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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.

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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

Chinese media blame U.S. democratic system for its incompetence after a Chinese student is abducted.

Yingying Zhang, a Chinese female graduate student who disappeared in broad daylight in the U.S. state of Illinois on June 9, has not been found yet. Brendt Christensen, the man charged in Zhangskidnapping, hasnt revealed anything useful to the police. As time passes by, Zhangs family is getting more and more desperate and Chinese media have turned more and more critical, blaming the U.S. democratic system for its ineffectiveness and incompetence in the case.

Xinhua, the Chinese official news agency, launched a series of special reports, under the title of Where is Yingying? The abduction case tests U.S. rule of law, attacking the incompetence of the U.S. police and the ineffectiveness of U.S. rule of law.

The first most condemned point is that the police tracked down Christensen through his car on June 12, but didnt arrest him until June 29.Every minute wasted by the police, according to Xinhuas interpretation,directly increased the possibility of Zhangs death.

Even after the police obtained an audio recording of Christensen discussing abducting Zhang, the police still couldnt make the suspecttalk.

Xinhuaalso points tothe long and complicated procedure of court hearings and prosecution in the United States, which will bea secondblow to the victims family. The article also criticizedthe fact that Illinois has abolished the death penalty, which according toXinhuameans it will be impossible tobring an extreme criminal to justice.

Xinhuaalso attacked the principle of presumption of innocence, the fundamental cornerstone of the U.S. rule of law, which might help the criminal get away from punishment in practice.

The series of criticism won much approval fromChinese netizens. Some Chinese netizens even blamed U.S. racism for the ineffectiveresponse, arguing that the police havent tried their best because of Zhangs race and nationality. They compared Zhangs abductionwith another case in China: one Japanese young man reported to the Chinese police that his bicycle was stolen in Wuhan city. The whole citys policemen were mobilized and found his bicycle within three days.

Despite the hash criticism, some other Chinese media still tried to defend the U.S. rule of law, arguing that the U.S. Fifth Amendment isa fundamental protection of human rights. And some Chinese netizens who agree withthis point of view also explained the principle of presumption of innocence by quoting Blackstones formulation: It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.

In return, their opponents counter-argued: Better for whom?

Clearly, Zhangs case has become a fuse for Chinese people to ponder U.S. democracy and its fundamental principles.

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A Chinese Student Disappeared. China Blames US Democracy - The Diplomat

Four vouchers supplied by the city of Seattle. Photograph: City of Seattle

If money amplifies the voices of wealthy Americans in politics, Seattle is trying something that aims to give low-income and middle-class voters a signal boost.

The citys new Democracy Voucher program, the first of its kind in the US, provides every eligible Seattle resident with $100 in taxpayer-funded vouchers to donate to the candidates of their choice. The goal is to incentivize candidates to take heed of a broad range of residents homeless people, minimum-wage workers, seniors on fixed incomes as well as the big-dollar donors who often dictate the political conversation.

This Augusts primary is the trial run for the program. But before Seattle can crow about having re-enfranchised long-overlooked voters, it must contend with conservative opposition.

The experiment comes at a time of seemingly new possibilities for campaign financing. Bernie Sanders demonstrated that small donors can float a campaign, with 99% of his donations coming from individual donors, 59% of which were considered small donations.

Last fall, South Dakota voters approved a program similar to Seattles, joining more than a dozen other states with some form of public financing, usually a matching fund for small campaign donations. Cities such as Portland, Oregon, and Berkeley, California, also followed the public-financing trend last year.

In Seattle, if we had a concerted effort to register, educate, and organize renters and people who are homeless as a political force, our city politics would look rather different than they currently do, said Alison Eisinger of the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, which works to register homeless voters, among other advocacy efforts.

The democracy voucher program was created by a voter-approved ballot measure in November 2015 and is funded by a 10-year, $30m property tax levy. Registered voters are automatically sent the vouchers. Those who are not registered and those without a permanent address such as homeless people can apply by mail or in person with a city commission.

Seattle candidates are not required to participate in the voucher program. But Jon Grant, a leftist city council candidate who previously led the Tenants Union of Washington, has made the vouchers a centerpiece of his campaign. He has pushed to collect vouchers from over 1,000 people, including those living in several homeless encampments.

Of the $145,933 in donations that Grant reported on the most recent campaign disclosure form, $128,800 is from vouchers.

I took a pledge not to accept any money from corporations and developers, Grant said. I wanted to show that democracy vouchers can support grassroots campaigns that want to address systemic issues like homelessness.

As part of that effort, Grant spent several months organizing in three unsanctioned homeless encampments, helping to set up a communal tent in one encampment, and registering people to vote and receive vouchers. We wanted to work with those residents to assist them to stabilize their living situation and shine some light on how the city was handling the situation, he said. We started building trust and organizing there and wanted to educate people that they had access to democracy vouchers.

Grants campaign received a few vouchers from them, but the city cleared the encampments before the campaigns organizing efforts truly gained steam. Though they are gone, Grant is still working to engage homeless people around the city.

Yet at the same time that Grants campaign is being cited as a democracy-voucher success, lawyers are presenting it as evidence in a bid to kill the program.

Libertarian law firm Pacific Legal Foundation is representing two Seattle homeowners in their lawsuit against the city. They allege that democracy vouchers violate their first amendment rights because their taxes are funding candidates they oppose.

PLF lawyer Ethan Blevins wrote in an email that Grants campaign highlights the injustice done to property owners who oppose his candidacy. Mr Grants views on rental housing clash with the interests of landlords yet these are the very people who have unwillingly fronted most of the money for his campaign.

University of Washington constitutional law professor Hugh Spitzer told the Stranger that some of their legal reasoning doesnt make any sense at all and suggests a misunderstanding of how property taxes work.

Naturally, Grant agrees. The voucher program is very much in line with the values of most Seattle voters. This lawsuit is the death rattle of many corporate interests who were hoping to keep their hold on city hall.

Lawsuit aside, prospects for the vouchers are murky.

Vouchers alone will not change the political status quo, said Devin Silvernail, executive director of homeless advocacy organization Be:Seattle, which recently launched an effort to help homeless people register to vote when they check into shelters.

There are a lot of folks elected to office who, to be frank, dont give a shit about people who are having a hard time, he said. Still, putting vouchers in homeless peoples hands will be really useful as the start of a way for them to get their perspective known by elected officials.

Proponents must also combat feelings concerning the futility of voting.

Our little voucher would be so small compared to corporate Americas donations, said Soukaynah, a woman in her late 50s who was part of a knitting circle on Wednesday at the Marys Place day center for homeless women in downtown Seattle.

Bobby Gene, a 75-year-old who also declined to give her last name, was homeless until she was recently placed in a low-income housing complex for seniors. She received democracy vouchers but doesnt plan to use them.

Maybe they would do some good, but politicians dont want to listen to us, she said. Candidates, she suggested, as good as vanish once they attain office.

We only see them when its time to vote, when theyre kissing babies and shaking hands. Then we never hear from them.

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'Democracy vouchers' aim to amplify low-income voices, to conservative ire - The Guardian

Greens leader Richard Di Natalie and NSW senator Lee Rhiannon at a press conference in Canberra in March. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian

Lets get some reality back on the table with regard to the current debate within the Australian Greens. This is certainly a debate about democracy in the party but its not about our members having a say in party policy or preselections.

Lets dump the idea that this is about grassroots democracy it isnt.

All Australian Greens members, whether from Tasmania, New South Wales, Queensland or anywhere else, have a say on policy, which is formulated from the local branches upwards and decided at our national conference. I am really proud of that fact and about how it sets us apart from the old political parties in Australias parliament.

Lets also dump the idea that only the NSW Greens vote consistently with party policy. That is so wrong.

One thing Greens MPs in every state and nationally are proud of is our record of being faithful to our four principles of ecology, social justice, peace and non-violence, and participatory democracy, as well as our accountability to our members for the decisions we make and the votes we have cast.

The Australian Greens party room is the Greens equivalent to shadow cabinet. All members, including NSW, hold portfolios on behalf of the party members around the country. They bring forward recommendations in their portfolios on parliamentary votes, which are then debated, and decisions are reached by consensus. They have the party policy as the basis for decisions but daily have to decide whether to support matters that come before parliament, regardless of whether there is a policy on them or not.

But there can be no consensus if one person is already bound to vote according to a directive from a liaison committee in their own state. If all states took that view, then the Australian Greens could never make a decision.

The undemocratic exemption to the Australian Greens constitution given to NSW in 1992 is what is being challenged

No state committee can be kept up to date in real time with parliamentary debates and decisions across all portfolio responsibilities. That is why every state except NSW agreed at the time of the formation of the Australian Greens that our elected members would be entrusted with a conscience vote enabling them to stay true to both the partys philosophy and current policy, and the wellbeing of their constituency.

NSW, alone among all of the state parties, insisted that its elected members only had delegated authority to vote as they were instructed by the party and had no discretion.

The NSW Greens refused to form a national Australian Greens party unless they were given an exemption from the conscience vote. They locked it in by insisting that it could only be changed by a consensus decision of national conference or a 75% majority vote of the conference to conduct a full membership ballot on the issue. Therein lies the problem that has dogged the party since 1992.

While the Greens retain our core commitment to consensus-based decision making, the NSW party has effectively secured veto power over the whole of the membership of the Australian Greens.

By binding their elected members in a manner that is at odds with consensus-based decision making, they exert an influence and regularly veto decisions in a manner that is neither democratic nor in the spirit of equality.

That was the price members from the other states paid to form a national party. Now the NSW senator sits in the party room but refuses to sign the rules that govern every other elected member. NSW benefits from the work of the whole party room but picks and chooses what it supports or undermines. In a caucus that might be acceptable but in a shadow cabinet it is untenable.

How is it democratic or effective for all our other MPs and senators to negotiate with the government of the day and try to come to a consensus decision after consultation with the members around the whole country and then find that a parliamentary liaison committee in NSW has determined before that negotiation is over that it will oppose that decision and campaign against it?

The undemocratic exemption to the Australian Greens constitution given to NSW in 1992 is what is being challenged in 2017.

It is no surprise that NSW wants to keep that power at any cost but party democracy, equality and unity can no longer afford it. It must be addressed, and the constitution must be democratic and afford equal rights to all its members.

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This debate isn't about grassroots democracy: it's about Greens unity - The Guardian