On Friday, the Senate confirmed the first two of President Trump’s nominees: Generals Mattis and Kelly to run DOD and DHS, respectfully. But it did not confirm the third nominee slotted for that day, Mike Pompeo. In part because the nomination was not dealt with in regular fashion in the Senate Intelligence Committee (which did not vote out his nomination), Ron Wyden managed to force Mitch McConnell to hold 6 hours of debate tomorrow on his nomination.

Wyden has suggested we need to have more debate because Pompeo hasn’t answered all the questions posed to him. And it is true that Wyden has concerns about the following issues. But perhaps most of all, Wyden’s questions suggest he is concerned that the Trump administration will use information the Russians hacked against Americans.

In follow-up questions posed to Pompeo, Wyden expressed concern about Pompeo’s:

• Enthusiasm for using bulk collections of “lifestyle” information on Americans
• Willingness to have the CIA engage in activities the Ambassador or other Chief of Mission disagrees with
• Squirminess about when the CIA can kill a US person
• Dodginess on classifying torture information that reveals illegal, embarrassing, competitive, or otherwise unclassified information

But as I said, Wyden’s chief concern appears that Pompeo will use information the Russians have or will give the Trump administration against Americans.

Enthusiasm for using bulk collections of “lifestyle” information on Americans

A big point of concern for Wyden and Martin Heinrich throughout Pompeo’s confirmation process is this op-ed he wrote at the beginning of last year. Based in part on the fact that the intelligence community didn’t find the Tashfeen Malik’s anti-American statements on non-public social media, and in part on the demonstrably false claim that the IC didn’t find the Garland attackers beforehand (in reality, the FBI was cheering them on), Pompeo argued we need to collect still more data. “Congress should pass a law re-establishing collection of all metadata, and combining it with publicly available financial and lifestyle information into a comprehensive, searchable database,” he wrote.

Pompeo has dodged questions about precisely what “lifestyle” information he wants to collect — though it surely includes Twitter’s firehose of data from Dataminr. Sadly, he repeatedly pointed to executive orders in his answers, and the new EO 12333 sharing rules permit the access of “public” information, which can include information from data brokers (though Pompeo claims ignorance of what he might want to use). So while Wyden is concerned that Pompeo will start dragnetting Americans, sadly he has been enabled to do so by one of the last things Obama did.

Willingness to have the CIA engage in activities the Ambassador or other Chief of Mission disagrees with

Another concern Wyden raised pertains to disagreements between the Chief of Mission (the top diplomat in a country) and the CIA Station Chief. This has been an issue in the past at least as it pertains to drone strikes in Pakistan and the torture program, where the Ambassador was either not informed or not properly consulted on CIA activities within a country.

When asked a yes or no question whether he would permit CIA to conduct activities even while an outstanding disagreement remained, Pompeo refused to answer, stating instead that he would seek an expeditious decision from the President. Effectively, he suggested if he were losing a disagreement with State, he’d get Trump to override State.

Squirminess about when the CIA can kill a US person

Wyden, who has long sought guidelines on when the US can kill an American citizen, returned to pre-hearing questions on this topic. After citing the Drone Rule Book requirement that DOJ be involved before taking action against a US person, he asked whether Pompeo agreed with the requirement. Pompeo basically said the US “must consider an American citizen’s constitutional rights prior to targeting him” and “CIA attorneys frequently consult with” DOJ (though left open the possibility of relying on less formal analysis). Ultimately, Pompeo dodged laying out any additional checks he’d following before killing an American.

Dodginess on classifying torture information that reveals illegal, embarrassing, competitive, or otherwise unclassified information

Wyden asked Pompeo if he disagreed with the prohibitions on classifying information to “(1) conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error; (2) prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency; (3) restrain  competition; or ( 4) prevent or delay the release of information that does not require protection in the interest of national security,” prohibitions that existed in Clinton’s, George W. Bush’s, and Obama’s EOs on classified information. Pompeo said he did not. However, immediately in that context, Wyden asked about the Torture Report, and Pompeo dodged all questions about declassifying the torture report.

Willingness to use information obtained by Russians hacking Americans

But as I said, Wyden’s persistent concerns in his post-hearing questions pertained to whether and how Pompeo would be willing to cooperate with the Russians. Raising a Pompeo hearing comment that if a foreign partner gave the CIA information on US persons “independently,” “it may be appropriate of CIA to collect [that] information in bulk,” Wyden raised Trump’s encouragement of Russian hacking and asked what circumstances would make foreign collection so improper that CIA should not receive such information. Pompeo responded, “information obtained through such egregious conduct may be appropriate for the CIA to use or disseminate.”

Wyden then listed out a bunch of conditions, such as information coming from an adversary, to disrupt US democracy, information implicating First Amendment protected political activity, or information affecting thousands or millions of Americans. “The listed conditions could all be relevant,” Pompeo responded, remaining non-committal.

Wyden raised a Pompeo comment suggesting rules for accessing US person communications under EO 12333 and asked if that was true of information known to include significant US person information. Pompeo said he would consult experts and AGG guidelines (which, arguably, are this flexible).

Wyden raised Pompeo’s promise to expand intelligence cooperation with state and non-state partners, and asked specifically whether this included Russia, and if so how Pompeo planned on dealing with the counterintelligence risks of doing so. Pompeo said he as not referring to “any specific partners,” said, “CIA already has a strong counterintelligence program,” and said anything he did would comply with law and standard practices and be noticed to Congress.

Wyden then asked if “it is legal or appropriate for the White House to obtain from a foreign partner…information that includes the communications of U.S. persons” and if he learned that they were doing so, whether he would inform Congress of it. Pompeo responded “I am not aware of a DCIA role in supervising White House activities or providing legal counsel to the White House on its activities,” apparently committing only to informing Congress of CIA’s own activities.

In short, there are a lot of reasons to be worried about Pompeo as Director of CIA. But Wyden seems most worried that CIA (and the White House) will use information Russia gives them against American citizens.

Back in December, I called out BuzzFeed for a bogus news story about fake news. Based on a poll it commissioned, it claimed that 75% of people believe fake news. That’s not what the poll showed. Rather, it showed few people recalled headlines BuzzFeed had IDed as fake, but those who did believed it. It also showed that people recalled and believed “real” news more than they did fake.

[T]he poll showed that of the people who remember a given headline, 75% believed it. But only about 20% remembered any of these headlines (which had been shared months earlier). For example, 72% of the people who remembered the claim that an FBI Agent had been found dead believed it, but only 22% actually remembered it; so just 16% of those surveyed remembered and believed it. The recall rate is worse for the stories with higher belief rates. Just 12% of respondents remembered and believed the claim that Trump sent his own plane to rescue stranded marines. Just 8% remembered and believed the story that Jim Comey had a Trump sign in his front yard, and that made up just 123 people out of a sample of 1809 surveyed.

Furthermore, with just one exception, people recalled the real news stories tested more than they did the fake and with one laudable exception (that Trump would protect LGBTQ citizens; it is “true” that he said it but likely “false” that he means it), people believed real news at rates higher than they did fake. The most people — 22% — recalled the fake story about the FBI Agent, comparable to the 23% who believed some real story about girl-on-girl pictures involving Melania. But 34% remembered Trump would “absolutely” register Muslims and 57% remembered Trump’s claim he wasn’t going to take a salary.

BuzzFeed is back with another poll. Here’s what Craig Silverman claims this poll shows.

The online survey of 1,007 American adults found roughly the same percentage of American adults said they consumed news in the past the month on Facebook (55%) as on broadcast TV (56%). Those were by far the most popular sources of news, followed by print newspapers (39%), cable news (38%), “social media (generally)” (33%), and newspapers’ websites (33%).

But a significant gap emerged when people were asked how much they trust the news they get from these sources. Broadcast TV once again scored the highest, with 59% of respondents saying they trust news from that source all or most of the time.

In contrast, only 18% of respondents trust news on Facebook all or most of the time — and 44% said they rarely or almost never trust news on Facebook.

And unlike the last time Silverman read a poll, that is what the poll actually shows: people say they get “news” from Facebook but don’t really trust it, in contradistinction from the “news” they get from broadcast TV. In case you’re wondering (because BuzzFeed didn’t include this in its narrative of whether people read and trust news), 23% of people get “news” from online only publications like this one and like BuzzFeed; 35% trust it most or all of the time. Given how much BuzzFeed has been claiming that we have a “fake news crisis” driven by Facebook, you’d think they’d find low trust rates for Facebook to be great news. “Golly, people aren’t the rubes we’ve been getting clicks telling you they are, sorry.”

But BuzzFeed doesn’t do that. Instead, it returns to overstating what its last poll showed (though not quite as badly, this time), to suggest that people may believe Facebook, even if they don’t trust it .

But other research suggests that trust is not the same as belief — and that beliefs can be shaped even by distrusted sources. A recent online poll conducted by Ipsos for BuzzFeed News found that on average about 75% of American adults believed fake news headlines about the election when they recalled seeing them. The headlines tested were among those that received the highest overall engagement (shares, reactions, comments) on Facebook during the election, which means they received a large amount of exposure on the platform. A research paper published this week also found that just over half of people who recalled seeing viral fake election news headlines believed them to be true.

So while American adults say they don’t trust a lot of the news they see on Facebook, that apparently doesn’t stop many of them from believing it.

As a threshold matter, note that BuzzFeed’s pollster, Ipsos, appears not to have defined “news,” “trust,” or (the last time) “belief.” I guess it is unsurprising that someone claiming we have a “fake news” crisis believes there are essential terms, because fetishizing “news” is a key part of pitching “fake news” as something new.

But even though BuzzFeed introduced both apples and oranges in its bowl of fruit, I do find the numbers taken in conjunction instructive. Had BuzzFeed actually done the math I did last time — showing that recall rates for fake news are actually low so the poll did not, in fact, show that “many” people believe fake news — it might consider the possibility that when people read stuff on Facebook they don’t find to be credible, they don’t retain it. BuzzFeed measured different things, but the 18% of people who believe everything they read on Facebook is not far off from the 8-16% of people who remembered and believed fake news headlines from Twitter.

If you want a crisis, I’d say look to cable news, which is where 38% of people say they got their news, with half trusting it most or all the time. It appears more disinformation gets disseminated and retained that way than via Facebook. But as a very old problem, I guess that wouldn’t give BuzzFeed the same clicks as the Facebook fake news panic does.

The NYT had an article yesterday reporting on investigations into three (not four) of Donald Trump’s associates. The lead explains that authorities are reviewing “intercepted communications” in an investigation.

American law enforcement and intelligence agencies are examining intercepted communications and financial transactions as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump, including his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, current and former senior American officials said.

The article differs from many of the reports on investigations into Trump because it is not so breathless and shows far more understanding of how DOJ works. Sadly, most readers appear not to have gotten this far into the story, which admits it’s not even clear whether the investigation is primarily about ties between Trump and the DNC hack.

It is not clear whether the intercepted communications had anything to do with Mr. Trump’s campaign, or Mr. Trump himself. It is also unclear whether the inquiry has anything to do with an investigation into the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s computers and other attempts to disrupt the elections in November.

A number of people, including — bizarrely! — former DHS Assistant Secretary for Intergovernmental Affairs Juliette Kayyem have asked why the NYT article doesn’t mention FISA.

Great piece. Honest ? Is there reason why it doesn’t mention word FISA? I don’t know other ways to intercept comms.

Kayyem asks that, even about an article that partially raises another — the most common — way intercepts get done: by targeting foreigners.

The counterintelligence investigation centers at least in part on the business dealings that some of the president-elect’s past and present advisers have had with Russia. Mr. Manafort has done business in Ukraine and Russia. Some of his contacts there were under surveillance by the National Security Agency for suspected links to Russia’s Federal Security Service, one of the officials said.

The Russians alleged to have bought off Manafort, and the Russians alleged to have hacked the DNC are all legal targets without a FISA order (unless they’re targeting in the US, and even then, in some cases you wouldn’t need a FISA order). But these people are described as Russians and Ukrainians in Europe, so no FISA order needed. Moreover, the BBC article that started this line of reporting made clear the investigation arises from an intercept from a Baltic ally. Even if the US did the spying, foreign targets could be collected on under EO 12333 or under Section 702 of FISA without an individual order, and the Manafort sides of those conversations would be read. Indeed, those communications would be read precisely because a US person was having conversations with targets of interest.

So to review, here are the ways that the government might collect data in this case.

• As the BBC reported, the US gets intercepts from its foreign partners, and appears to have done so here.
• For foreign targets like those described, much US surveillance takes place under EO 12333. The NSA is collecting on switches and satellites carrying such communications, and to the extent that they’re not encrypted (or encrypted using technology the NSA has broken) those communications are readily available without a court order.
• Those foreign targets located in Europe are also legal targets under Section 702. For national security cases (including counterintelligence ones) NSA routinely shares the raw feed off such collection with FBI, and FBI is not only allowed to read both sides of those conversations, but to go back and search for US persons in them without any suspicion of wrong-doing.
• This counterintelligence investigation is primarily about money changing hands. That’s Treasury’s job, and its methods of coercion for collecting information don’t usually involve courts. Banks are obliged to hand over certain kinds of suspicious transfers in any case. Treasury also gets to go to SWIFT and get what it wants. That’s not an “intercept” in the traditional sense, but is likely a key piece of evidence in this case.

The issue, then, is when someone like Manafort becomes the target of the investigation and/or when Russians in the US (but not exclusively at an Embassy) are targeted. In that case, the following might explain intercepts.

• In some respects, Manafort’s behavior reeks of classic influence peddling, a lobbyist gone wrong. To the extent that’s the case, it might be investigated under regular criminal law with pretty much the same secrecy that FISA will give you (especially given that multiple sources are leaking like sieves about FISA orders now). So FBI could have obtained a criminal warrant targeting Manafort’s communications.
• To target Manafort anywhere in the world, the FBI/NSA would need a FISA order. Domestically, that’d be a traditional order(s). Given the overseas connection, they’d likely get a 705b order, allowing them to keep spying if Manafort were to leave the country.
• To target Russians who are in the country but not at the Russian embassy, the government would need a FISA order.

To be sure, there were earlier reports that FBI asked for FISA orders in June and July, finally obtaining one (not three) in October. Even there, the original BBC report suggested the Americans were not the primary targets, but foreign targets, though it misstates who could actually be targeted (and seems to think Russian banks would require a FISA order).

Lawyers from the National Security Division in the Department of Justice then drew up an application. They took it to the secret US court that deals with intelligence, the Fisa court, named after the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. They wanted permission to intercept the electronic records from two Russian banks.

Their first application, in June, was rejected outright by the judge. They returned with a more narrowly drawn order in July and were rejected again. Finally, before a new judge, the order was granted, on 15 October, three weeks before election day.

Neither Mr Trump nor his associates are named in the Fisa order, which would only cover foreign citizens or foreign entities – in this case the Russian banks

A more recent, but breathless, version of the story originally misstated the standard for FISA, but does get closer to suggesting Trump’s associates are the targets.

Note that in one place NYT refers to “investigations” plural.

The F.B.I. is leading the investigations, aided by the National Security Agency, the C.I.A. and the Treasury Department’s financial crimes unit.

It is possible that there are separate investigation(s), one targeting Manafort for clear influence peddling, another targeting Roger Stone for apparent involvement in the hand-off of DNC documents to Wikileaks, and a third for corrupt business dealings on the part of Carter Page. It is also possible that such independent investigations could converge on the election, if what the Trump dossier claims is true. It is further possible that if all of those investigations converged into one election-related investigation, there’d still be no way to prove Trump knew of Russian involvement; right now, only his associates have been “targeted,” to the extent even that has occurred. (Roger Stone, of course, is an old hand at giving the President plausible deniability about the rat-fucking done in his name.)

Finally, there’s one more (delicious) detail most people have missed. Just last week the intelligence community rolled out its new EO 12333 sharing guidelines. I suspect such guidelines were in place between FBI and NSA before then; for a variety of reasons I think they may have been sharing such data since … September. But as I’ll show in a follow-up, one very clear objective for the expanded EO 12333 sharing is to give FBI (and CIA) direct access to raw EO 12333 collected information for counterintelligence purposes. That means all those intercepts on Russian and Ukrainian people talking to Manafort, going back over a year? At least as of January 3, the FBI (and CIA) can have those, including Manafort’s side of the conversation, in raw form.

Charlie Savage has a great review in the New Yorker, pitting Oliver Stone’s Snowden movie against Edward Jay Epstein’s book (and astutely noting that these two have battled before over JFK history, which presumably explains the use of “Soviet” in the title).

In it, he addresses something fact-based commentators have had to deal with over and over: the claim Snowden stole 1.5 million documents.

Another complication for judging Snowden’s actions is that we do not know how many and which documents he took. Investigators determined only that he “touched” about 1.5 million files—essentially those that were indexed by a search program he used to trawl NSA servers. Many of those files are said to pertain to military and intelligence tools and activities that did not bear on the protection of individual privacy. Snowden’s skeptics assume that he stole every such file. His supporters assume that he did not. In any case they believe his statements that after giving certain NSA archives to the journalists in Hong Kong, he destroyed his hard drives and brought no files to Russia.

But it’s time, once and for all, to reject this frame entirely.

That’s true for several reasons. First, as the House Intelligence Report on Snowden discloses, the Intelligence Community actually has two different counts of what documents Snowden “took.” The 1.5 million number comes from Defense Intelligence Agency.

The IC more generally, though, has a different (undisclosed) number, based off three tiers of damage assessment: those documents that had been released to the public by August 31, 2015, those documents that, “based on forensic analysis, Snowden would have collected in the course of collecting [the documents already released], but have not yet been disclosed to the public.” (PDF 29) The IC believes these documents are in the hands of Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras and Bart Gellman. The last tier consists of documents that Snowden accessed in some way. The rest of the description of this category is redacted, but the logic involved in the section suggests the IC has good reason to question whether the third tier ever got delivered to journalists.

By May 2016 (much to HPSCI’s apparent chagrin), the IC had stopped doing damage assessment on documents not released the public, which strongly suggests they believed Russia and other adversaries hadn’t and probably wouldn’t obtain them, which in turn suggests the IC either believes the journalists’ operational security is adequate against Russia and China and/or the documents have already been destroyed and certainly didn’t go with Snowden to Russia and get delivered to Vladimir Putin.

Particularly given the later date for the IC assessment, I’d suggest the IC likely has listened for years for signs the wider universe of documents has been released, and have found no sign the documents have. Otherwise they’d be doing a damage assessment on them.

But the 1.5 million number is problematic for two more reasons. First, as Jason Leopold reported in 2015, the 1.5 million number comes from a period when HPSCI was actively soliciting dirt on Snowden that they could (and did) leak to the press. It was designed to be as damning as possible And, as I added at the time, the number also came at a time when Congress was scrambling to give DOD more money to deal with mitigation of Snowden’s leak. In other words, for several reasons Congress was asking the IC to give it the biggest possible number.

But there’s another problem with the 1.5 million number, revealed in the HPSCI report released last month. The 1.5 million isn’t actually all the documents Snowden is known to have touched, or even downloaded. Rather, it is all the documents he touched and downloaded, less some 374,000 “blank documents Snowden downloaded from the Department of the Army Intelligence Information Service (DAIIS) Message Processing System.”

So the real number of documents that Snowden “touched” is almost 1.9 million. But in coming up with its most inflammatory number, DIA eliminated the almost 20% of the documents that it had determined were blank.

But consider what that tacitly admits. It admits that one-fifth of the documents that Snowden not just touched, but actually downloaded, were absolutely useless for the purposes of leaking, because they were blank. But if Snowden downloaded 374,000 blank documents, it is proof he downloaded a bunch things he didn’t intend to leak.

Of course, fear-mongering about Snowden wandering the world with 374,000 blank documents risks making someone look crazy. So maybe that’s the reason the Snowden skeptics have chosen to edit their number down, even while doing so is tacit admission they know he “touched” a lot of things he had no intention of leaking.

If Edward Jay Epstein wants to write the definitive screed against Snowden, he should adopt, instead, that 1.9 million number. But in so doing, he should also admit he’s raising concerns about Snowden leaking blank documents.

Today, President Obama commuted Chelsea Manning’s sentence, effective May 17. May she have the fortitude to withstand five more months of prison.

Among the many responses to the commutation, many people are pointing to a tweet Julian Assange wrote in September, promising to agree to US prison if Manning got clemency.

Assange made a very similar comment more recently, on January 12.

To Assange’s credit, he has long called for clemency for Manning; and whatever you think of Assange, his anger against Hillary was in significant part motivated by Clinton’s response to the Manning leaks. Manning might have been able to cooperate against Assange for a lesser sentence, but there was nothing Assange did that was not, also, what the NYT has done.

Indeed, the oddity of Assange’s original tweet is that, as far as has been made public, he has never been charged, not even for aiding Edward Snowden as a fugitive.

Nevertheless, since the comments, Assange’s European lawyer said he stands by his earlier comment (though she points out the US has not asked for extradition).

But I’d like to point to a third tweet, which might explain why Assange would be so willing to be extradited now.

The day after Assange repeated his promise to undergo extradition, just as the uproar over the Trump dossier led Christopher Steele to go into hiding has been roiling, Assange also tweeted a comment at least pretending he thought he might be murdered.

Sure, Assange is paranoid. But while Assange has been hiding behind purportedly American IDed cutouts, claiming plausible deniability that he got the DNC emails from the Russians, he surely knows, now, those people were cut-outs. The Russians, Trump, and any American cutouts that Assange could ID would badly like him to sustain that plausible deniability.

And the Russians have a way of silencing people like that, even in fairly protected places in London.

So while Assange could just be blowing smoke, Assange may well be considering his options, coming to the US on a plea deal versus dealing with Putin’s goons.

All of which might make such deals more attractive.

Update: Here’s Assange’s latest on this.

Last week, the government released the long-awaited procedures permitting the intelligence community to share raw 12333 collected information more widely. This will be a working thread on those procedures.

(1) The procedures bill themselves as procedures to govern the sharing of information under 2.3 of EO 12333, which basically permits the IC to share info so IC elements can see if they need the info.

(1) The procedures exclude NSA SIGINT activities, which I think has the effect of making sure those don’t operate with these limits.

(2) The procedures also exclude activities undertaken under NSCID-5 and NSCID-6, which I think has the effect of excluding joint NSA-CIA activities that already take place.

(2) Note the reference to PPD-28 (which reappears) refers to PPD-28 “and implementing procedures and any successor documents.” That suggests there may be a lot more about PPD-28 we’re not seeing, and that this Administration anticipates it will be changed.

(2-3) This section lays out what it claims to be limits on any info sharing agreements, which is basically a requirement that any entity getting NSA data must adopt procedures akin to those NSA adopts.

(3) Even if NSA tells another element of intelligence that would interest them, the element must make a formal request to get it. I suspect this is done so NSA can pretend it is not affirmatively giving away entire swaths of data.

(4) There’s an odd definition of “reasonableness,” which is the standard NSA always says it uses to comply with the Fourth Amendment. It includes these measures of impact on US persons:

e. (U) The likelihood that sensitive U.S. person information (USPI) will be found in the information and, if known, the amount of such information;

f. (U) The potential for substantial harm, embarrassment, inconvenience, or unfairness to U.S. persons if the USPI is improperly used or disclosed;

That is, the measure is not if information is improperly access, but if accessing it might cause the US person substantial embarrassment of inconvenience.

(4) After the long section on reasonableness, the procedures then say NSA doesn’t actually have to check the data set to make sure its measures of impact are valid.

(5) Those receiving NSA data are prohibited from tampering in politics.

Not engage in any intelligence activity authorized by these Procedures, including disseminations to the White House, for the purpose of affecting the political process in the United States.

(5) Sharing agreements are covered by memoranda of agreement that last 3 years. Given the discussion of whether or not this enables Trump, I think it worth noting that any data sharing can be expanded before Trump’s first term ends. Conversely, that implies that any president can impose new restrictions during a term.

(5) There’s a squabble resolution process that goes to Secretary of Defense, then DNI for military units, and DNI for non-military.

(5) The procedures provide 3 different options for data possession that can count as sharing (one that was laid out in the 5240.01 revision released last year): the data remains in NSA’s systems, it goes to the IC cloud, it goes to the receiving entity’s systems. The roll-out of the IC cloud in recent years was a technical precondition for this expanded sharing.

(6) Before the procedures talk about what the entities have to do with audits (that does come later), it has this to say about protecting audit records.

Auditing records. Protect auditing records against unauthorized access, modification, or deletion, and retain these records for a sufficient period of time to verify compliance with the requirements of these Procedures.

Did they need to include this because audit records have been altered in the past?

(6) I’ve written a lot about the times (especially at FBI) where elements choose not to mark the source for their data, which allows for a lot of negative outcomes (such as hiding evidence source from defendants). So this passage makes me really furious.

Marking o(files. Use reasonable measures to identify and mark or tag raw SIGINT files reasonably believed or known to contain USPI. Marking and tagging will occur regardless of the format or location of the information, or the method of storing it. When appropriate and reasonably possible, files and documents containing USPI will also be marked individually. In the case of certain electronic databases, if it is not reasonably possible to mark individual files containing USPI, a banner may be used before access informing users that they may encounter USPI.

There should be an initial requirement that all shared data retains its NSA SIGAD information, marking it both as NSA data and tracking how it was collected. But this only asks that recipients mark data if it includes USPI, and even there allows the requirement to slide.

(7) The section prohibiting the selection of domestic (that is, between entirely US persons) is worthwhile. Except they don’t tell you until later that metadata analysis (which for the purposes of this document is limited to contact chaining) is exempt from this. So this means law enforcement can use entirely NSA-collected raw data to do network analysis of entirely American communications.

(7) There are actually 3 different kinds of searches included in these procedures, which should get people to reconsider how they refer to “upstream” searches: searches on the identity of a communicant, searches mentioning a communicant, and searches on content (which comes a few pages later).  Also note, it all relies on a new definition of “foreign” communications to mean what “international” used to, meaning they can access communications of a US person via that US person identifier if it happens internationally.

(7) The procedures let IC elements use US person identifiers for “selection” (a term designed to avoid “search”) if that person is already approved for content spying with a FISA order, but not for metadata spying. Note they list 703 among the authorities in question, though at least until recently, they never used 703.

(7) One of the key prongs (of three) under which an element can spy on an American w/AG approval is redacted. I’ll come back to this.

(8) Some of the reasons why the IC can spy on Americans are redacted. Given the items that appear on page 12, at least one of these is almost certainly a counterintelligence focus. The other may be counternarcotics or transnational crime.

(9) After having laid out how you can spy on Americans via their identifiers, the procedures now lay out how they might be swept up via their content. Remember that this may mean “content of headers,” and likely includes selectors for things like encryption keys. The selection term based collection permits the selection of US person communications (possibly, given the redaction, even between two US based US persons) if there will be significant FI or CI value.

(9) Minor point but the procedures explicitly use the phrase “defeat,” which is a concept often redacted.

(9) There are no explicit protections for Attorney Client communications here, just a “call NSD for guidelines” rule, which is alarming.

(9) I’ll come back to F, which is basically SPCMA on steroids, and probably a significant part of these sharing goals anyway. Effectively, this institutes SPCMA analysis, across IC elements, without some of the protections that have long been in place.

(10) Note, there seems to be flux in what metadata can be included as metadata (though there are reasonable definitions for metadata later). Also, ZERO of the oversight involves DOD.

(10) Retention is 5 years, so consistent with Section 309, which it cites.

(10) Note the reference to “data related to” communications to, from, or about US persons.

(10) The IC can only keep domestic communications in case of threat of death or bodily harm (but remember they include bodily harm to corporate persons in that).

(11) This is confusing. Right after saying it has to destroy domestic comms, it says that it can keep them if there is significant CI or FI value, and or anomalies showing a vulnerability to US comm service. This is sort of consistent with upstream 702, but not quite.

(11) The procedures treat government employee comes differently based on who they’re talking to, which is a tribute to how much this is about counterintelligence.

(11) The immediate notice of destruction incorporates a lesson they learned during 702, when such notices took time and US person stuff remained in the system in NSA even if destroyed at FBI.

(12) Note US person info can be disseminated for a non-exclusive list, though the list is quite extensive in any case.

(12) Info can be disseminated if someone is the target of hostile intelligence activities of a foreign power. This might make it easier for DHS to disseminate warnings.

(13) The auditing function described does not include an explicit exception for techs, whereas it would at NSA.

(14) Note the distinction between queries and retrievals. Added to selection, and we’ve got another set of not entirely sensical terms that are new.

(14) Note that throughout, the oversight mechanisms avoid any body that is statutorily independent, including both PCLOB and the IGs. So it should not be taken as credible.

(15) The first paragraph of VIII makes it clear they’re parallel constructing this. No notice to defendants basically makes this unconstitutional, but the ID doesn’t care.

(16) Throughout, there are designees allowed that will make it a cinch to put some of these sharing relationships in a box where no one will find them.

(16) The departures from procedures section doesn’t include any deadlines for how long until notifications have to go out. Again, another easily exploited loophole.

(17) They added language to Obama’s standard “does not create any rights” language to include “nor do they place any limitation on otherwise lawful investigative and litigative prerogatives of the United States.” Which sounds like even more parallel construction.

(17) As we’ll see, “contact chaining” is defined to mean two hops. But because it isn’t tied to anything, and because the definition of foreign power includes 3 degrees of separate for most things (engages in, aids or abets, or conspires), it really amounts to about 5 degrees of separation from any baddie.

(18) The definitions of metadata here are interesting (and different from the SPCMA one). First, on telephony metadata, they don’t comment about location. The Internet metadata description is more descriptive than any I’ve seen, including routers passed during delivery. But there’s so much that’s not addressed in the definition, because it pretends to be exclusively about email.

(19) The definition of contact chaining does not include, as USAF chaining does, connection chaining. This reinforces my belief that the latter primarily serves a complimentary function, that of IDing all associated identities known by a provider. The contact chaining definition only permits two hops, but there’s no limitation on target, which permits at least 5 and really an infinite number of hops.

(19) If just one recipient in a threat is not a USP, it does not count as domestic. Also, circumstances where someone doesn’t have a REOP, like Twitter, does not count as domestic either.

(19) There used to be two distinct definitions: International, which was one end US, and foreign, which is both-ends foreign. I’m not sure why they’ve changed it such that any end foreign counts as foreign, but that seems problematic.

(20) Public info includes that which is available on request, or by purchase, meaning this may includes a lot of brokered lists and the like (including advertising information).

(20) Definition of “selection” includes “cable address,” which seems like it could be very broadly interpreted.

(21) The definition of “selection term” is very useful (basically a boolean selection term), and should have been made public before.

(22) The USPI definition is notable both for its inclusions and exclusions. “Unique biometric records” is included, which seems like could be very broadly interpreted (and makes clear they’re throwing all the biometrics they have into this pot of analysis. There’s no specific mention of online identities (“names” and “unique titles” may incorporate that, but should be stated publicly). There’s also no mention of cookies or other session identifiers (which is especially notable given the silence about location data).

(22) The overhead reconnaissance language means they can use drone footage against us, so long as they don’t target it at us. Though some DirtBox uses would be problematic.

As I have laid out, the intelligence community has been making some odd claims about the Trump dossier. First, James Clapper claimed that the IC was the last to learn of the dossier, in spite of the fact that IC member FBI was getting the reports at least by August and probably earlier. Then, Sunday, John Brennan claimed the IC couldn’t be held responsible for leaking the dossier (though without denying that the IC had leaked it), because the dossier had already been out there; except the dossier — released with a report that post-dates all known public versions of the dossier — therefore post-dates what “was already out there.”

Brennan’s back with yet another claim, this in response to Trump’s insinuation that Brennan might have leaked it: Brennan claimed he has never read the dossier.

“Was I a leaker of this? No,” Mr. Brennan said Monday in an interview at CIA headquarters, days before he ends a career that has spanned more than three decades and that took him from entry-level recruit to head of the nation’s most storied spy service.

“First of all, this is not intelligence community information,” Mr. Brennan said. He noted that the dossier had been circulating “many months” and that he first heard about it from inquiring reporters last fall. To date, he hasn’t read the document and gave it no particular credence, he said.

“I would have no interest in trying to give that dossier any additional airtime,” Mr. Brennan said.

I mean, sure, you’re conducting one of the most sensitive briefings of recent history. The briefers here are all principals — along with Brennan and Clapper, Admiral Mike Rogers and Jim Comey. And you don’t even read the stuff that goes into it? You don’t review the underlying dossier that, you claim, you’re briefing just so Trump knows what the Russians have on him?

That may well be true. But if it is, it suggests a very deliberately cultivated plausible deniability, one that the decision to have Comey brief the dossier to Trump by himself only adds to. Most charitably, Brennan cultivated such deniability only to ensure he can claim that the CIA is not engaging in domestic politics (and that may well be enough).

But along with the pointedly false claims about what the IC knew when, the claim raises questions about why CIA would go so far out of its way to be able to claim they didn’t know.

John Brennan and Donald Trump are in a fight.

In his press conference last week, Trump called out the intelligence community for “allowing … information that turned out to be so false and fake” out, likening the leak to something that would happen in Nazi Germany.

I think it was disgraceful, disgraceful that the intelligence agencies allowed any information that turned out to be so false and fake out. I think it’s a disgrace. And I say that and I say that.

And that’s something that Nazi Germany would have done and did do. It’s a disgrace. That information that was false and fake and never happened got released to the public, as far as BuzzFeed, which is a failing pile of garbage, writing it, I think they’re going to suffer the consequences.

Over the weekend, Brennan went on Fox News to scold Trump for the Nazi analogy. At that appearance, he said this about the release of the dossier.

I think as the Director of National Intelligence said in his statement, this is information that’s been out there, circulating, for many months. So it’s not a question of the intelligence community leaking or releasing this information. It was already out there.

[snip]

There is no basis for Mr. Trump to point fingers at the intelligence community for leaking information that was already available publicly.

In response to Brennan’s appearance (and his suggestion Trump didn’t know what the fuck he was doing in Syria and Russia), Trump insinuated that Brennan may have leaked the dossier.

Let’s unpack this. Because while I have no idea who leaked the document (though I highly doubt Brennan would have done so personally), the intelligence community’s claims are really suspect.

As I noted last week, the James Clapper statement rather bizarrely claimed the IC was the last to know about the document. The dossier, according to Clapper, was “widely circulated in recent months among the media, members of Congress and Congressional staff even before the IC became aware of it.”

That (as some people have pointed out) cannot be true.

The stories about what Christopher Steele did when have been evolving. But David Corn’s description, based off a conversation that occurred before the IC started making public claims, strongly suggests that Steele started sharing documents with the FBI “soon” after “the end of June.”

By the end of June, he was sending reports of what he was finding to the American firm.

The former spy said he soon decided the information he was receiving was “sufficiently serious” for him to forward it to contacts he had at the FBI. He did this, he said, without permission from the American firm that had hired him. “This was an extraordinary situation,” he remarked.

Some other reports, based off claims made after the Clapper statement, put this date later — maybe August — even while the implication has always been that the FBI request for a FISA warrant in June stems from these reports.

Even if that information sharing dates to August, however, it would mean the FBI — a member of the IC — had regular updates from the dossier at least by then, if not by June. Sure, you might claim that FBI investigative teams are not part of the IC, but given that this would be a counterintelligence investigation, that’d be a laughable claim.

In other words, even assuming the claims about where the dossier came from and who paid for it are true, the IC was not the last to know, but one of the first.

There are two other dates of note that go into the claim the dossier was widely circulated before it got briefed to Trump this month. We know that the IC briefed the Gang of Eight on this dossier in October. Shortly thereafter, Corn received a copy of the dossier and wrote about it (though he has not revealed who gave it to him). Then in December, John McCain got a copy from Sir Andrew Wood. According to a Guardian article published around 9AM on the same day as the Clapper statement, McCain had not only received the dossier, but handed it over — yet another copy — to the FBI on December 9.

Senator John McCain, who was informed about the existence of the documents separately by an intermediary from a western allied state, dispatched an emissary overseas to meet the source and then decided to present the material to Comey in a one-on-one meeting on 9 December, according to a source aware of the meeting. The documents, which were first reported on last year by Mother Jones, are also in the hands of officials in the White House.

McCain, in a statement released midday on the day of the Clapper statement, is more vague about the hand-off date, describing it only as “late last year.”

I’m working on the specific times, but it is significant that the Guardian with the exact date came out in the morning on January 11, the vague McCain statement came out mid-day sometime, and Clapper’s statement came out that evening.

That’s significant because some people assume that McCain is the one who released the dossier — the dossier he received on December 9.

If that date is correct, the dossier couldn’t have come from McCain, because the last report in the dossier is dated four days later, December 13.

Very significantly, this last report, which talks about the Russian cover-up of the hack, alleges “the operatives involved had been paid by both TRUMP’s team and the Kremlin.” This is, in my opinion, one of the most incendiary claims in the entire dossier — that Trump not only encouraged Russia’s campaign, but paid operatives involved in it.

Just as significantly, the date completely undermines the substance of Brennan’s defense. When he says, “this is information that’s been out there, circulating, for many months. … It was already out there. … There is no basis for Mr. Trump to point fingers at the intelligence community for leaking information that was already available publicly,” he’s wrong. The full set of information released to BuzzFeed — including the allegation Trump paid for this operation — actually hasn’t been out there, because it post-dates all known circulation of the document.

Also remember that journalists have suggested they got copies of the dossier that redacted all the sources. This one didn’t. At least one likely source named in the report has died in curious circumstances since the release of the report.

I really have no idea where the dossier got leaked from — that is one reason I’m so interested in artifacts in the document that may raise questions about the provenance of the released dossier. I also wouldn’t, at this point, be surprised if Trump were getting his own stream of intelligence, possibly even from Russia, about where and how it got released.

But thus far, the IC’s claims about the dossier are even more dodgy than Trump’s, which is saying something.

I’ve been getting into multiple Twitter fights about the term “fake news” of late, a topic about which I feel strongly but which I don’t have time to reargue over and over. So here are the reasons I find the term “fake news” to be counterproductive, even aside from the way Washington Post magnified it with the PropOrNot campaign amidst a series of badly reported articles on Russia that failed WaPo’s own standards of “fake news.”

Most people who use the term “fake news” seem to be fetishizing something they call “news.” By that, they usually mean the pursuit of “the truth” within an editor-and-reporter system of “professional” news reporting. Even in 2017, they treat that term “news” as if it escapes all biases, with some still endorsing the idea that “objectivity” is the best route to “truth,” even in spite of the way “objectivity” has increasingly imposed a kind of both-sides false equivalence that the right has used to move the Overton window in recent years.

I’ve got news (heh) for you America. What we call “news” is one temporally and geographically contingent genre of what gets packaged as “news.” Much of the world doesn’t produce the kind of news we do, and for good parts of our own history, we didn’t either. Objectivity was invented as a marketing ploy. It is true that during a period of elite consensus, news that we treated as objective succeeded in creating a unifying national narrative of what most white people believed to be true, and that narrative was tremendously valuable to ensure the working of our democracy. But even there, “objectivity” had a way of enforcing centrism. It excluded most women and people of color and often excluded working class people. It excluded the “truth” of what the US did overseas. It thrived in a world of limited broadcast news outlets. In that sense, the golden age of objective news depended on a great deal of limits to the marketplace of ideas, largely chosen by the gatekeeping function of white male elitism.

And, probably starting at the moment Walter Cronkite figured out the Vietnam War was a big myth, that elite narrative started developing cracks.

But several things have disrupted what we fetishize as news since them. Importantly, news outlets started demanding major profits, which changed both the emphasis on reporting and the measure of success. Cable news, starting especially with Fox but definitely extending to MSNBC, aspired to achieve buzz, and even explicitly political outcomes, bringing US news much closer to what a lot of advanced democracies have — politicized news.

And all that’s before 2002, what I regard as a key year in this history. Not only was traditional news struggling in the face of heightened profit expectations even as the Internet undercut the press’ traditional revenue model. But at a time of crisis in the financial model of the “news,” the press catastrophically blew the Iraq War, and did so at a time when people like me were able to write “news” outside of the strictures of the reporter-and-editor arrangement.

I actually think, in an earlier era, the government would have been able to get away with its Iraq War lies, because there wouldn’t be outlets documenting the errors, and there wouldn’t have been ready alternatives to a model that proved susceptible to manipulation. There might eventually have been a Cronkite moment in the Iraq War, too, but it would have been about the conduct of the war, not also about the gaming of the “news” process to create the war. But because there was competition, we saw the Iraq War as a journalistic failure when we didn’t see earlier journalistic complicity in American foreign policy as such.

Since then, of course, the underlying market has continued to change. Optimistically, new outlets have arisen. Some of them — perhaps most notably HuffPo and BuzzFeed and Gawker before Peter Thiel killed it — have catered to the financial opportunities of the Internet, paying for real journalism in part with clickbait stories that draw traffic (which is just a different kind of subsidy than the family-owned project that traditional newspapers often relied on, and these outlets also rely on other subsidies). I’m pretty excited by some of the journalism BuzzFeed is doing right now, but it’s worth reflecting their very name nods to clickbait.

More importantly, the “center” of our national — indeed, global — discourse shifted from elite reporter-and-editor newspapers to social media, and various companies — almost entirely American — came to occupy dominant positions in that economy. That comes with the good and the bad. It permits the formulation of broader networks; it permits crisis on the other side of the globe to become news over here, in some but not all spaces, it permits women and people of color to engage on an equal footing with people previously deemed the elite (though very urgent digital divide issues still leave billions outside this discussion). It allows our spooks to access information that Russia needs to hack to get with a few clicks of a button. It also means the former elite narrative has to compete with other bubbles, most of which are not healthy and many of which are downright destructive. It fosters abuse.

But the really important thing is that the elite reporter-and-editor oligopoly was replaced with a marketplace driven by a perverse marriage of our human psychology and data manipulation (and often, secret algorithms). Even assuming net neutrality, most existing discourse exists in that marketplace. That reality has negative effects on everything, from financially strapped reporter-and-editor outlets increasingly chasing clicks to Macedonian teenagers inventing stories to make money to attention spans that no longer get trained for long reads and critical thinking.

The other thing to remember about this historical narrative is that there have always been stories pretending to present the real world that were not in fact the real world. Always. Always always always. Indeed, there are academic arguments that our concept of “fiction” actually arises out of a necessary legal classification for what gets published in the newspaper. “Facts” were insults of the king you could go to prison for. “Fiction” was stories about kings that weren’t true and therefore wouldn’t get you prison time (obviously, really authoritarian regimes don’t honor this distinction, which is an important lesson in their contingency). I have been told that fact/fiction moment didn’t happen in all countries, and it happened at different times in different countries (roughly tied, in my opinion, to the moment when the government had to sustain legitimacy via the press).

But even after that fact/fiction moment, you would always see factual stories intermingling with stuff so sensational that we would never regard it as true. But such sensational not-true stories definitely helped to sell newspapers. Most people don’t know this because we generally learn a story via which our fetishized objective news is the end result of a process of earlier news, but news outlets — at least in the absence of heavy state censorship — have always been very heterogeneous.

As many of you know, a big part of my dissertation covered actual fiction in newspapers. The Count of Monte-Cristo, for example, was published in France’s then equivalent of the WSJ. It wasn’t the only story about an all powerful figure with ties to Napoleon Bonaparte that delivered justice that appeared in newspapers of the day. Every newspaper offered competing versions, and those sold newspapers at a moment of increasing industrialization of the press in France. But even at a time when the “news” section of the newspaper presented largely curations of parliamentary debates, everything else ran the gamut from “fiction,” to sensational stuff (often reporting on technology or colonies), to columns to advertisements pretending to be news.

After 1848 and 1851, the literary establishment put out alarmed calls to discipline the literary sphere, which led to changes that made such narratives less accessible to the kind of people who might overthrow a king. That was the “fictional narrative” panic of the time, one justified by events of 1848.

Anyway, if you don’t believe me that there has always been fake news, just go to a checkout line and read the National Enquirer, which sometimes does cover people like Hillary Clinton or Angela Merkel. “But people know that’s fake news!” people say. Not all, and not all care. It turns out, some people like to consume fictional narratives (I have actually yet to see analysis of how many people don’t realize or care that today’s Internet fake news is not true). In fact, everyone likes to consume fictional narratives — it’s a fundamental part of what makes us human — but some of us believe there are norms about whether fictional narratives should be allowed to influence how we engage in politics.

Not that that has ever stopped people from letting religion — a largely fictional narrative — dictate political decisions.

So to sum up this part of my argument: First, the history of journalism is about the history of certain market conditions, conditions which always get at least influenced by the state, but which in so-called capitalist countries also tend to produce bottle necks of power. In the 50s, it was the elite. Now it’s Silicon Valley. And that’s true not just here! The bottle-neck of power for much of the world is Silicon Valley. To understand what dictates the kinds of stories you get from a particular media environment, you need to understand where the bottle-necks are. Today’s bottle-neck has created both what people like to call “fake news” and a whole bunch of other toxins.

But also, there has never been a time in media where not-true stories didn’t comingle with true stories, and at many times in history the lines between them were not clear to many consumers. Plus, not-true stories, of a variety of types, can often have a more powerful influence than true ones (think about how much our national security state likes series like 24). Humans are wired for narrative, not for true or false narrative.

Which brings us to what some people are calling “fake news” — as if both “fake” and “news” aren’t just contingent terms across the span of media — and insisting it has never existed before. These people suggest the advent of deliberately false narratives, produced both by partisans, entrepreneurs gaming ad networks, as well as state actors trying to influence our politics, narratives that feed on human proclivity for sensationalism (though stories from this year showed Trump supporters had more of this than Hillary supporters) served via the Internet, are a new and unique threat, and possibly the biggest threat in our media environment right now.

Let me make clear: I do think it’s a threat, especially in an era where local trusted news is largely defunct. I think it is especially concerning because powers of the far right are using it to great effect. But I think pretending this is a unique moment in history — aside from the characteristics of the marketplace — obscures the areas (aside from funding basic education and otherwise fostering critical thinking) that can most effectively combat it. I especially encourage doing what we can to disrupt the bottle-neck — one that happens to be in Silicon Valley — that plays on human nature. Google, Facebook, and Germany have all taken initial steps which may limit the toxins that get spread via a very American bottle-neck.

I’m actually more worried about the manipulation of which stories get fed by big data. Trump claims to have used it to drive down turnout; and the first he worked with is part of a larger information management company. The far right is probably achieving more with these tailored messages than Vladimir Putin is with his paid trolls.

The thing is: the antidote to both of these problems is to fix the bottle-neck.

But I also think that the most damaging non-true news story of the year was Bret Baier’s claim that Hillary was going to be indicted, as even after it was retracted it magnified the damage of Jim Comey’s interventions. I always raise that in Twitter debates, and people tell me oh that’s just bad journalism not fake news. It was a deliberate manipulation of the news delivery system (presumably by FBI Agents) in the same way the manipulation of Facebooks algorithms feeds so-called fake news. But it had more impact because more people saw it and people may retain news delivered as news more. It remains a cinch to manipulate the reporter-and-editor news process (particularly in an era driven by clicks and sensationalism and scoops), and that is at least as major a threat to democracy as non-elites consuming made up stories about the Pope.

I’ll add that there are special categories of non-factual news that deserve notice. Much stock market reporting, especially in the age of financialization, is just made up hocus pocus designed to keep the schlubs whom the elite profit off of in the market. And much reporting on our secret foreign policy deliberately reports stuff the reporter knows not to be true. David Sanger’s recent amnesia of his own reporting on StuxNet is a hilarious example of this, as is all the Syria reporting that pretends we haven’t intervened there. Frankly, even aside from the more famous failures, a lot of Russian coverage obscures reality, which discredits reports on what is a serious issue. I raise these special categories because they are the kind of non-true news that elites endorse, and as such don’t raise the alarm that Macedonian teenagers making a buck do.

The latest panic about “fake news” — Trump’s labeling of CNN and Buzzfeed as such for disseminating the dossier that media outlets chose not to disseminate during the election — suffers from some of the same characteristics, largely because parts of it remain shrouded in clandestine networks (and because the provenance remains unclear). If American power relies (as it increasingly does) on secrets and even outright lies, who’s to blame the proles for inventing their own narratives, just like the elite do?

Two final points.

First, underlying most of this argument is an argument about what happens when you subject the telling of true stories to certain conditions of capitalism. There is often a tension in this process, as capitalism may make “news” (and therefore full participation in democracy) available to more people, but to popularize that news, businesses do things that taint the elite’s idealized notion of what true story telling in a democracy should be. Furthermore, at no moment in history I’m aware of has there been a true “open” market for news. It is always limited by the scarcity of outlets and bandwidth, by laws, by media ownership patterns, and by the historically contingent bottle-necks that dictate what kind of news may be delivered most profitably. One reason I loathe the term “fake news” is because its users think the answer lies in non-elite consumers or in producers and not in the marketplace itself, a marketplace created in and largely still benefitting the US. If “fake news” is a problem, then it’s a condemnation of the marketplace of ideas largely created by the US and elites in the US need to attend to that.

Finally, one reason there is such a panic about “fake news” is because the western ideology of neoliberalism has failed. It has led to increased authoritarianism, decreased quality of life in developed countries (but not parts of Africa and other developing nations), and it has led to serial destabilizing wars along with the refugee crises that further destabilize Europe. It has failed in the same way that communism failed before it, but the elites backing it haven’t figured this out yet. I’ll write more on this (Ian Welsh has been doing good work here). All details of the media environment aside, this has disrupted the value-laden system in which “truth” exists, creating a great deal of panic and confusion among the elite that expects itself to lead the way out of this morass. Part of what we’re seeing in “fake news” panic stems from that, as well as a continued disinterest in accountability for the underlying policies — the Iraq War and the Wall Street crash and aftermath especially — enabled by failures in our elite media environment. But our media environment is likely to be contested until such time as a viable ideology forms to replace failed neoliberalism. Sadly, that ideology will be Trumpism unless the elite starts making the world a better place for average folks. Instead, the elite is policing discourse-making by claiming other things — the bad true and false narratives it, itself, doesn’t propagate — as illegitimate.

“Fake news” is a problem. But it is a minor problem compared to our other discursive problems.

I still have questions about the provenance of the Trump dossier, particularly with respect to how we’ve received it. While this article has been touted as answering a lot of questions, it actually creates new ones (plus, it would seem to violate the D Notice that formally prohibits talking about Christopher Steele and his role).

But I did want to point to a passage in the dossier that seems critically important, if it can be deemed true. (Note, Cannonfire has an OCRed version of the dossier here.) According to a July report from Steele, there were DNC insiders involved in the operation.

Agreed exchange of information established in both directions. team using moles within DNC and hackers in the US as well as outside in Russia. PUTIN motivated by fear and hatred of Hillary CLINTON. Russians receiving intel from team on Russian oligarchs and their families in US

[snip]

2. Inter alia, Source E, acknowledged that the Russian regime had been behind the recent leak of embarrassing e-mail messages, emanating from the Democratic National Committee (DNC), to the WikiLeaks platform. The reason for using WikiLeaks was “plausible deniability” and the operation had been conducted with the full knowledge and support of TRUMP and senior members of his campaign team. In return the TRUMP team had agreed to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue and to raise defence commitments in the Baltics and Eastern Europe to deflect attention away from Ukraine, a priority for PUTIN who needed to cauterise the subject.

3. In the wider context campaign/Kremlin co-operation, Source E claimed that the intelligence network being used against CLINTON comprised three elements. Firstly there were agents/facilitators within the Democratic Party structure itself; secondly Russian emigre and associated offensive cyber operators based in the US [note: corrected OCE error] and thirdly, state-sponsored cyber operatives working in Russia. All three elements had played an important role to date. On the mechanism for rewarding relevant assets based in the US, and effecting a two-way flow of intelligence and other useful information, Source E claimed that Russian diplomatic staff in key cities such as New York, Washington DC and Miami were using the emigre ‘pension’ distribution system as cover. The operation therefore depended on key people in the US Russian emigre community for its success. Tens of thousands of dollars were involved. [my emphasis]

The claim there were “moles” within the DNC would be perfectly consistent with something Julian Assange has long claimed: that he got the documents from a disgruntled DNC insider.