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FOCUS: The Election Was Stolen - Here's How |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=13834"><span class="small">Greg Palast, GregPalast.com</span></a>
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Sunday, 13 November 2016 11:46 |
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Palast writes: "Before a single vote was cast, the election was fixed by GOP and Trump operatives."
Investigative reporter Greg Palast. (photo: Greg Palast's Website)
The Election Was Stolen - Here's How
By Greg Palast, GregPalast.com
13 November 16
Before a single vote was cast, the election was fixed by GOP and Trump operatives.
 tarting in 2013 – just as the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act – a coterie of Trump operatives, under the direction of Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State, created a system to purge 1.1 million Americans of color from the voter rolls of GOP–controlled states.
The system, called Crosscheck, is detailed in my Rolling Stone report, “The GOP’s Stealth War on Voters,” 8/24/2016.
Crosscheck in action:
| Trump victory margin in Michigan: |
13,107 |
| Michigan Crosscheck purge list: |
449,922 |
| Trump victory margin in Arizona: |
85,257 |
| Arizona Crosscheck purge list: |
270,824 |
| Trump victory margin in North Carolina: |
177,008 |
| North Carolina Crosscheck purge list: |
589,393 |
On Tuesday, we saw Crosscheck elect a Republican Senate and as President, Donald Trump. The electoral putsch was aided by nine other methods of attacking the right to vote of Black, Latino and Asian-American voters, methods detailed in my book and film, including “Caging,” “purging,” blocking legitimate registrations, and wrongly shunting millions to “provisional” ballots that will never be counted.
Trump signaled the use of “Crosscheck” when he claimed the election is “rigged” because “people are voting many, many times.” His operative Kobach, who also advised Trump on building a wall on the southern border, devised a list of 7.2 million “potential” double voters—1.1 million of which were removed from the voter rolls by Tuesday. The list is loaded overwhelmingly with voters of color and the poor. Here's a sample of the list
Those accused of criminal double voting include, for example, Donald Alexander Webster Jr. of Ohio who is accused of voting a second time in Virginia as Donald EUGENE Webster SR.
Note: Watch the four-minute video summary of Crosscheck. The investigation and explanation of these methods of fixing the vote can be found in my book and film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: a Tale of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits (2016).
No, not everyone on the list loses their vote. But this was not the only racially poisonous tactic that accounted for this purloined victory by Trump and GOP candidates.
For example, in the swing state of North Carolina, it was reported that 6,700 Black folk lost their registrations because their registrations had been challenged by a group called Voter Integrity Project (VIP). VIP sent letters to households in Black communities “do not forward.” If the voter had moved within the same building, or somehow did not get their mail (e.g. if their name was not on a mail box), they were challenged as “ghost” voters. GOP voting officials happily complied with VIP with instant cancellation of registrations.
The 6,700 identified in two counties were returned to the rolls through a lawsuit. However, there was not one mention in the press that VIP was also behind Crosscheck in North Carolina; nor that its leader, Col. Jay Delancy, whom I’ve tracked for years has previously used this vote thievery, known as “caging,” for years. Doubtless the caging game was wider and deeper than reported. And by the way, caging, as my Rolling Stone co-author, attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr., tells me, is “a felony, it’s illegal, and punishable by high fines and even jail time.”
There is still much investigation to do. For example, there are millions of “provisional” ballots, “spoiled” (invalidated) ballots and ballots rejected from the approximately 30 million mailed in. Unlike reporting in Britain, US media does not report the ballots that are rejected and tossed out—because, after all, as Joe Biden says, “Our elections are the envy of the world.” Only in Kazakhstan, Joe.
While there is a great deal of work to do, much documentation still to analyze, we’ll have to pry it from partisan voting chiefs who stamp the scrub lists, Crosscheck lists and ballot records, “confidential.”
But, the evidence already in our hands makes me sadly confident in saying, Jim Crow, not the voters, elected Mr. Trump.
What about those exit polls?
Exit polls are the standard by which the US State Department measures the honesty of foreign elections. Exit polling is, historically, deadly accurate. The bane of pre-election polling is that pollsters must adjust for the likelihood of a person voting. Exit polls solve the problem.
But three times in US history, pollsters have had to publicly flagellate themselves for their “errors.” In 2000, exit polls gave Al Gore the win in Florida; in 2004, exit polls gave Kerry the win in Ohio, and now, in swing states, exit polls gave the presidency to Hillary Clinton.
So how could these multi-million-dollar Ph.d-directed statisticians with decades of experience get exit polls so wrong?
Answer: they didn’t. The polls in Florida in 2000 were accurate. That’s because exit pollsters can only ask, “How did you vote?” What they don’t ask, and can’t, is, “Was your vote counted.”
In 2000, in Florida, GOP Secretary of State Katherine Harris officially rejected 181,173 ballots, as “spoiled” because their chads were hung and other nonsense excuses. Those ballots overwhelmingly were marked for Al Gore. The exit polls included those 181,173 people who thought they had voted – but their vote didn’t count. In other words, the exit polls accurately reflected whom the voters chose, not what Katherine Harris chose.
In 2004, a similar number of votes were invalidated (including an enormous pile of “provisional” ballots) by Ohio’s GOP Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell. Again, the polls reflected that Kerry was the choice of 51% of the voters. But the exit polls were “wrong” because they didn’t reflect the ballots invalidated by Blackwell.
Notably, two weeks after the 2004 US election, the US State Department refused the recognize the Ukraine election results because the official polls contradicted the exit polls.
And here we go again. 2016: Hillary wins among those queried as they exit the polling station—yet Trump is declared winner in GOP-controlled swings states. And, once again, the expert pollsters are forced to apologize—when they should be screaming, “Fraud! Here’s the evidence the vote was fixed!”
Now there’s a new trope to explain away the exit polls that gave Clinton the win. Supposedly, Trump voters were ashamed to say they voted for Trump. Really? ON WHAT PLANET? For Democracy Now! and Rolling Stone I was out in several swing states. In Ohio, yes, a Black voter may have been reluctant to state support for Trump. But a white voter in the exurbs of Dayton, where the Trump signs grew on lawns like weeds, and the pews of the evangelical mega churches were slathered with Trump and GOP brochures, risked getting spat on if they even whispered, “Hillary.”
This country is violently divided, but in the end, there simply aren’t enough white guys to elect Trump nor a Republican Senate. The only way they could win was to eliminate the votes of non-white guys—and they did so by tossing Black provisional ballots into the dumpster, ID laws that turn away students—the list goes on. It’s a web of complex obstacles to voting by citizens of color topped by that lying spider, Crosscheck.
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How America Got It So Wrong |
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Sunday, 13 November 2016 09:08 |
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Taibbi writes: "Trump enters the White House as a lone wrecking ball of conspiratorial ideas, a one-man movement unto himself who owes almost nothing to traditional Republicans and can be expected to be anything but a figurehead."
Donald Trump enters the White House as a lone wrecking ball of conspiratorial ideas, a one-man movement unto himself who owes almost nothing to traditional Republicans. (photo: Molly Riley/AP)
How America Got It So Wrong
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
13 November 16
Journalists and politicians blew off the warning signs of a Trump presidency – now, we all must pay the price
 uesday, November 8th, early afternoon. Outside the Trump Tower in Manhattan, a man in the telltale red Make America Great Again hat taps me on the shoulder.
"You press?" he says, looking at a set of lanyards around my neck.
I nod.
"Fuck yourself," he says, thrusting a middle finger in my face. He then turns around and walks a boy of about five away from me down Fifth Avenue, a hand gently tousling his son's hair.
This was before Donald Trump's historic victory. The message afterward no doubt would have been the same. There's no way to overstate the horror of what just went down. Sure, we've had some unstable characters enter the White House. JFK had health problems that led him to take amphetamine shots during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Reagan's attention span was so short, the CIA had to make mini-movies to brief him on foreign leaders. George W. Bush not only didn't read the news, he wasn't interested in it ("What's in the newspapers worth worrying about?" he once asked, without irony).
But all of these men were just fronts for one or the other half of the familiar alternating power structure, surrounded by predictable, relatively sober confederates who managed the day-to-day. Trump enters the White House as a lone wrecking ball of conspiratorial ideas, a one-man movement unto himself who owes almost nothing to traditional Republicans and can be expected to be anything but a figurehead. He takes office at a time when the chief executive is vastly more powerful than ever before, with nearly unlimited authority to investigate, surveil, torture and assassinate foreigners and even U.S. citizens – powers that didn't seem to trouble people much when they were granted to Barack Obama.
Shunned during election season by many in his own party, President-elect Trump's closest advisers are a collection of crackpots and dilettantes who will make Bush's cabinet look like the Nobel committee. The head of his EPA transition team, Myron Ebell, is a noted climate-change denier. Pyramid enthusiast and stabbing expert Ben Carson is already being mentioned as a possible Health and Human Services chief. Rudy Giuliani, probably too unhinged by now for even a People's Court reboot, might be attorney general. God only knows who might end up being Supreme Court nominees; we can only hope they turn out to be lawyers, or at least people who played lawyers onscreen. And sitting behind this fun-house nightmare of executive-branch worthies (which Politico speculates will be one of the more "eclectic" cabinets ever) will be a rubber-stamping all-Republican legislature that will attract the loving admiration of tinhorn despots from Minsk to Beijing.
Trump made idiots of us all. From the end of primary season onward, I felt sure Trump was en route to ruining, perhaps forever, the Republican Party as a force in modern American life. Now the Republicans are more dominant than ever, and it is the Democratic Party that is shattered and faces an uncertain future.
And they deserve it. The Democratic Party's failure to keep Donald Trump out of the White House in 2016 will go down as one of the all-time examples of insular arrogance. The party not only spent most of the past two years ignoring the warning signs of the Trump rebellion, but vilifying anyone who tried to point them out. It denounced all rumors of its creeping unpopularity as vulgar lies and bullied anyone who dared question its campaign strategy by calling them racists, sexists and agents of Vladimir Putin's Russia.
But the party's willful blindness symbolized a similar arrogance across the American intellectual elite. Trump's election was a true rebellion, directed at anyone perceived to be part of "the establishment." The target group included political leaders, bankers, industrialists, academics, Hollywood actors, and, of course, the media. And we all closed our eyes to what we didn't want to see.
The almost universal failure among political pros to predict Trump's victory – the few exceptions, conspicuously, were people who hailed from rust-belt states, like Michael Moore – spoke to an astonishing cultural blindness. Those of us whose job it is to cover campaigns long ago grew accustomed to treating The People as a kind of dumb animal, whose behavior could sometimes be unpredictable but, in the end, almost always did what it was told.
Whenever we sought insight into the motives and tendencies of this elusive creature, our first calls were always to other eggheads like ourselves. We talked to pollsters, think-tankers, academics, former campaign strategists, party spokes-hacks, even other journalists. Day after day, our political talk shows consisted of one geek in a suit interviewing another geek in a suit about the behaviors of pipe fitters and store clerks and cops in Florida, Wisconsin, Ohio and West Virginia. We'd stand over glitzy video maps and discuss demographic data points like we were trying to determine the location of a downed jetliner.
And the whole time, The People, whose intentions we were wondering so hard about, were all around us, listening to themselves being talked about like some wild, illiterate beast.
When 60 Minutes did its election-eve story about the mood of the electorate, they had to call up a familiar Beltway figure, pollster Frank Luntz, to put together a focus group. Luntz's purpose was to take the white-hot rage and disgust hurled at him by voters on both sides of the aisle during the "focus group" portion, and translate it all into a media-speak during the sit-down. Luntz did his job and gave Steve Kroft his sound-bite diagnosis of The People's temperature. "That's not blowing off steam," he said. "That is a deep-seated resentment."
Deep-seated resentment. There was a catchy, succinct line, over which we could all collectively stroke our chins in quiet contemplation. That's as opposed to what the voters intended, which was to sock us all so hard for our snobbism and intellectual myopia that those very chins of ours would get driven straight through the backs of our skulls.
There was a great deal of talk in this campaign about the inability of the "low-information" voter to understand the rhetoric of candidates who spoke above a sixth-grade language level. We were told by academics and analysts that Trump's public addresses rated among the most simplistic political rhetoric ever recorded.
But that story cut in both directions, in a way few of us silver-tongued media types ever thought about. The People didn't speak our language, true. But that also meant we didn't speak theirs.
Beavis and Butthead creator Mike Judge's Idiocracy, ostensibly a comedy but destined now to be remembered as a horror movie, was often cited this past year as prophecy. The film described a future dystopia of idiot Americans physically unable to understand the tepid grammatical speech of a half-smart time traveler from the past. Many reporters, myself included, found themselves thinking about this film when we heard voters saying they were literally incapable of understanding the words coming out of Hillary Clinton's mouth.
"When [Trump] talks, I actually understand what he's saying," a young Pennsylvanian named Trent Gower told me at a Trump event a month ago. "But, like, when fricking Hillary Clinton talks, it just sounds like a bunch of bullshit."
So these Trump voters had a comprehension problem. But we were just as bad. We couldn't understand what they were saying to us. We refused to accept every signal about whom they hated, and how much. Why? Because Trump's voters were speaking a language that has been taboo in America for decades, if not forever.
Nobody in this country knows how to talk about class. America is like a giant manor estate where the aristocrats don't know they're aristocrats and the peasants imagine themselves undiscovered millionaires. And America's cultural elite, trained for so long to think in terms of artificial distinctions like Republicans and Democrats instead of more natural divisions like haves and have-nots, refused until it was too late to grasp the meaning of the rage-storm headed over the wall.
Just like the leaders of the Republican Party, who simply never believed its electorate wouldn't drop and roll over on command when the time came, we media types never believed all that anger out there was real, or at least gathered in enough force to matter.
Most of us smarty-pants analysts never thought Trump could win because we saw his run as a half-baked white-supremacist movement fueled by last-gasp, racist frustrations of America's shrinking silent majority. Sure, Trump had enough jackbooted nut jobs and conspiracist stragglers under his wing to ruin the Republican Party. But surely there was no way he could topple America's reigning multicultural consensus. How could he? After all, the country had already twice voted in an African-American Democrat to the White House.
Yes, Trump's win was a triumph of the hideous racism, sexism and xenophobia that has always run through American society. But his coalition also took aim at the neoliberal gentry's pathetic reliance on proxies to communicate with flyover America. They fed on the widespread visceral disdain red-staters felt toward the very people Hillary Clinton's campaign enlisted all year to speak on its behalf: Hollywood actors, big-ticket musicians, Beltway activists, academics, and especially media figures.
Trump's rebellion was born at the intersection of two toxic American myths, the post-racial society and the classless society.
Candidate Trump told a story about a conspiracy of cultural and financial elites bent on finishing off a vanishing white middle-class nirvana, first by shipping jobs overseas and then by waving hordes of crime-prone, bomb-tossing immigrants over the border.
These elites lived in both parties, Trump warned. The Republicans were tools of job-exporting fat cats who only pretended to be tough on immigration and trade in order to win votes, when all they really cared about were profits. The Democrats were tools of the same interests, who subsisted politically on the captured votes of hoodwinked minorities, preaching multiculturalism while practicing globalism. Both groups, Trump insisted, were out of touch with the real American voter. Neither party saw the awesome potential of this story to upend our political system.
Republicans had flirted with racist (and sexist) rhetoric for decades, refusing to the last to understand how dangerous this behavior was. They never imagined their voters would one day demand that they act on all this race-baiting talk. They believed their own pablum about racism being a thing of the past and reverse discrimination being the true threat to the American polity.
Meanwhile, the Democratic leadership, even as it was increasingly indebted to banks and corporations, never imagined that it could be the target of a class uprising. How could we be seen as aristocrats? We get union endorsements! We're the party of FDR! We're pro-civil rights! And so on.
Trump drove his tens of millions of followers right through each of these major-party blind spots. He called the Republicans' bluff on race almost from the start with his crazy Mexican wall idea, which instantly positioned the rest of the party field as nationalist pretenders. As for the Democrats, he lucked into a race against a politician he would portray as a 30-year symbol of a Beltway-insider consensus, one he said had left Middle America behind through trade deals like NAFTA.
Way back in February, after following Trump in New Hampshire, I guessed at the probable nominee's general-election strategy: "Trump will surely argue that the Clintons are the other half of the dissolute-conspiracy story he's been selling, representing a workers' party that abandoned workers and turned the presidency into a vast cash-for-access enterprise, avoiding scrutiny by making Washington into Hollywood East and turning labor leaders and journalists alike into star-struck courtiers."
Back then, I thought Trump had a real chance at the presidency. But later I made the same mistake most every other reporter did. I listened to polls and media outlets, instead of people. I thought Trump's maladroit and ridiculous general-election campaign, in which he went back on virtually every major primary-season promise while being revealed through seemingly hourly scandals as one of the world's most corrupt and personally repulsive individuals, would do him in. He would lose and lose huge, ending up a footnote to history, having served no purpose beyond the destruction of the Republican Party. Conventional wisdom said so, and wasn't conventional wisdom always right?
Not quite. We journalists made the same mistake the Republicans made, the same mistake the Democrats made. We were too sure of our own influence, too lazy to bother hearing things firsthand, and too in love with ourselves to imagine that so many people could hate and distrust us as much as they apparently do.
It's too late for any of us to fix this colossal misread and lapse in professional caution. Now all we can do is wait to see how much this failure of vision will cost the public we supposedly serve. Just like the politicians, our job was to listen, and we talked instead. Now America will do its own talking for a while. The world may never forgive us for not seeing this coming.
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Donald Trump's Threat to Press Freedom and Why It Matters |
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Sunday, 13 November 2016 09:05 |
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Excerpt: "With little more than two months before Trump takes the oath of office, the threat to the media - and the public's right to know - is reality."
Supporters of Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump scream and gesture at members of the media in a press area at a campaign rally in Cincinnati, Ohio, October 13. (photo: Mike Segar/Reuters)
Donald Trump's Threat to Press Freedom and Why It Matters
By Mirren Gidda and Zach Schonfeld, Newsweek
13 November 16
 ess than a month before the U.S. presidential election, the Committee to Protect Journalists issued an unprecedented statement denouncing the then-Republican nominee. “[Donald] Trump has insulted and vilified the press and has made his opposition to the media a centerpiece of his campaign,” said the committee, a New York-based organization that promotes press freedom. “A Trump presidency would represent a threat to press freedom in the United States.”
With little more than two months before Trump takes the oath of office, the threat to the media—and the public’s right to know—is reality. However, President-elect Trump may find a thicket of laws and Supreme Court precedents limit his maneuvering—slight comfort for those working to protect a free press.
‘Definitely Reason for Concern’
At the president-elect’s often incendiary rallies, Trump frequently blasted the press as “dishonest,” “disgusting” and “scum.” The crowds that gathered to watch him would often turn and jeer at the reporters, hemmed in the press pen.
On the internet, the vitriol from Trump fans continued. In April, the journalist Julia Ioffe received a barrage of anti-Semitic abuse and death threats after she wrote a critical profile of Trump’s wife Melania for GQ magazine. In October, a Trump supporter sent Newsweek ’s Kurt Eichenwald ( who has been vocal about his epilepsy) a video that triggers seizures. Other Newsweek staffers have received anti-Semitic slurs on Twitter and memes about hanging journalists from trees.
Even the few news outlets who backed Trump weren’t always safe. In March, Florida police charged Trump’s then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski with battery after he appeared to grab Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields as she approached Trump to ask him a question. (Florida ultimately decided not to prosecute Lewandowski, and he landed a job at CNN.)
Amid the threats and abuse, Trump—who once gave interviews to any outlet that would pay him attention—started turning on the press. At a Texas rally in February, Trump made a promise. If elected president, he said, “I'm going to open up our libel laws so when [journalists] write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.”
Could he do this? Probably not, says Craig Aaron, the president of the U.S. advocacy group Free Press. Aaron points out that the U.S.’s free speech protections through law and Supreme Court precedent make it difficult for a public figure to sue the press and win. “And as he’ll learn—if he hasn’t already—there’s no more public figure than a president,” Aaron says. “Though I suppose in theory he could badger journalists with frivolous lawsuits.”
But whether Trump’s threat was realistic, it had a chilling effect on news organizations. His rise was “the most distressing campaign in memory, from the perspective of press freedom,” says Suzanne Nossel, the executive director of PEN American Center, which advocates for free expression. In short, there has probably never been a presidential candidate so openly and publicly hostile to the press.
Now that he’s won, “there's definitely reason for concern,” Nossel says. “If the campaign and his past history are any indication, this will be a president who is dismissive of the role of the press. Accusatory. Punitive in his treatment of journalists. Arbitrary. Secretive when he wants to be.”
Throughout the campaign, Trump denied press credentials to a range of news organizations, from BuzzFeed to Politico to the Washington Post . At the time, Post editor Marty Baron described Trump’s ban as “a repudiation of the role of a free and independent press.” (Perhaps keen to get back in Trump’s good graces, the Post ’s owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, recently tweeted : “Congratulations to @realDonaldTrump. I for one give him my most open mind and wish him great success in his service to the country.”)
Precedents Protecting the Press
Trump, of course, has not yet assumed the powers of the presidency. But his refusal to allow a press pool to accompany him to his meeting with President Barack Obama on Thursday suggested that his hostility toward reporters has not waned. In newsrooms all over the country, journalists are now wondering: What happens to a free press under President Trump?
First, the good news. The U.S. Constitution, and a succession of Supreme Court rulings, will ensure that the press is somewhat shielded against the caprices of a man who has openly mused about suing news outlets who report critically on him.
“The First Amendment guarantees that Congress can make no law that abridges the freedom of the press,” writes Andrea Hatcher, associate professor and chair of the department of politics at the University of the South, in an email to Newsweek. “A free press is part of the American identity. And textual Constitutional guarantees have always been rather sacred.”
In recent decades, the Supreme Court has consistently ruled to protect the press’s freedom. Camila Vergara, a PhD candidate in political science at Columbia University and an adjunct lecturer in political theory at New York University, outlined three landmark decisions to Newsweek that she said would keep news outlets free to criticize Trump.
The first ruling came in 1931, in Near v. Minnesota , when the Supreme Court found that a state law allowing prior restraint of the press—essentially, censorship in advance—was unconstitutional.
The second—which could stymie Trump’s February promise to sue journalists and “win lots of money”—was in 1964 with New York Times v. Sullivan, which established the “actual malice” standard. The court unanimously decided that for a public figure to win a libel suit against the media, he or she had to prove the outlet acted with “actual malice”—essentially, that the report was known to be inaccurate or that it was published with reckless disregard for its veracity.
Finally, the third decision, again involving the New York Times , saw the court rule in 1971 that the U.S. government (the other plaintiff) could not stop the Times and the Washington Post from publishing the then-classified Pentagon Papers, documents which detailed the nation’s involvement in Vietnam. The ruling, Vergara says, “puts the burden of proof on the government, to prove that publication of sensitive information would undermine national security.”
In other words, the Supreme Court has had the press’s back. The trouble is that there’s a vacancy on the court, created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February. Two of the sitting judges, Anthony Kennedy and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, are over 80 years old. Should they die or retire, Trump will have the chance to appoint two more justices to the bench. (In September, sources claimed that Trump wanted to nominate the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel —a man who is also notorious for bankrolling the lawsuit that sued Gawker out of existence—to the court. Spokespeople for both Trump and Thiel denied the reports.)
“What now is frightening—for a free press and other freedoms we hold dear—is that the president is positioned to create a court that can interpret the Constitution in ways that undermine our liberty—even those that we thought to be inviolable,” writes Hatcher. “Unified ideological control of the three branches of government, plus many of the state governments, means that institutional checks and balances are more vulnerable than they have ever been.”
Intimidation and Threats
Even if the Supreme Court continues to protect the First Amendment, and with it the U.S. press, there are other ways that Trump could limit journalistic freedoms. The pattern is intimidation and threats. In September, for instance, he threatened a lawsuit against the New York Times .
The following month, when the Times published an article about the women accusing Trump of assault, the candidate claimed he was going to sue the newspaper and the women who went on the record.
He never pursued these lawsuits. The discovery process would have been too damaging, as commentators noted, and he would not have had much of a case: The Times story was a piece of newsworthy reporting on someone who is obviously a public figure. So the newspaper refused to back down. “We welcome the opportunity to have a court set him straight,” the Times’ lawyer wrote in a letter to Trump's counsel.
But Trump’s intimidation was enough to get his point across. Other news outlets lack the resources that the Times has to defend itself against a potential libel suit (a more vulnerable newspaper with lesser resources might have backed down). Plus, “the election outcome has taught him that going to war with the press works, so why would he change now?” says Aaron. “I suspect Trump will use the power of his office in the more predictable but no less problematic ways we’ve glimpsed on the campaign trail: intimidating journalists, turning his bully-pulpit power against them and trying to delegitimize the role of an adversarial press at every opportunity.” He also predicts Trump will expand the Obama administration’s war on whistleblowers.
Nossel is worried but cautiously optimistic.
“He doesn't seem to understand or respect the principles of press freedom that is so important in this country,” she says. “Maybe that'll change. There's a certain solemnity of responsibility that's maybe setting in for him now.” Regardless, her organization will be watching. “I would be surprised if we don't have a busy time ahead of us,” Nossel says.
‘Don’t Normalize; Scrutinize’
To some people, these concerns might seem trivial. Across the U.S., marginalized groups more vulnerable than journalists are terrified for their future—with some ethnic minorities already falling victim to abuse. But a free press is one of several entities that gives voice to the voiceless. If a Trump administration restricts and limits it, the effects will reverberate far beyond the news organizations.
So what’s the plan? How can journalists prepare themselves for the age of Trump?
Aaron offers some advice. “Don't normalize; scrutinize,” he says. “Don't be a stenographer. Stay away from the press conferences and golf courses and dig into the documents, appointments and policies —including policies that will shape journalism, the internet and the media business.”
What else? “Stand up for those asking President Trump hard questions. Show solidarity with everyone committing acts of journalism even if they don't have fancy credentials. Get a good lawyer on speed dial. And encrypt everything.”
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Surveillance Self-Defense Against the Trump Administration |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=32965"><span class="small">Micah Lee, The Intercept</span></a>
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Sunday, 13 November 2016 09:04 |
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Lee writes: "On Tuesday, Americans handed the U.S. presidency to a racist, xenophobic, authoritarian, climate-science-denying, misogynistic, revenge-obsessed ego-maniac - and with it control over a vast and all-too-unaccountable intelligence apparatus; and in a speech less than three weeks ago, Trump promised to sue all of the women who have come forward with sexual assault accusations against him."
Donald Trump. (photo: AP)
Surveillance Self-Defense Against the Trump Administration
By Micah Lee, The Intercept
13 November 16
 n Tuesday, Americans handed the U.S. presidency to a racist, xenophobic, authoritarian, climate-science-denying, misogynistic, revenge-obsessed ego-maniac — and with it control over a vast and all-too-unaccountable intelligence apparatus; and in a speech less than three weeks ago, Trump promised to sue all of the women who have come forward with sexual assault accusations against him.
Trump has repeatedly shown utter disrespect for the rule of law. He doesn’t believe in freedom of religion. He advocates torture. He has said he’ll instruct his Justice Department to investigate Black Lives Matter activists, and it’s likely he’ll appoint Rudy Giuliani, of New York City’s racist and unconstitutional “stop-and-frisk” fame, as his attorney general to do the investigating. The New York Times also reports that “Mr. Trump still privately muses about all the ways he will punish his enemies after Election Day.”
With Trump eager to misuse his power and get revenge on his perceived enemies, it’s reasonable to conclude there will be a parallel increase in abuse of power in law enforcement and the intelligence community. Activists who put their bodies on the line trying to protect basic rights — freedom of religion, freedom of speech, civil rights, reproductive rights, voting rights, privacy rights — will face the brunt of it.
Thanks to 16 years of relentless and illegal expansion of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, Trump is about to have more tools of surveillance at his disposal than any tyrant ever has. Those preparing for the long fight ahead must protect themselves, even if doing so can be technically complicated.
The best approach varies from situation to situation, but here are some first steps that activists and other concerned citizens should take.
Encrypt Your Phone
If there is a risk you will be detained on the street, the best way to protect the information in your phone is to encrypt it, and require a strong password to unlock it. (Also, check out EFF’s detailed technical and legal advice for protecting your phone while protesting, and what to do if you get arrested at a protest.)
All iPhones are encrypted by default, but the encryption is only useful if you use it correctly. Make sure you set a long, random passcode — it should be at least 6 digits, and it should be 11 digits if you think an agency like the FBI may invest resources into breaking into it (see this article for details and rationale behind this iPhone passcode strategy). As inconvenient as it is, don’t use Apple’s fingerprint technology Touch ID to unlock your phone; law enforcement can force you to use your finger, but they can’t force you to give up your passcode.
If you use Android, go into your Settings app, navigate to the Security section, and encrypt your phone from there. Before you can encrypt your phone you need to set a strong pattern, numeric PIN, or password for unlocking it.
It may be annoying at first to have to type something complicated just to unlock your phone, but once you get started your muscle memory will quickly take over, and this is the only way to truly protect the data stored on your phone. And an important note: if you forget your passcode and can’t unlock your phone, there’s no way you will ever recover the data on it (that’s kind of the point of encryption), and you’ll have to factory reset your phone to keep using it. So when you first switch to a strong passcode, write it down on a piece of paper and keep it in your wallet until you’re sure you’ve committed it to memory, and then destroy the paper.
Ditch Your Phone At Sensitive Moments
Even if you take steps to secure your phone, you shouldn’t trust it too much. If you’re having an activist meeting where you might discuss secret plans, such as organizing nonviolent direct action, everyone should leave their phones somewhere outside of earshot of the meeting. If one phone has been hacked, it could be recording the entire conversation without anyone knowing.
And while phone are indispensable tools for organizing and secure communications, they unfortunately are also tracking devices. If you need to hide your location while you do especially high-risk work, such as whistleblowing, it might be better to leave your phone at home.
Switch from Facebook Groups To End-to-End Encrypted Groups
If you’re part of an activist organization or affinity group that has internal strategy and planning discussions over Facebook (or any other non-encrypted service), you should stop immediately. All of the members of your group, and everything that anyone posts to it, is just a legal request away from being used against you.
Instead, you should get everyone in your activist Facebook groups to switch to an end-to-end encrypted group-messaging app, such as Signal, WhatsApp, or Semaphor.
To create a Signal or WhatsApp group, you need to have the phone numbers of everyone in your group in your phone. Semaphor is kind of like an end-to-end encrypted version of Slack or HipChat — you need to create a new Semaphor team and invite everyone else to join it, and then within that team you can create different channels and send private messages.
All of the messages you send to groups of people using these apps will be end-to-end encrypted. No one, not even the app developers who have access to the servers these apps use, will be able to read the plaintext of your messages, except for the other members of your group.
But while the messages are encrypted, the list of members of the group might not be, and this is also important information to protect. WhatsApp and Semaphor might be able to hand over group membership information if the government comes knocking.
On the other hand, the developer of Signal, Open Whisper Systems, is way ahead of the game here. The one time they received a request for data about a Signal user, all they were technically able to hand over to the FBI was the account creation time and the last date that the user connected to the Signal server — they didn’t have the users’ contacts, they didn’t have a list of groups they were in or members of those groups. The company also successfully fought a gag order designed to keep them from publicizing the request. That said, Signal groups can be buggy, have scaling issues when groups get too big, and at the moment there are far fewer people using Signal than there are using WhatsApp.
(If you’re using Signal, you might also be interested in these Signal security tips — most of the information is current, but there are some recent features that are not covered, including “safety numbers” now used to verify the privacy of your conversations, disappearing messages, and desktop support for iPhone users.)
Also, be careful who you trust. The FBI has a long history of recruiting informants to spy on activists. Since law enforcement can’t spy on your group conversations by asking these companies to hand over your messages, like they can with Facebook groups, their next easiest move is to infiltrate your group.
Prioritize Security When Building Activist Sites
A lot of activists set up web-based forums to communicate. If you’re responsible for setting such a forum up, make sure you take special care to secure it. Always make sure you use the latest version of the software that powers your website, as well as any plugins you’re using, and apply security updates promptly.
Turn on the web encryption technology HTTPS, and follow all of the best practices like strong cipher suites and HTTP Strict Transport Security. The certificate authority Let’s Encrypt makes this simple and free. Refuse to use forums on websites that still use HTTP, since the U.S. government spies on everything you post to those, including your password, when you log in, and makes it searchable in databases like XKEYSCORE.
Even with HTTPS, your group can still be spied on. At the very least, the government can see exactly which people are visiting your website. You might consider making this much more difficult by taking your website off the open internet completely and making it only accessible as a Tor onion service. Everyone in your group will need to use Tor Browser to access it, but this will make eavesdropping on you, or even realizing that you’re part of a group, much more difficult. The activist tech collective Riseup has published a best practices guide for running Tor onion services.
Secure Your Accounts and Computer
Improve your password habits: I recently wrote some email security tips for the Clinton campaign, but these tips also apply to everyone. Use strong passwords, use a password manager so you can use a unique password for each site without having to memorize them all, and turn on two-factor authentication for applications that support it.
Turn on full disk encryption: If someone gets physical access to your computer and you aren’t using disk encryption, they can very easily steal all of your files. It doesn’t matter if you have a good password or not because they can simply remove your hard drive to access all of your data. Follow these instructions for encrypting your laptop in Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
Install all updates promptly: Updates fix security bugs, so every day you haven’t installed them is a day you’re vulnerable to attack. People all too quickly dismiss windows that tell them their software is out-of-date — don’t ignore these. Update all of your software, and it will be much, much harder for anyone to hack you.
Use virtual machines to compartmentalize: You can get hacked by installing the wrong program or opening the wrong email attachment, and if that happens the attacker can access all of your files, log your keystrokes, take screenshots, and even listen to your microphone and watch through your webcam. It’s possible to isolate the most risky files and programs from other parts of your computer using technology called virtual machines. This article explains how to use them.
Use Qubes To Protect Your Computer
If your activism involves handling secrets — planning nonviolent direct action campaigns, gathering evidence for a lawsuit, trafficking in leaked documents — and it’s conceivable that you might be targeted by the FBI, CIA, or NSA, you should be using the open source operating system called Qubes.
Qubes is not the simplest to switch to if you’re coming from Windows or a Mac, but if you have secrets to protect it’s absolutely worth it. With Qubes, you can compartmentalize your computer to work exactly as you want, so that if one part of it gets hacked, the rest of it remains secure. Here are some of the things you can do with Qubes but that you can’t do with Windows, Mac OS X, or normal Linux distributions:
- It’s the only operating system that can protect you from vulnerabilities in your computer’s drivers and from malicious USB sticks that you plug into your computer.
- With Qubes you can easily open any untrustworthy document, such as all of your email attachments, using “disposable VMs,” or virtual machines. If the document contains malicious software, the software will be contained, and it will be completely gone as soon as you close the window.
- You can convert PDF files to “trusted PDF” files, which uses the Qubes sandbox technology to remove any potential malware from a PDF before you open it or send it to your friends.
- You can create “vaults” on your computer, special components that are isolated from the rest of your computer and never have access to the internet. This is perfect for storing sensitive documents — if your web browser gets hacked, the attacker won’t be able to access them — and also for storing secrets such as password databases.
- You can use Tor Browser more securely than you can in other operating systems, so that even if someone manages to exploit a Tor Browser bug and hack you, like the FBI has done in the past, they still won’t be able to deanonymize you.
Qubes is a relatively new operating system, and usability isn’t its strongest point yet. It requires a lot of typing commands into terminal windows if you want to be a power user, so it’s not for everyone. If you’d like to learn more about Qubes, you might be interested in watching this half-hour video tour explaining how it works.
But if you’re looking to invest time and energy into securing your computer from hackers (and you should, if you’re taking a big risk with your activism), Qubes is absolutely the place to start.
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t is time for a New Democratic Party.
