold War, Pine Gaps role has expanded further, with additional infrastructure built at the desert site and hundreds of extra staff hired. According to intelligence expert Professor Des Ball of the Australian National University, Pine Gap has been used to intercept long-distance phone calls, satellite transmissions, anti-missile signals, and ballistic missile electronic communications.

In addition to this, American National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed in documents published in 2017 that Pine Gap has, over the last two decades, played a critical role in assisting US military operations, including identifying targets for missile attacks and drone assassinations.

An August 2012 NSA site profile of Pine Gap stated that it has a special section, known as the geopit, equipped with a number of tools available for performing geolocations. The document, which used the US intelligence codename RAINFALL for the Pine Gap facility, explained: RAINFALL detects, collects, records, processes, analyses and reports on PROFORMA signals collected from tasked entities, it stated. PROFORMA signals are communications data of radar and weapons systems, such as surface-to-surface missiles, anti-aircraft artillery and fighter aircraft.

This revelation followed the publication of other documents courageously leaked by Snowden in 2013 that showed that Pine Gap played a central role within a NSA program codenamed X-XKeyscore, that collects electronic data on people around the world, permanently storing phone numbers, email addresses, log-ins and user activity. As part of the Five Eyes global intelligence networkled by the US and including Australia, Britain, Canada, and New ZealandAustralian intelligence agencies have high-level access to the NSA data, including on Australian citizens.

The Snowden revelations confirmed previous media reports of Pine Gaps role in US drone assassination operations.

In July 2013, journalist Phillip Dorling wrote an article for the Age and Sydney Morning Herald, based on unnamed sources, including former Pine Gap personnel. He explained that Pine Gap allowed the US military to process intercepted electronic communications and provide target information to the US military within minutes.

Dorling reported that the Pentagon was critically dependent on Pine Gap for locating targets marked for extrajudicial execution by President Barack Obama. The facility provides information that feeds into the United States drone strike program and other military operations, with personnel sitting in airconditioned offices in central Australia directly linked, on a minute-by-minute basis, to US and allied military operations in Afghanistan and, indeed, anywhere else across the eastern hemisphere.

Given this record, it would be unusual if Pine Gap intelligence played no role at all in the US assassination of General Qassem Suleimani, leader of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Details about the hit operation continue to emerge. According to the New York Times, a US MQ-9 Reaper drone fired two missiles at a convoy of vehicles that was departing Baghdad airport, near an air cargo terminal. The bombing killed Suleimani, as well as Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, of the Iraqi government-backed Popular Mobilisation Forces, and at least three other people. Iran responded by last Wednesday launching limited missile operations against two US military bases in Iraq, in Erbil and Ain al-Assad airbase in Anbar province.

The ratcheting up of tensions has paved the way for the Trump administration to prepare a devastating war of aggression against Iran, threatening a far wider conflagration engulfing the primary targets of US imperialism, Russia and China (see Trump bides his time, but the preparations for war against Iran will continue).

The Australian government is complicit in the drive to war. Canberra has been directly involved in every US provocation in the Middle East in recent decades, including the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq from 2003. Now the government, again without challenge from within the political establishment, is preparing to line up with an even greater war crime, the US-led regime change offensive against Iran.

The assassination of Suleimani underscores the urgent need for the development of an internationally unified antiwar movement. In Australia, among the primary demands of such a movement will be the immediate and unconditional end to the US-Australia military alliance and the closure of all US-connected military and intelligence bases, including Pine Gap.

The author recommends:

Australian spy base critical to Obamas drone assassinations[22 July 2013]

Snowden confirms Australian agencies involved in NSA global spying[10 July 2013]

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Australia's Pine Gap spy base likely involved in the assassination of Qassem Suleimani - World Socialist Web Site

To the Editor:In 1961 Philip Roth wrote about the difficulty a writer has trying to understand and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally, it is even a kind of embarrassment to ones own meager imaginationThe daily newspapersfill me with wonder and awethe fixes, the scandals, the insanities, the treacheries, the idiocies, the lies, the pieties, the noise

That was then. What about now?

President Trump was impeached in December by the House of Representatives. Every Republican in the House opposed the two articles of impeachment. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he was not an impartial juror, and would closely coordinate any Senate trial with the White House.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi as late as September rejected impeachment. It was just not worth it. She changed her mind only after a CIA whistleblowers complaint became public, and then proceeded to narrow the impeachment investigation to the Ukraine scandal.

This ignored the Mueller Report, which found 10 possible obstructions of justice by Trump, in its investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The Speakers strategy follows the advice of Lawrence Welk who said, You have to play what the people understand. Isnt it a pity that Pelosi believes the American people are not capable of understanding that Trumps pattern of behavior for three years makes him, in the words of Laurence Tribe, a serial abuser of power and someone who has committed many impeachable acts?

It was a mistake that the Democrats didnt make the broadest case for impeachment, especially in the wake of the assassination of Qassim Suleimani, and the possibility of war with Iran. Our Commander in Chief was described by John Kelly as an idiot, who said it was pointless to try to convince him of anything. Eliot Cohen concluded that any level-headed observer could see Trumps deficiencies, outlook and experience made him unfit for office.

The president has made well over 13,000 false or misleading claims. He has publicly asked not only the Ukraine, but also Russia and China to provide incriminating evidence on his political opponent.

Twenty women have accused him of rape, sexual assault or sexual harassment.

Trump has granted clemency to Edward Gallagher, a Navy Seal, and two other soldiers who were accused or convicted of war crimes. He makes decisions based on information learned each day from Fox News, and recently took credit for the opening of an Apple factory in Texas that had opened in 2013.

During the impeachment hearings, The New York Times published drawings by one of the terrorists behind the 9/11 attacks, showing how he had been tortured by the CIA. There was also a report in The Washington Post which documented that high-level officials in the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations repeatedly lied about progress in the 18-year war in Afghanistan and hid evidence that the war was unwinnable. In 1971, The Pentagon Papers similarly revealed that every President from Truman to Johnson (Nixon continued this tradition) had lied to the American people about the Vietnam War.

Speaker Pelosi, in justifying the impeachment of Trump because of the Ukraine scandal, said Our democracy is what is at stake. His actions are in defiance of the vision of our Founders, and the oath of office that he takes to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

If democracy is at stake when Trump violates his oath of office, why wasnt it at stake for Democrats and Republicans in Congress when the Bush Administration lied about WMDs in Iraq, committed war crimes after 9/11 when the CIA carried out torture and renditions to black sites of suspected terrorists, and authorized illegal warrantless wiretaps? Speaker Pelosi recently admitted she was under pressure to begin impeachment proceedings against Bush for invading Iraq. However, she rejected this pressure, saying, I just didnt want it to be a way of life in our country.

Why wasnt democracy also at stake when the Obama Administration decided not to hold the Bush administration and the CIA accountable for its abuses of power in the war against terror and the war in Iraq, and when it failed to hold anyone accountable for the National Security Administration abuses revealed by Edward Snowden, who was immediately charged with violating the Espionage Act?

Who can make sense of all of this in a country that Philip Roth, decades ago described as an unreal environment, a distressing cultural and political predicament and the indigenous American berserk?

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The Treachery, the Idiocy | Letters to the Editor - The Chief-Leader

Shortly after Iran lobbed two-dozen missiles into two U.S. military bases in Iraq last week, the country's foreign minister tweeted that Iran had "concluded" its "proportionate" response to the assassination of Major General Qassem Soleimani.

Few people in the U.S. military are taking this statement at face value. Iran is likely to step up its harassment of the U.S. using its network of proxy groups in the Middle East and elsewhere. If history is any guide, that response will include cyber attacks against the U.S. government, companies and high-profile individualsand possibly even the 2020 elections.

"I don't think Iran is finished," says Jon Bateman, a former Iran expert at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency and now a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The door is open, he says, to "follow-on actions that are more covert or more plausibly deniable. Cyber classically is one of the tools."

Although Iran isn't considered to be one of the world's most formidable cyber threatsits program lags behind Russia's and China'sthe nation is still capable of causing a great deal of disruption. Its past cyber attacks have been characterized by unpredictability, and it's unclear how much its capabilities have improved in recent years.

It's been a decade since Iran weathered a sophisticated cyber-attack that set its nuclear weapons program back on its heels. The U.S. and Israel are widely thought to have launched an astonishingly intelligent bit of malware called Stuxnet, which was small enough to fit on a thumb drive but smart enough to wend its way like a heat-seeking missile through the internet to penetrate Tehran's heavily-fortified nuclear program. Not only did Stuxnet destroy uranium centrifuges, used to make bomb-grade uranium, it disguised itself by creating a false appearance of normalcy to the engineers who monitored the equipmentuntil it was too late. "Iran... has demonstrated a clear ability to learn from the capabilities and actions of others," said an NSA report released by Edward Snowden and reported in 2013 by The Intercept.

Heightened tensions in the aftermath of the Suleimani killing have U.S. cyber experts worried about Iran-backed cyber attacks in the months to come.

The big worries

The most worrying cyber threat from Iran are those that could result in a loss of life. In this respect, Iran is capable of using hackers to support some kind of conventional military action, such as a bombing or the assassination of an individual or a kidnapping. It could also use cyber espionage or data collection techniques to monitor the movement of troops, ships or planes in the Middle east and target them for attack.

To conduct a targeted assassination, Iran would need to bring together a variety of streams of intelligence. Infecting mobile phones with malware would give it access to a cornucopia of informationincluding potentially the real-time whereabouts of targets. A phone hack could provide what experts call "pattern of life" informationwhere an individual tends to go, and whenthat could be used to predict a target's whereabouts. By gaining access to phone calls, emails, text message and contact lists, hackers could even manipulate a target to walk unwittingly into a trap. "Iran has conducted many targeted killings abroad through its proxies and, perhaps, directly," says Bateman. "In 2020 that would include a cyber element. Any state would use that."

Installing malware on a mobile devices is not as hard as you might think. The simplest method is through "social engineering"tricking targets into divulging compromising information such as passwords or, as Russian operatives did with Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta in 2016, installing malware. In recent years, popular messaging apps WhatsApp and iMessage have had "no-click" vulnerabilitiessoftware bugs allow hackers to implant malware simply by sending a message, without requiring any action on the part of the target. Although these particular no-click vulnerabilities have since been patched, there could be others. Iran is not known to have exploited these vulnerabilities in the past, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't in the future.

Disinformation campaigns

Another worry is that Iran could generate disinformation for the purposes of inspiring violence. In recent months, Iran-backed groups have used social media to share false data about the U.S. militaryone widely-circulated claim was that U.S. Marines had arrested an Iraqi Parliamentarian, says Bateman. "Actions that kind of foment anger and distrust of U.S. forces and incite violence against them would be concerning," he says.

Although Iran doesn't have the kind of massive misinformation apparatus in place to sow division, the way Russia did in the run-up to 2016, it's conceivable that Iran could seek to influence the 2020 election, if it wanted to, by other means. Iran has good cyber-attack chops in breaking and entering computer systems. These skills could be useful for finding and leaking sensitive informationsimilar to Russia's hack of the Democratic National Committee in 2016. Security experts suspect that Iran was behind the 2015 attack on the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which uncovered confidential diplomatic cables that were subsequently leaked, according to Bateman.

Iran was already caught once trying to hack the Trump campaign. In October, Microsoft reported that a hacker group called Phosphorous, which it believes is linked to the Iranian government, made more than 2700 attempts to identify email accounts and attacked 241 of them, including some associated with a U.S. political campaign. The Wall Street Journal later reported that the campaign under attack was Trump's. The hackers had succeeded in breaking into four accounts, none directly linked to the campaign, before Microsoft shut it down. "This effort suggests Phosphorus is highly motivated and willing to invest significant time and resources engaging in research and other means of information gathering," Microsoft said in its October statement.

Iran could also pose a plausible threat to voting machines. Although the U.S. election system is fragmented, Iran could try to compromise voting infrastructure in key districts, spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt. Undermining Americans' faith in the legitimacy of the election could be even more destabilizing than tampering with the actual vote results.

Experts say that such a tactic would be out of character for Iran, which in the past hasn't shown much interest in the U.S. political election system. From Iran's point of view, there isn't much difference between the policies of the two U.S. parties. "Iran sees a consistent four-decade-long pressure campaign that has bipartisan approval," says Bateman. "But the killing of Soleimani is more personal than previous U.S. actions because of the relationship he had with the Supreme Leader [Ayotallah Ali Khamenei], so I wouldn't rule out something that sought to embarrass or harm Donald Trump personally."

Soft corporate targets

Disrupting corporations is both in character for Iran and well within its current cyber capabilities. Although Iran wouldn't be able to make much headway with tech giants like Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft, myriad other organizations are vulnerable to hacking, including many banks, chemical plants, oil refineries, pharmaceutical companies, water treatment plans and the electrical grid. It's likely that Iran has been installing malware in such organizations over the past decade, to lie dormant for many years until the right moment. "It's called 'preparing the battlefield'," says Steven Bellovin, a computer-science professor at Columbia University in New York who consults for defense organizations. "You wait, like sleeper cells, until you have three or four chemical plants and a couple of power plants, and then you act."

The malware would presumably activate on a signal from Iran and then proceed to carry out a coordinated cyber attack. This could take many forms. In a power plant, malware could cause turbines to spin so erratically that they eventually broke down--which is exactly how Stuxnet took out the uranium centrifuges--shutting down portions of the grid. In a pharmaceutical company, malware could change dosages in pills coming off a factory line, sowing panic.

It's unlikely that Iran has the capacity for waging a cyber war that results in significant loss of life, experts say. For instance, although it could use malware to damage power plants, it would not likely be able to cause damage on enough of a scale to create a prolonged outage of the U.S. electrical grid. "A real cyber war would destroy critical infrastructure, killing potentially millions of people," says Scott Borg, director of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, a non-profit research group specializing in cyber security. "If we're totally talking about real cyber war, Iran has no capability."

The Stuxnet malware is also not likely to be replicated by Iran's engineers. That weapon required more than just expert programming: it required a massive amount of intelligence gathering to figure out how to launch the virus to the exact computer chips the Iranian nuclear engineers had built into their uranium centrifuges. Iran simply doesn't have the expertise or the resources to develop malware on such a scale, experts believe. "Cyber weapons, or malware, aren't as simple as just picking a gun off the street that someone has dropped and then loading it and firing it yourself," says Bateman. "A cyber operation is a complex sequence of events, in which you need to understand, and penetrate, a specific target and work your way up to a specific effect you'd like to achieve."

Learning curve

One factor working against Iran's cyber capabilities, says Borg, is distrust of the government. Although Iran possesses considerable talent in the realm of computing, most capable hackers in Iran and its diaspora don't see eye-to-eye with the Ayatollah, and therefore they withhold cooperation. "The Iran hacker groups are more moderate politically," he says. "It's hard to acquire technological expertise without becoming a little cosmopolitan and moderate."

"But if you could offend them enough to get them to rally around their leaders," he says, "Iran could become a formidable cyber power in a short timea matter of months."

See more here:
This Is What an Iranian Cyberattack On The US Would Look Like - Newsweek

Actor Vince Vaughn caught flak from liberals on social media Monday after he was seen talking with President Donald Trump at the 2020 college football national championship game in New Orleans.

"I'm very sorry to have to share this video with you. All of it, every part of it," Timothy Burke wrote on Twitter, posting a video of the interaction between Vaughn and Trump that has since went viral.

In reaction, people who said Vaughn was one of their most favorite actors disavowed him, calling his meeting with Trump "gross." Other critics were more brash, simply saying, "F*** em both."

Yet still other critics claimed the left does not want to "cancel" Vaughn because they do not remember who he is, implying that he is no longer relevant.

Though civilized interaction between two adults should not be news, neither is Vaughn's apparent interest in Republicans.

Vaughn, of course, is a well-known libertarian who does not shy away from his beliefs in small government. He has been outspoken about his beliefs on taxation and the Second Amendment, for example, in the past. Vaughn endorsed Mitt Romney for president in 2012, and even once said that Edward Snowden is a "hero."

Criticism of Vaughn for cordially speaking with Trump was met with swift condemnation and mockery.

"You guys really have no idea how petty and ridiculous you look when you do this, do you," one person responded.

"Vince Vaughn is really trending because of that? Get a life," another person wrote.

"It's an amazing time to be alive when shaking the hand of the president is enough to get you canceled. Vince Vaughn doesn't strike me as one to give a s**t fortunately. Y'all have lost your minds. You never learn," another person said.

"Please say a little prayer for Timothy who's perturbed by three adults interacting in a civil manner. PS Vince Vaughn is cancelled, naturally," one person mocked in response.

"So do Swingers and Wedding Crashers get taken off the air for all of eternity now after Vince Vaughn had a civilized conversation with the president at the Superdome tonight?" another person mocked.

Even the White House responded to the criticism. White House spokesperson Hogan Gidley told Fox News, "Democrats seem to be more upset at this exchange than they do over Soleimani killing American citizens.

Read more from the original source:
Liberals outraged at Vince Vaughn for speaking with President Trump. Conservatives hit back with mockery. - TheBlaze

A senior adviser at Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, also known as FinCEN, pleaded guilty to conspiracy for leaking the Trump campaign's confidential banking information to a reporter at BuzzFeed News.

Natalie Edwards, 41, entered the plea in a Manhattan federal court and could be sentenced to five years in prison. The plea deal she reached with prosecutors will keep her from serving little or no time behind bars.

Edwards leaked thousands of confidential banking records known as Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs). Banks must file those reports if they believe certain transactions raise questions about financial wrongdoing. The SARs were from records of various campaign officials under investigation, including Paul Manafort.

Fox News:

As law enforcement swooped in, she wascarrying a government-issued USB flash drivecontainingnot only thousands of SARs, but also "highlysensitive material relating to Russia, Iran, and the terrorist group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant," prosecutors said.

"Edwards is not known to be involved in any official FinCEN project or task bearing these file titles or code names," prosecutors said at the time.

Prosecutors say there were about a dozen articles in BuzzFeed over the past 18 months that were based on information in the SARs. Edwards apparently transmitted the documents via images taken by her cellphone and then texted using an encrypted application.

She was a very helpful source for the reporter.

When the judge asked her if she knew she was committing a crime, Edwards said she did not "know of the regulation" at the time but she knew about the federal Whistleblower Protection Act.

After consulting with her lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, she said she admitted that she agreed to disclose the SARs.

Prosecutors believe her motive was political.

He said prosecutors were "probably of the view that she was more politically motivated than she was for some conception like the good of our republic."

Agnifilo said his client believed "certain critical facts" weren't being handled in the right way by the government agencies tasked with handling them.

Yes, just because you mean well doesn't save you if you break the law -- a fact that Julian Assange and Edward Snowden should take to heart. Assange and Snowden believe that because their motives for leaking were pure, they shouldn't be prosecuted. They took it upon themselves to expose their idea of corruption in the arrogant belief that they had a corner on truth.

Edwards may have been motivated by nothing more than Trump-hatred. She had no high moral goals to satisfy. Hers was a partisan political act, not the actions of a "whistleblower."

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Ex-Treasury Official Pleads Guilty to Leaking Trump Campaign Financial Records | News and Politics - PJ Media