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The US Secretary of State has lauded the courage of the Turkish people who defended their country and democracy during last years military coup attempt, which Ankara pinned on the followers of US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen.

Nearly a year ago, the Turkish people brave men and women stood up against coup plotters and defended their democracy, Rex Tillerson said during a speech at World Petroleum Congress in Istanbul.

READ MORE: US politicians, bureaucrats & academics caught in Turkeys failed coup attempt probe

I take this moment to recognize their courage and honor the victims of the events of July 15, 2016. It was on that day that the Turkish people exercised their rights under the Turkish constitution, defended their place in a prosperous Turkey, and we remember those who were injured or died in that event, he added.

Last July, a rogue faction of the Turkish military attempted to overthrow the government using tanks and attack helicopters. As the night unfolded, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on his civilian supporters to take to the streets of Istanbul.

Tens of thousands of Turks confronted the armed plotters to prevent the overthrow of the government. At least 265 people were killed, including 104 pro-coup participants, while 1,440 people were injured in military action in Istanbul and Ankara.

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Washingtons relations with Turkey have been strained following the failed coup attempt, which Ankara pinned on political dissident Gulen. Turkey has demanded the extradition of the cleric, but the US has refused to honor the request. Gulen, who has lived in Pennsylvania for many years, repeatedly denied any connections with the coup attempt.

Ankara, has in the past, criticized the US over its attitude to the coup attempt. The Turkish leadership even implied that American intelligence had played a role in the failed plot.

Instead of thanking this nation that quashed the coup in the name of democracy, on the contrary, you are taking sides with the coup plotters, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in reference to the US in July last year. The putschist is already in your country.

My people know who is behind this scheme they know who the superior intelligence behind it is," Erdogan added at the time.

READ MORE: 100s of thousands rally in Istanbul ending 25-day march of Turkish opposition leader

The failed coup attempt led to a massive crackdown in Turkey and saw thousands of people, including military officers, judges, and academics arrested. Critics, however, believe that the plot was used by Erdogans government as a convenient pretext to crush any opposition and dissent.

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Tillerson honors 'victims & defenders of Turkish democracy' during failed coup attempt - RT

Poland's former president Lech Walesa, a democracy hero, has been hospitalized with heart problems in his Baltic coast home city of Gdansk, his son said Saturday.

Jaroslaw Walesa told The Associated Press via text message that his father was feeling "unfortunately weak." It was not immediately known when he could be discharged from the heart diseases ward of the Gdansk University Clinic.

The 73-year-old Walesa on Thursday attended a speech by President Donald Trump in Warsaw. He was booed by many in a crowd that supported the current government, which criticizes Walesa's role in Poland's politics.

Walesa strongly criticizes the government, saying its policies threaten democracy and hurt Poland's ties with the European Union's leading nations.

On Monday he had been expected to lead a demonstration against monthly observances that the ruling populist party holds in memory of President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others killed in a 2010 plane crash in Russia. The head of the ruling party is Kaczynski's twin brother, Jaroslaw, who is Poland's most powerful politician.

Walesa says the monthly observances are used to rally support for the ruling party.

The protest planned for downtown Warsaw will proceed even if Walesa cannot attend, said another pro-democracy activist, Wladyslaw Frasyniuk.

Walesa in 1980 led a massive strike against Poland's communist authorities, giving rise to the Solidarity freedom movement. Solidarity peacefully ousted the communists from power in 1989, ushering in democracy.

But Kaczynski claims that the transition included a secret deal that allowed the communists to retain some influence and wealth.

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Poland democracy hero Lech Walesa hospitalized, said 'weak' - ABC News

This week saw President Trump cross yet another line in his use of his Twitter account.Trumptweeteda meme of himself symbolically beating up CNN.While to some it might have appeared to be a funny way to epitomize Trumps feud with CNN, to many the meme was aggressive, immature and inflammatory.CNN took the attacks seriously andreleased a statementstating, It is a sad day when the President of the United States encourages violence against reporters.

There are lots of questions to be asked about the tweet, not the least of which is what it tells us about the judgment of the president and those who work with him.But the real story here is not about Trump; its about the increasing power and presence of alt-right communication on various social media platforms, from Twitter to YouTube to Reddit to Facebook.

What is interesting is the way that rants and memes and other alt-right tirades have major success in shaping public opinion. And while there is a through line between these outbursts and fake news, it is important to point out that the rants are likely far more influential than fake news in shaping political perception.

This means that the real lesson for CNN and other mainstream news outlets is not that the president is immature enough to sharea stupid meme attacking the newsbut rather that their focus on fake news has distracted them from the real story: the rise of emotional, aggressive, inflammatory, bigoted communication on social media and the power these posts have had in shaping the ideas of the Trump-supporting alt-right.

Well beyond the problem of fake news, which at least tried to pose as news, these posts are pure opinion, outburst and excess.There is nothing about these posts that even remotely compares to news reporting and thats why they are popular. At a moment in U.S. history wheretrust in the news is at a record low, we are seeing the growing power of individuals outside of traditional media circuits who have built a following by suggesting that their voices are more authentic and more accurate than thoseof the so-called liberal, elitist, majority-silencing news.

The key to the story is the connection between Trumps tweet and its original source.As Vox reported,the source was discovered to be a Reddit forum known for Islamophobia, racism, and frequently violent hate speech. It was originally posted on Reddits largest pro-Trump community.

The Reddit userHanAssholeSoloreleased the original GIF versionof the clip used in the presidents tweet, posting it to Reddits r/The_Donald. As Vox reports, the Reddit community known as The_Donald is both a huge and hugely controversial part of Reddit. It gained in popularity over the course of 2016, as Trumps presidential campaign gained momentum.

It had around 300,000 members back in November 2016.It has about 448,000 members today.

In November, shortly after the election, the New York Timespublished a profile of the subreddit calling it, one of the most influential communities within one of the most significant websites on the internet.The Times reported that according to its moderators, The_Donald was the largest, best and closest thing to an official campaign subreddit for Donald Trump 2016.Analysis of its posts showed that it was home to copious Islamophobia, trolling of liberals and near constant bashing of Hillary Clinton.

Just as the distinction between National Enquirer-type fake news and actual news has blurred for many citizens, there is increasing evidence that social media rants are playing a larger and larger role in creating the information that shapes public perceptions. As Vox puts it, theres a reason to take Trumps tweet seriously, and that is its direct connection to the violence the alt-right routinely espouses.

It isnt just the violence espoused by these sites that is the problem; it is the increasing power of the alt-right across these platforms and the way that these rants become mainstreamed as sources of public information that should cause us to worry.While attention has focused on the way that Trump and his team have demonized the free press, it is time to pay more attention to the encroaching power of the alt-right on social media to influence national dialogues.

Despite the fact that HanAssholeSolo attempted to use what I have calledThe Colbert Defenseof crying satire to back out of his offensive statements,the archive of his posts demonstrateshate speech in abundance and no regard for the people he might hurt. And it isnt just the one user that can be characterized that way. Overall the Reddit community on The_Donald frequently shares hate speech posts that are openlyIslamophobic, misogynistic, racist and outright offensive. This makes the fact thatbothTwitterandthe White Housedefended the tweet against accusations of hate speech and violence even more disturbing.

The story of the Trump tweet, the alt-right and Reddit is only one among many across social media platforms. For instance,a recent studybyZack Exley, Joan Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University, shows that political channels on YouTube are currently dominated by the alt-right.

Although often overlooked by mainstream media as too fringe to matter, Exleys research shows that these YouTube channels receive millions of views, espousing recycled National Socialist and white nationalist ideologies with a modern twist. His study explains how the alt-right uses these channels to build influence and spread its ideas among its audience, much in the same way that right-wing talk radio shaped public perceptions for decades.

Exley points outthat just as the left missed the growing role of right-wing talk radio, it is now missing the power of the alt-right on social media.

Exley claims that political rants on YouTube are dominated by right-wing personalities. It is a claim echoed byVice News too.The New York Times callsYouTube almost a kind of internet nation-state given the fact that it has more than a billion users. About 400 hours of video uploaded every minute and1 billion hours of video consumed every day.

The focus of Exleys study is a demonetized YouTube channel that has more than180,000 subscribers and 18 million views that he suggests epitomizes the sort of alt-right rants that gain traction on YouTube. Exley suggests that it isnt just that the alt-right dominates the YouTube political rant; it is that they are cornering the market on the format, creating a new form of communicative style that is gaining increasing traction among viewers.

Even more important, these rants and other forms of aggressive communication arent just being picked up by our president and sent out to the public; they are also affecting public behavior, moving from an online, virtual space into real action. Such wasthe storyof the man who shot up the pizza parlor purportedly tied to Pizzagate, a conspiracy theory about a Democrat-run pedophilia ring that began on 4chan.

As BuzzFeednotes, there is a sprawling new universe of far-right internet personalities who have aligned themselves with a new right or alt-right or new far-right political youth movement in the US.This group is interested in moving their trolling into the real world.

Whether on Reddit or YouTube or another form of social media these alt-right rants share a few key beliefs. AsMalia Rolt explainsin a piece on YouTube and the alt-right, those posting right-wing hate speechallbelieve that the media is untrustworthyandpolitical correctness has gone too far, and see advocacy for equality for all as athreat to freedom of speech.

The issue of freedom of speech and social media, of course, is a tricky issue since all of the platforms have rules and restrictions over the sort of content they allow.And yet, there is some evidence to suggest that the application of those rules may indeed favor aggressive speech by the right more than from other quarters.

For instance,a report from ProPublicasuggests that Facebooks internal rules for censoring hate speech is biased to favor both the right and celebrity users. In contrast, Facebook users who dont mince words in criticizing racism and police killings of racial minorities say that their posts are often taken down.

They compare two posts. One bya U.S. congressman who wrote a post after a terrorist attack in London that called for the slaughter of radicalized Muslims. Hunt them, identify them, and kill them, declared U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins, a Louisiana Republican. Kill them all. For the sake of all that is good and righteous. Kill them all.And one by Boston poet and Black Lives Matter activist DiDi Delgado:All white people are racist. Start from this reference point, or youve already failed.

Delgados postwas removed and her Facebook account was disabled for seven days. Higgins post was untouched. Such practices certainly suggest deep political biases in the ways that Facebook censors users.

All of this combines to suggest that, while each social media platform has a different identity and different content rules, there is increasing evidence that right-wing hate speech is growing in power and force across the major social media platforms and into everyday life.

What this weeks Trump Twitter war against the mainstream news media teaches us is that CNN should be worried but not about Trumps attacks, rather about the fact that an increasing number of U.S. citizens are forming their political ideas based on alt-right rants, and not on anything that even remotely resembles information.

Rather than fight Trump, outlets like CNN have to take seriously the fact that a major portion of the population simply doesnt trust them. Even worse, they dont find CNN interesting or compelling. And,as Carlos Maza has pointed out, the fact that CNN treats politics like sports isnt helping. By covering politics as ifit were a game, CNN hypes controversy more than it reports the truth.

The challenge facing CNN isnt a president whowill tweet an immature and aggressive video of himself tackling them; it is the reality that a significant subset of Americans, including ones who work in the White House, are more likely to be influenced by a Reddit user who goes by the ID HanAssholeSolo than they are by a commentator for CNN.

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Forget fake news alt-right memes could do more damage to democracy - Salon

Beginning in March and April 2016, an unknown person or persons hacked into the computer servers of the Democratic National Committee. Over time it became clear that the hackers were targeting very specific information in the DNC filesthe opposition research the Democrats had dug up on their Republican opponent Donald J. Trump. Once they had the information they wanted, the cyber-spies rooted around in the computers for several months thereafter, stealing other files such as personal emails, digital voice mails, and sensitive personal information on donors. This included the donors bank account, credit card, and social security numbers. The DNC discovered the intrusion while performing a security check, and shut their network down. However, the damage was done.

For an old spy and codebreaker like myself, nothing in the world happens by coincidence. Intelligence officers are a peculiar lot. Whether they are active or retired, their brains are wired for a completely different way of seeing the world around them. Some come from the Human Intelligence world, where they learn to read, manipulate, and distrust everyone in order to social engineer intelligence from people who do not want to give them anything. Others are forged in the signals intelligence world, where all data is just a massive electronic puzzle to be constantly analyzed, turned over, and fused together into an exploitable product, or into a final code to be decrypted or broken. Some, like myself, come from both worlds, and are at turns analytical and skeptical of seemingly obvious information. This hybrid mindview doesnt approach the world as streams of linear data; it attempts to analyze information like a constantly flowing game of three-dimensional chess. All the moves are technically the same as in regular chess, but the traditional allowances of forward and backwards one square, or a lateral or L-shaped pattern, are too limiting for those trained to sniff out hostile intent; we require additional ways of processing information to be satisfied. Up vertically, down every angle of the compass rose and then across every median, line of longitude, latitude, and every other angle of measure are just about right ... then we add layers of frequency analysis figuring out the timing, spacing, depth and distance between each item we call data points. When an event has been then identified on the continuum of intelligence, we compare it with everything that has ever occurred in history to see if it resembles other patterns played by another spy who employed that process. We then process the context and precedence of each observed activity against common sense to determine if an event chain is coincidence, or if it bears the marks of hostile intent. Ian Fleming, the old British Secret Intelligence Service officer who created the fictional character of James Bond, characterized the amazing events in his books with an observation in his 1959 book Goldfinger: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.

Times have changed since Mr. Flemings Dictum. In light of current trends in the intelligence business, I like to characterize this phenomenon as Nances Law of Intelligence Kismet: Coincidence takes a lot of planning.

Reading about the DNC hack was not initially alarming; hackers had also penetrated the Obama and McCain campaigns in 2008. The DNC hack was newsworthy but not really noteworthy until it was paired with two additional events. At the time of the hacks I was writing a massive tome on hackers associated with ISIS and al-Qaeda, so I was attuned to any information about electronic data theft. Then on June 1, 2016 one of my military hacker friends pointed out that an entity who called himself Guccifer 2.0 had opened a WordPress page and was dumping information stolen from the DNC hack.

Guccifer 2.0 claimed he had all the hacked material from the DNC and would be releasing it through his webpage. The name Guccifer struck a nerve, as the real Guccifer, a prolific Romanian hacker, had just been extradited to the United States. Guccifer 2.0 was a copy-cat, and a lazy one at that. My hyper-suspicious intelligence mind started kicking into gear and the game of multidimensional chess was on.

Two weeks later SamBiddle, the national security writer for the snarky web magazine Gawker, posted the entire Donald J. Trump opposition file from the DNCs servers. Immediately both Flemings Dictum and Nances Law struck at the same time. There was no way that the single most damaging (and dull) file from the DNC hack would be accidentally released weeks before the Republican National Committee convention. It was straight from the Karl Rove political playbook: Release damning information early, hold bad information until appropriate. More startling was that word was spreading across the global cyber security community that the DNC hack and Guccifer 2.0 had Russian fingerprints all over it.

I started my career in Naval Intelligence when I entered as a Russian language interpreter sent to DLI, the Defense Language Institute. For years before my Navy enlistment I had studied the Soviet Union and the KGBs history of political intrigue in preparation for a career in intelligence. Little did I know that two years of studying Russian on my own and four months of waiting at the Presidio of Monterey for my language school slot would result in my taking a completely different language. I was assigned to study Arabic, then I spent decades watching the Russian client states of Libya, Syria, and Iraq, as well as their ties to European terrorist groups Red Army Faction, Action Direct, the Irish Republican Army, and the Combatant Communist Cells. No matter what my target was, the KGB cast a shadow across every spectrum of my operations. Whenever we conducted a mission involving Syria, we watched for Russian cruisers and destroyers heading to Tartus, or the IL-38 May surveillance aircraft that dogged us and kept a weather eye on the Soviet naval units in the Gulf of Sollum anchorage off the Egyptian and Libyan border. Russian Illegals covert intelligence officers would try to attach themselves to us like leeches in seedy strip clubs in Naples or when puking on the streets of the Marseilles red light district. We went to monthly counterintelligence briefings that explained how the KGB recruited assets, and how they manipulated even the lowest-level young soldier, sailor, or marine through heterosexual and homosexual honeytraps.

The formerly classified briefings of Yuri Bezmenov, now posted up on Youtube.com, are where we learned of the targeting and recruitment techniques of the KGB. Until the fall of the Soviet Union the watchword was Beware of the Bears. The Bears are everywhere.

After the fall of the Soviet Union the KGB became known as the FSB. In the last ten years Russian intelligence melded all of its offensive techniques to create a new kind of war: Hybrid Warfare a melange of hostile cyber, political, and psychological operations in support of their national objectives, whether during peacetime or in open war. It is now standard operating procedure.

A few months after the hacks, at the start of the Democratic Party Convention in Philadelphia, the WikiLeaks organization, led by the information transparency activist Julian Assange, leaked the stolen documents with the intent to damage Hillary Clinton. The information leak had the intended effect, as airing the DNCs dirty tricks conducted against the Sanders campaign created a rift between diehard Bernie Sanders supporters, and led to the resignation of Representative Debbie Wasserman-Schultz as chair of the DNC.

Once the emails were released the source of the hacking became the number one question asked by global security and intelligence experts. The story was literally a Whodunnit? How did information from just one political party get released to the benefit of the unpredictable Republican nominee, Donald Trump? Civilian security specialists joined the U.S. and NATO allies as they commenced a massive cyber-sleuthing operation. The United States Cyber Command, headquartered at the National Security Agency (NSA) on Fort George G. Meade in Maryland, as well as the FBI and their cyber subcontractors, detected the leak source: The FSB and its sister the GRU Russias national and military intelligence bureaus. The metadata information inside the emails showing the pathway from the DNC computers to WikiLeaks led straight back to a suspected Russian intelligence organization, a conglomeration of cyber spying groups codenamed CYBER BEARS.

All of the old lessons of identifying Russian mantraps started to come back to me as the stolen DNC data was revealed. It had a pattern that was familiar and that virtually every other intelligence officer could recognize. The pattern showed that someone was playing 3-dimensional chess with our democracy.

Russia has perfected political warfare by using cyber assets to personally attack and neutralize political opponents. They call it Kompromat. They hack into computers or phones to gather intelligence, expose this intelligence (or false data they manufacture out of whole cloth) through the media to create scandal, and thereby knock an opponent or nation out of the game. Russia has attacked Estonia, the Ukraine, and Western nations using just these cyberwarfare methods. At some point Russia apparently decided to apply these tactics against the United States and so American democracy itself was hacked.

The president received a briefing days before WikiLeaks released the data to the public. The Russian spy agency had been ordered to make a bold move, hack the American elections, and engage in political warfare to elect Donald Trump President. Whether he knew it or not, Trump was the perfect candidate for a political asset. Former KGB officer Yuri Bezmenov said the KGB targeted Ego-centric people who lack moral principleswho are either too greedy or who suffer from exaggerated self-importance. These are the people the KGB wants and finds easiest to recruit.

This activity could only have been directed from the highest level of the Russian Federation, from Vladimir Putin himself.

In The Plot to Hack America, I have attempted to explain the story of the first massive Russian cyberwarfare operation against the United States electorate, and how Vladimir Putin attempted to engineer Donald J. Trumps improbable election as president of the United States. Here you will find a fairly detailed breakdown of the entire CYBER BEARS organ of the Russian Federation: the FSB, the GRU, Russian military intelligence, and criminal cyberwarfare subcontractors. It will become clear that they are using every weapon in the Kremlins propaganda arsenal. It will catalog the entirety of all of their known cyber and media activities related to the 2016 US political campaign. Within its chapters are revelations about how television media, global communications, and cyber operations were used to exploit and attack the US electoral system. There is strong evidence their work with WikiLeaks met clearly scripted dates and actively responded to events in order to destroy Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party and to elect Donald Trump as president.

The Plot to Hack America will also try to explain how the CYBER BEARS group was detected; how CYBER BEARS hacks personal and intelligence data from its enemies and then uses that intelligence to choose political allies and useful idiots to do their bidding in the target nation; and why they may or may not be disseminating Black propaganda, forged emails, false statements, and computer viruses, that are released into the WikiLeaks data dumps. CYBER BEARS teams also often masquerade as American voters and post Pro-Trump positions and materials on Twitter, Facebook and other sites to support the election of Donald Trump.

The Plot to Hack America details how Russian intelligence, the FSBs Active Measures units, created and structured a strategic political warfare campaign, and how it influences the internet via distribution of international media through Russia Today (RT) television, which pushes political propaganda daily. The Russian television media arm of the Kremlin, Russia Today (RT) television is engaged in a strategic propaganda campaign to further Russias political goals and has been used to co-opt the extreme wings of the American political parties including tacit and open support for neo-Nazis, anti-government extremist libertarians, conspiracy theorists, and the marginalized left such as the Green Party. RT gives these organizations an international mouthpiece in an attempt to validate them in mainstream media to the detriment of American stability.

This is a real-life spy thriller, happening in real time. It is my hope that The Plot to Hack America will inform the American electorate of how Russia executed a full-scale political and cyberwar on America, starting with Watergate 2.0, to elect Donald Trump president of the United States.

Read more here:
The day democracy got hacked: To this old spy, all signs in the DNC email leak pointed to Russia - Salon

Sacramento Bee

Mr. Trump: By demonizing the press, you threaten democracy. Maybe you want that. Sacramento Bee Dear Mr. President,. Last year I ended my lifelong loyalty to the Republican Party and did all I could to keep you out of the White House. I took a lot of heat for backing your Democratic opponent, but I knew you were not only unqualified to lead our ...

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Mr. Trump: By demonizing the press, you threaten democracy. Maybe you want that. - Sacramento Bee