PROTECTING HOSTILE INTELLIGENCE SERVICES: When he was CIA director, Mike Pompeo declared that Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange made common cause with dictators and he declared the organization a “hostile intelligence service.” Senator Ron Wyden and Congressman Ro Khanna recently introduced the “Espionage Reform Act” to protect journalists and whistleblowers. Some observers believe the act would “protect journalists like Julian Assange.” According to Shadowproof.com,“both Wyden and Khanna say Assange could still be prosecuted for allegedly helping Chelsea Manning hack passwords, though defense attorneys might have a reasonable challenge.”
NOT YOUR VAULT: We certainly have learned a lot from the case of former CIA techie Joshua Schulte who was on trial in New York, accused of taking some of the Agency’s most sensitive hacking tools and allegedly passing them to the aforementioned Wikileaks. The jury failed to reach a verdict on the most serious charges this week. Schulte was found guilty of making false statements to investigators and contempt of court. During the trial, defense attorneys tried to portray the CIA as extremely sloppy in protecting their most powerful hacking tools code named “Vault 7.” For example, they said that the “virtual machine” that held all the hacking tools had a password of “123ABCdef.” Well, at least it wasn’t “password.” We don’t know much about the jury who weighed Schulte’s fate – but we did learn some interesting background on one juror who was dismissed from the case because she admitted having looked at press reports about the matter – a strict no-no. According to the New York Post, Sylwia Wiesenberg of Manhattan “designs beauty masks for people’s rear ends.” She is the founder of “Bawdy Beauty” that offers “butt facials” and “exfoliation for kiesters.” In the end, she didn’t get a chance to throw Schulte’s a%# in jail but Wiesenberg did say that he was a “naughty boy” but she might not have voted to convict him if she hadn’t been canned first. The judge will hold a hearing at the end of the month to decide what to do about the charges that the jury was deadlocked over.
GUNNING FOR ELECTIVE OFFICE? Remember Maria Butina, the Russian grad student and gun rights advocate who was thrown in the slammer in the U.S. for failing to register as a foreign agent? She is now home in Mother Russia and recently announced that she was joining the new “Direct Democracy Party.” The party was started by Vyacheslav Makarov, a successful video game designer who created what the Moscow Times called “the mega-hit World of Tanks.” Some observers think the new party was created to siphon off support from other opposition parties and thereby strengthen Putin’s hold on power.
CORONAVIRUS CONSPIRACY THEORIES: Pro-Kremlin news outlets are reportedly spreading rumors that the worldwide outbreak of coronavirus is actually the work of the United States and the CIA. This is reminiscent of Soviet disinformation efforts from the early 1980s which blamed the U.S. for the AIDS epidemic. Playing into the hands of the disinformation specialists, perhaps, was the decision to have Acting DNI Ric Grenell accompany President Trump on a planned visit to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta and to tour tornado damaged areas of Tennessee on March 6. Some folks (like the Hayden Center) noted that visiting such places seem “a little outside the DNI job jar (or Amb to Germany).” Another theory may be that if John Ratcliffe, the Trump nominee to be the permanent DNI should get confirmed, perhaps Grenell is being eyed for some other administration post, like the open Secretary of Homeland Security position.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS DAY: Mark your calendars. Traditionally, the first Friday of every May is designated “Foreign Affairs Day.” We’re told it used to be called “Foreign Service Day” by the folks in the State Department who celebrate it. The Diplopundit blog says that the Department (which they have renamed the “Department of Swagger”) this year is combining the event with an annual retirement ceremony. Attendees for the Foggy Bottom ceremony are invited to part at the Kennedy Center and, if they show their invitation, they will get a “special” $15 rate. According to Diplopundit the normal daytime rate? $14.
POCKET LITTER: Bits and pieces of interesting /weird stuff we discovered:
TOUGH ECONOMY: You know economic conditions are rough when a person has to hold down multiple jobs to make ends meet. Consider a man arrested last week while walking down a street in Nashville, TN while drinking a Bud Light Lime. The man in question reportedly told police that he was a cop in England, worked for the ATF, worked for the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, and was a CIA “agent.” The cops didn’t buy it. They probably knew that no self-respecting CIA officer would call himself an “agent” or drink Bud Light Lime.
TOP GUN FOR SHIP DRIVERS: Aviators have garnered most of the glory within the naval service. Films like Top Gun grab the public’s attention. Flicks about slower moving ships – not so much. Surface sailors tell us they hope an upcoming Tom Hanks movie called Greyhound will address that shortcoming a bit. The official trailer for the movie, which comes out June 12, was just released and it paints a very dramatic picture of WWII battles in the North Atlantic. Eagle-eyed nitpickers point out however, that the trailer seems to show Hanks wearing two-and-a-half stripes on his uniform, signifying he is playing a lieutenant commander, but he is also shown wearing a hat with “scrambled eggs” on the visor – only authorized for commanders and above. (Maybe Tom got promoted mid-film?) Uniform controversies are nothing new for the Navy. Just this past week saw a post from the U.S. Naval Institute reminding us that character on the Cap’n Crunch cereal box has only three stripes on his uniform instead of the four on captain’s uniforms.
FLAGGING SUPPORT: In keeping with the naval/movie/cartoon theme, we also noted a story recently which says that the amphibious assault ship USS America has been spotted flying a massive “Captain America” flag from her island. The flag with the iconic Captain America shield evokes the image of the cartoon character created during WWII who used his superpowers to fight the Axis.
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