How about a little consistency.....
The Obama administration provided a New York Times reporter exclusive access to a range of high-level national security officials for a book that divulged highly classified information on a U.S. cyberwar on Iran’s nuclear program, internal State Department emails show.
The information in the 2012 book by chief Washington correspondent David E. Sanger has been the subject of a yearlong Justice Department criminal investigation: The FBI is hunting for those who leaked details to Mr. Sanger about a U.S.-Israeli covert cyberoperation to infect Iran’s nuclear facilities with a debilitating computer worm known as Stuxnet.
A New York Times story adapted from the book, “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power,” quotes participants in secret White House meetings discussing plans to unleash Stuxnet on Iran.
The scores of State Department emails from the fall of 2011 to the spring of 2012 do not reveal which officials told Mr. Sanger, but they do show an atmosphere of cooperation within the administration for a book generally favorable toward, but not uncritical of, President Obama. For example:
“I’m getting a bit concerned about the pace of our interviews — or lack of pace, to be more precise — for the book,” Mr. Sanger said in an email Oct. 30, 2011, to Michael Hammer, a senior State Department public affairs official. “The White House is steaming away; I’ve seen [National Security Adviser Thomas E.] Donilon many times and a raft of people below. Doing well at the Pentagon. But on the list I sent you starting on Sept. 12 we’ve scheduled nothing, and chapters are getting into final form.”
Mr. Sanger’s book debuted in June 2012 and brought an immediate call from Republicans to investigate the leaks. They charged that administration officials jeopardized an ongoing secret cyberattack by tipping off Iran’s hard-line Islamic regime about war plans.
They also charged that Obama aides were leaking sensitive materials on other issues, such as the Navy SEAL-CIA raid to kill Osama bin Laden, to burnish Mr. Obama’s credentials as commander in chief as the 2012 election approached.
The nonprofit Freedom Watch acquired the State Department emails via a Freedom of Information Act request filed days after the book was published. Larry Klayman, its director, said State at first had told him it did not have any documents. He then filed suit in federal court.
In December, U.S. District Court Judge Robert L. Wilkins ordered State to turn over emails relating to its cooperation with Mr. Sanger.
Officials line up
“When you read the totality of those documents, it’s a super-close relationship they are furthering with Sanger,” Mr. Klayman said. “They were literally force-feeding him.”
He said State has yet to provide transcripts of the Sanger interviews.
“I think the thrust of this is this requires a significant investigation,” Mr. Klayman said, adding that he has provided the emails to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
A State Department spokesman did not respond to emails from The Washington Times requesting comment.
In one email, a public affairs official said Mr. Sanger wanted to discuss “Cybersecurity — particularly if there’s a legal framework being developed on the offensive side.” Stuxnet would be an example of an offensive cyberweapon.
Mr. Sanger’s nudging seemed to do the trick. Over the next several months, Mr. Hammer, the senior public affairs official, arranged interviews with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and a roster of senior aides.
By March 2012, Mr. Sanger had spoken with Deputy Secretary of State William Burns; Deputy Chief of Staff Jake Sullivan, who is now Vice President Joseph R. Biden’s national security adviser; Robert Einhorn, then a special adviser on arms control; Harold Hongju Koh, State’s legal adviser; and others.
In December 2011, Mr. Hammer sent an email summarizing Mr. Sanger’s reporting and reproducing a story from the previous month headlined “America’s Deadly Dynamics with Iran,” which reported on the Stuxnet computer worm.
It is not unusual for authors to request and sometimes win access to administration officials. Mr. Sanger’s access, however, is notable in that its subsequent disclosures prompted an FBI investigation in which agents have interviewed government officials.
The worm on the loose
Mr. Sanger wrote a June 1, 2012, article on Stuxnet that was adapted from his book, which debuted later that week. In the story, he quoted “participants” in White House meetings on whether to continue attacking Iran with Stuxnet, which somehow had broken free into the Internet.
“At a tense meeting in the White House Situation Room within days of the worm’s ‘escape,’ Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, Leon E. Panetta, considered whether America’s most ambitious attempt to slow the progress of Iran’s nuclear efforts had been fatally compromised,” the story said.
“Should we shut this thing down?” Mr. Obama asked, according to members of the president’s national security team who were in the room.”
Republicans said those passages alone are evidence that Obama aides broke the law by publicly disclosing a covert program.
With the story and book in print, State Department public affairs on June 7 sent to department officials a transcript of a floor speech delivered by Sen. John McCain that week. The Arizona Republican accused the administration of deliberately leaking secrets to portray Mr. Obama as a “strong leader on national security issues” in an election year.
“What price did the administration apparently pay to proliferate such a presidential persona highly valued in an election year?” he said. “Access. Access to senior administration officials who appear to have served as anonymous sources divulging extremely sensitive military and intelligence information and operations.”
‘Drones and cyber’
Citing the book, Mr. McCain said: “The administration officials discussed a most highly classified operation that is both highly classified and still ongoing, an operation that was clearly one of the most tightly held national security secrets in our country until now.”
Asked on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on June 3, 2012, whether the administration leaked to him to bolster the president’s image, Mr. Sanger said:
“I spent a year working the story from the bottom up, and then went to the administration and told them what I had. Then they had to make some decisions about how much they wanted to talk about it.
“All that you read about this being deliberate leaks out of the White House wasn’t my experience. Maybe it is in other cases,” he said. “I’m sure the political side of the White House probably likes reading about the president acting with drones and cyber and so forth. National security side has got very mixed emotions about it because these are classified programs.”
Said Mr. McCain: “I don’t know how one could draw any conclusion but that senior members of this administration in the national security arena have either leaked or confirmed information of the most highly classified and sensitive nature.”
On June 5, The New York Times published a review of the Sanger book by Thomas Ricks, an author and former reporter for The Washington Post.
“Mr. Sanger clearly has enjoyed great access to senior White House officials, most notably to Thomas Donilon, the national security adviser,” Mr. Ricks wrote. “Mr. Donilon, in effect, is the hero of the book, as well as the commenter of record on events. He leads the team that goes to Israel and spends ‘five hours wading through the intelligence in the basement of the prime minister’s residence.’”
Three days later, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced that he had appointed two U.S. attorneys to investigate leaks, including the Stuxnet disclosures.
White House press secretary Jay Carney took offense to Mr. McCain’s speech.
“Any suggestion that this administration has authorized intentional leaks of classified information for political gain is grossly irresponsible,” he said.
A ‘target’ in the probe
In May, The New York Times reported: “The investigation into reporting by David E. Sanger of The Times, about efforts to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program, appears to be one of the most active inquiries.”
In June, NBC News reported that the FBI had zeroed in on one of the nation’s highest-ranking military officers at the time that Mr. Sanger was researching his book in 2011.
NBC said that retired Marine Gen. James E. Cartwright, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and one of Mr. Obama’s closest military advisers, was a “target” in the probe — a designation that often means the Justice Department plans to indict the person.
Gen. Cartwright retired in August 2011.
Mr. Donilon, the national security adviser, submitted his resignation in June and left the post last month.
More than any previous president, Mr. Obama has aggressively gone after leakers — in this case possibly members of his own inner circle.
The Justice Department took the unusual step of collecting data on phone calls to and from the Washington bureau of The Associated Press in an effort to find who leaked information about a foiled terrorist attack.
The Justice Department has charged two former CIA employees and one former National Security Agency worker with providing secrets to journalists. In all three of those cases, the FBI acquired the “smoking gun” by obtaining emails between the reporters and the leakers.
In all, the Obama administration has charged eight people with leaking secrets, the most recent being former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
and of course , in contrast....... hammer time !
Wash Times: Stuxnet Links Lead Back to Obama White House
Monday, 19 Aug 2013 06:48 AM
The information in the 2012 book by chief Washington correspondent David E. Sanger has been the subject of a yearlong Justice Department criminal investigation: The FBI is hunting for those who leaked details to Mr. Sanger about a U.S.-Israeli covert cyberoperation to infect Iran’s nuclear facilities with a debilitating computer worm known as Stuxnet.
A New York Times story adapted from the book, “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power,” quotes participants in secret White House meetings discussing plans to unleash Stuxnet on Iran.
The scores of State Department emails from the fall of 2011 to the spring of 2012 do not reveal which officials told Mr. Sanger, but they do show an atmosphere of cooperation within the administration for a book generally favorable toward, but not uncritical of, President Obama. For example:
“I’m getting a bit concerned about the pace of our interviews — or lack of pace, to be more precise — for the book,” Mr. Sanger said in an email Oct. 30, 2011, to Michael Hammer, a senior State Department public affairs official. “The White House is steaming away; I’ve seen [National Security Adviser Thomas E.] Donilon many times and a raft of people below. Doing well at the Pentagon. But on the list I sent you starting on Sept. 12 we’ve scheduled nothing, and chapters are getting into final form.”
Mr. Sanger’s book debuted in June 2012 and brought an immediate call from Republicans to investigate the leaks. They charged that administration officials jeopardized an ongoing secret cyberattack by tipping off Iran’s hard-line Islamic regime about war plans.
They also charged that Obama aides were leaking sensitive materials on other issues, such as the Navy SEAL-CIA raid to kill Osama bin Laden, to burnish Mr. Obama’s credentials as commander in chief as the 2012 election approached.
The nonprofit Freedom Watch acquired the State Department emails via a Freedom of Information Act request filed days after the book was published. Larry Klayman, its director, said State at first had told him it did not have any documents. He then filed suit in federal court.
In December, U.S. District Court Judge Robert L. Wilkins ordered State to turn over emails relating to its cooperation with Mr. Sanger.
Officials line up
“When you read the totality of those documents, it’s a super-close relationship they are furthering with Sanger,” Mr. Klayman said. “They were literally force-feeding him.”
He said State has yet to provide transcripts of the Sanger interviews.
“I think the thrust of this is this requires a significant investigation,” Mr. Klayman said, adding that he has provided the emails to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
A State Department spokesman did not respond to emails from The Washington Times requesting comment.
In one email, a public affairs official said Mr. Sanger wanted to discuss “Cybersecurity — particularly if there’s a legal framework being developed on the offensive side.” Stuxnet would be an example of an offensive cyberweapon.
Mr. Sanger’s nudging seemed to do the trick. Over the next several months, Mr. Hammer, the senior public affairs official, arranged interviews with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and a roster of senior aides.
By March 2012, Mr. Sanger had spoken with Deputy Secretary of State William Burns; Deputy Chief of Staff Jake Sullivan, who is now Vice President Joseph R. Biden’s national security adviser; Robert Einhorn, then a special adviser on arms control; Harold Hongju Koh, State’s legal adviser; and others.
In December 2011, Mr. Hammer sent an email summarizing Mr. Sanger’s reporting and reproducing a story from the previous month headlined “America’s Deadly Dynamics with Iran,” which reported on the Stuxnet computer worm.
It is not unusual for authors to request and sometimes win access to administration officials. Mr. Sanger’s access, however, is notable in that its subsequent disclosures prompted an FBI investigation in which agents have interviewed government officials.
The worm on the loose
Mr. Sanger wrote a June 1, 2012, article on Stuxnet that was adapted from his book, which debuted later that week. In the story, he quoted “participants” in White House meetings on whether to continue attacking Iran with Stuxnet, which somehow had broken free into the Internet.
“At a tense meeting in the White House Situation Room within days of the worm’s ‘escape,’ Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, Leon E. Panetta, considered whether America’s most ambitious attempt to slow the progress of Iran’s nuclear efforts had been fatally compromised,” the story said.
“Should we shut this thing down?” Mr. Obama asked, according to members of the president’s national security team who were in the room.”
Republicans said those passages alone are evidence that Obama aides broke the law by publicly disclosing a covert program.
With the story and book in print, State Department public affairs on June 7 sent to department officials a transcript of a floor speech delivered by Sen. John McCain that week. The Arizona Republican accused the administration of deliberately leaking secrets to portray Mr. Obama as a “strong leader on national security issues” in an election year.
“What price did the administration apparently pay to proliferate such a presidential persona highly valued in an election year?” he said. “Access. Access to senior administration officials who appear to have served as anonymous sources divulging extremely sensitive military and intelligence information and operations.”
‘Drones and cyber’
Citing the book, Mr. McCain said: “The administration officials discussed a most highly classified operation that is both highly classified and still ongoing, an operation that was clearly one of the most tightly held national security secrets in our country until now.”
Asked on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on June 3, 2012, whether the administration leaked to him to bolster the president’s image, Mr. Sanger said:
“I spent a year working the story from the bottom up, and then went to the administration and told them what I had. Then they had to make some decisions about how much they wanted to talk about it.
“All that you read about this being deliberate leaks out of the White House wasn’t my experience. Maybe it is in other cases,” he said. “I’m sure the political side of the White House probably likes reading about the president acting with drones and cyber and so forth. National security side has got very mixed emotions about it because these are classified programs.”
Said Mr. McCain: “I don’t know how one could draw any conclusion but that senior members of this administration in the national security arena have either leaked or confirmed information of the most highly classified and sensitive nature.”
On June 5, The New York Times published a review of the Sanger book by Thomas Ricks, an author and former reporter for The Washington Post.
“Mr. Sanger clearly has enjoyed great access to senior White House officials, most notably to Thomas Donilon, the national security adviser,” Mr. Ricks wrote. “Mr. Donilon, in effect, is the hero of the book, as well as the commenter of record on events. He leads the team that goes to Israel and spends ‘five hours wading through the intelligence in the basement of the prime minister’s residence.’”
Three days later, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced that he had appointed two U.S. attorneys to investigate leaks, including the Stuxnet disclosures.
White House press secretary Jay Carney took offense to Mr. McCain’s speech.
“Any suggestion that this administration has authorized intentional leaks of classified information for political gain is grossly irresponsible,” he said.
A ‘target’ in the probe
In May, The New York Times reported: “The investigation into reporting by David E. Sanger of The Times, about efforts to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program, appears to be one of the most active inquiries.”
In June, NBC News reported that the FBI had zeroed in on one of the nation’s highest-ranking military officers at the time that Mr. Sanger was researching his book in 2011.
NBC said that retired Marine Gen. James E. Cartwright, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and one of Mr. Obama’s closest military advisers, was a “target” in the probe — a designation that often means the Justice Department plans to indict the person.
Gen. Cartwright retired in August 2011.
Mr. Donilon, the national security adviser, submitted his resignation in June and left the post last month.
More than any previous president, Mr. Obama has aggressively gone after leakers — in this case possibly members of his own inner circle.
The Justice Department took the unusual step of collecting data on phone calls to and from the Washington bureau of The Associated Press in an effort to find who leaked information about a foiled terrorist attack.
The Justice Department has charged two former CIA employees and one former National Security Agency worker with providing secrets to journalists. In all three of those cases, the FBI acquired the “smoking gun” by obtaining emails between the reporters and the leakers.
In all, the Obama administration has charged eight people with leaking secrets, the most recent being former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
And how far up is the investigation going to go - will the investigation venture into 1600 Pennsylvania Ave ? Is General Cartwright getting a potential raw deal ?
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/james-cartwright-stuxnet-leak-investigation
The former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General James "Hoss" Cartwright, took his nickname from Bonanza's loveable, warm giant, Eric "Hoss" Cartwright. Lovable and warm do not describe the feelings the Justice Department has towards him. They've reportedly singled him out for leaking information to a New York Times journalist about Stuxnet, the cyber-attack that debilitated Iran's uranium enrichment facilities at Natanz, setting back its nuclear program by years.
While it's hard to imagine Cartwright, a 40-year military veteran, having to share a figurative cell with Pfc. Bradley Manning, his alleged involvement in Stuxnet and his resignation from the military in 2011 had made him a possible "target" since at least last year.
In the summer of 2012, an article by the Times' David Sanger — whose phone calls and emails were subpoened by the government over an investigation about his reporting—named Cartwright as a strategic architect of the Stuxnet operation, codenamed Olympic Games. It was Cartwright who in 2006 reportedly convinced President Bush to take a less conventional approach to Iran's nuclear capabilities, an issue that, given Israel's concerns, threatened to incite war in the Middle East. Sanger described Cartwright and the significance of this new weapon, which was reportedly developed by the NSA and the CIA with help from Israel:
General James E. Cartwright, who had established a small cyberoperation inside the United States Strategic Command, which is responsible for many of America’s nuclear forces, joined intelligence officials in presenting a radical new idea to Mr. Bush and his national security team. It involved a far more sophisticated cyberweapon than the United States had designed before...“Previous cyberattacks had effects limited to other computers,” Michael V. Hayden, the former chief of the C.I.A., said, declining to describe what he knew of these attacks when he was in office. “This is the first attack of a major nature in which a cyberattack was used to effect physical destruction [...] Somebody crossed the Rubicon,” he said.
Though highly respected, Cartwright was also considered a feather-rufffler in some circles, unafraid to urge more attention to less conventional, more high tech strategy and to use terms like"semantic interoperability." He pushed new institutional thinking within the Pentagon, urged better immigration policy, and supported the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell."
DoD photo by Master Sgt. Adam M. Stump, U.S. Air Force
His aggressive, progressive approach to war even made him, according to Bob Woodward,Obama's "favorite general."
In “Obama’s Wars,” Woodward describes General Cartwright as being candid with the President. “I’m just not in the business of withholding options," Woodward quotes him as saying. "I have an oath, and when asked for advice I’m going to provide it.”
But in 2011, when Cartwright was nominated to succeed Admiral Mike Mullen as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, a whisper campaign against him had already begun. Apparently, many top brass hadn't forgiven him for bypassing Adm. Mullen and recommending to the President a smaller U.S. footprint in Afghanistan. There were also concerns about Mullen's adversarial relationship with his wife. And there was another issue too, reports the Washington Post:
Cartwright, a four-star general, was cleared in February 2011 of misconduct involving a young aide. An anonymous accuser had claimed Cartwright acted inappropriately during a 2009 overseas trip on which the aide traveled as a military assistant. Several sources confirmed that the former aide was a young woman. The Pentagon inspector general quickly cleared Cartwright of the most serious allegations, which involved claims that he may have had an improper physical relationship with the woman.The report did find that Cartwright mishandled an incident in which the aide, drunk and visibly upset, visited his Tbilisi, Georgia, hotel room alone and either passed out or fell asleep on a bench at the foot of his bed. Cartwright denied any impropriety and was later cleared of all wrongdoing.
Cartwright won his battle, but he wasn't ultimately confirmed, and in August 2011, he resigned from the military. He would stay on the Defense Policy Board, an elite Pentagon advisory panel with top-secret national security clearance. But in January, he resigned due to health problems, just as reports emerged a Justice Dept. Stuxnet investigation had begun to focus on him.
On Friday, following new reports he was being investigated for being one of the "current and former American, European and Israeli officials involved in the program" cited by the Times' David Sanger in his reporting last year and in 2010, his attorney, former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig, described his client as "an American hero.'' "Any suggestion that he could have betrayed the country he loves is preposterous,'' Craig said.
Cartwright kept a laser-like focus on cyberwar. A 2012 keynote address by ex-General Cartwright's plays vaguely like a Bruce Sterling speech.
"My job will probably be to depress you... but my job, as it sits today, as the Vice Chairman, is really to worry about the future war fighter... you look at the financial crisis that we're going through and the interdependence that has occurred as a result of this ubiquitous ability to exchange and to be interconnected around the world... it has its strengths and it has its weaknesses... In 2006 we stored and processed 40 hexabytes of unique information. I don't know what an hexabyte is, but that's essentially 300,000 Libraries of Congress... Within a year, were seeing that within a year we'll do that amount in a month, on the battlefield. Not as a nation, on the battlefield."
In a 2011 parting speech, according to a Dept. of Defense dispatch, "the vice chairman acknowledged that he is known as someone who embraces technology," and he praised those who took scientific and technological risks, “whether it was to shoot down a satellite or to take the night time away from the enemy with night-vision goggles … [or] with radar.”
And while he was also in command of America's nuclear arsenal, Cartwright often seemed more interested in another, more virtual set of weapons.
How Stuxnet worked, via Ars Technica
How we hack
Earlier this year, Cartwright told a small student-run security conference at Georgetown University that wireless, not desktop systems, are a top target for the US military, according toBreakingDefense.com: “the reality of it is the wireless side is far more likely” an avenue for attack. “All I need is a willing aperture to let me in and I can start to create havoc,” he warned.
“One of the beautiful parts about cyber [is] it goes from influence all the way to destruction with a lot of points in between,” he said. “Cyber allows you to have a much broader set of activity and tools short of war.” He noted that in addition to the traditional tools of sanctions, spies, and public statements, the US can now spread online propaganda — or break governments' firewalls, to enable more free communication — and attack the bad guys with viruses not bombs.
He did not mention Stuxnet of course. The operation — like most of the country's offensive cyber apparatus, including recently revealed NSA programs — has never been publicly acknowledged by any government agency. Days before Obama took office, Sanger reported, President Bush recommended the incoming President keep two programs secret: the drone operation in Pakistan and Olympic Games, the project that built Stuxnet. Obama heeded his advice.
Without touching upon offensive cyber operations however, Cartwright downplayed the threat to the US from Chinese hackers.
“Everyone is talking about 'China is hacking into this, that and the other thing, they’re stealing this, that and the other thing, they’re terrible people.' Got it.” But two hundred years ago, when the young United States was playing catch-up to Britain’s Industrial Revolution, “we went to England and stole every manufacturing secret we could find,” he said. “Rising states do that."“We can hate it, we can not like it, but it is basically in the human pattern,” Cartwright said. What the US really needs to keep up with China, he argued, is a new immigration policy to keep talented risk-takers coming from all corners of the world.
Cartwright embraced technology as a tool for democracy, for instance in the Arab Spring, and praised one experiment in which the US distributed a thousand smartphones to Afghans of various sects and tribes — many of them illiterate — and encouraged them to use the technology with an Afghan version of American Idol.
“[In] two months, they were texting, they were using the phones, very comfortably going across all the social barriers that for the last five thousand years have defined their culture [...] Quite frankly, when we leave next year, just like all the conquerors that have gone to in Afghanistan in the past, we’ll be forgotten very quickly. That phone will not.”
But with the benefits of iPhones also come the kind of cybersecurity threats that Cartwright and his hacker soldiers were building, and a host of important questions about the moral costs of those weapons. One attendee asked him how cyberwar would jibe with existing standards of warfare. Cartwright warned against restrictive laws.
“Much of what we are doing today or could do in cyber could be handled by existing law or policy,” he said. “Very little of it is going to require new standing law.” In fact, he went on, the real danger is “people rushing to pour cement on new policy and law in a world where things last 18 months.”“Our legislative bodies are very happy to say, we passed it, it’s done, it will last forever,” he warned.
In his parting speech, Cartwright quoted from an address by Teddy Roosevelt that a mentor of his had once cited. Delivered at the Sorbonne in April 1910, "Citizenship in a Republic" celebrated the fighter over the critic.
It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.
Curiously, Julian Assange would also quote Roosevelt, as an epigraph to the first of a few philosophical essays he wrote in 2006, which laid out some of the philosophy behind WikiLeaks.
Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people... To destroy this invisible government, to befoul this unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of statesmanship.
Of course, Cartwright wouldn't be the first high-ranking US official to leak intelligence to the public. Daniel Ellsburg, who disseminated the pentagon papers in 1971, worked for Rand Corp., previously beneath Robert McNamara. Mark Felt, who told Bob Woodward about a break-in at DNC headquarters on Nixon's behalf, was just second to J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI. If prosecuted, Cartwright could become the eighth person to be charged with violating the Espionage Act under the Obama administration for leaking information to the press. Prior to 2008, only three people had been charged, beginning with Ellsberg.
A 2011 address by Cartwright, courtesy of the IBM Center for the Business of Government
Given Cartwright's proximity to Stuxnet -- and his previous alleged transgressions -- it's not hard to see the DOJ's rationale for focusing on him. Harder to see is the basis on whicgovernment is conducting its investigation, and how it may have gathered evidence against him. It was through requests to read Gen. David Petraeus's Gmail account that the Justice Department learned of improprieties. It's not improbable that government investigators applied even more aggressive surveillance to Cartwright. Two sources told NBC that prosecutors managed to track him down without subpoenaing the phone records of Times reporters. So far no allegations of wrongdoing have been made against Cartwright, and the previous investigation of possible sexual misbehavior remains classified.
When he retired in 2011, Senator Diane Feinstein -- who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee -- praised the general for his candidness and his ideas. "General Cartwright’s commitment to providing his honest and blunt assessments go beyond nuclear forces and extend to all security threats facing our nation, and the best way to prepare and respond to them, even when it was not popular to do so."
While Stuxnet was intended to operate in secret and was only bound for Iran's Natanz facility, it was discovered in July 2009 by VirusBlokAda, a Belarussian computer security company, at least several months after it had been released. According to Sanger, code that had been added by Israeli's military hackers, who had collaborated with the NSA to create Stuxnet, caused it to leak to other systems. Sanger's first story on the malware, in 2010, confirmed suspicions that it had originated with the U.S. or Israel or both.
By then, however, the mysterious weapon -- which used an unprecedented four zero-day exploits-- had done its damage. In 2012, security researchers discovered an even more sophisticated piece of malware, called Flame, living onon computers in Iran and throughout the Middle East, and capable of in-depth computer espionage.
One curious irony about the leak investigation is some in Congress suspected that the White House leaked the story about Stuxnet itself, in a bid to burnish the President's reputation as a hawk ahead of an election. As Sanger told Gawker’s John Cook, while the White House didn’t actually leak the story, it didn’t protest its release either.
In a press conference earlier this month, amidst concerns about the government's treatment of whistleblowers and the journalists they speak to, Obama dismissed the idea that the White House had purposefully leaked intelligence.
"We're dealing with issues that can touch on the safety and security of the American people, our families or our military personnel or our allies, and so we don't play with that," he said. "We have mechanisms in place where if we can root out folks who have leaked, they will suffer consequences. In some cases, it's criminal. These are criminal acts when they release information like this."
and.....
Did Panetta leak classified info to Zero Dark Thirty filmmakers?
POSTED AT 10:42 AM ON JUNE 5, 2013 BY ED MORRISSEY
According to Politico, that’s the conclusion of an Inspector General report. The information on the raid was classified as Secret and Top Secret, and its dissemination to the filmmakers has been a controversial point ever since the film was announced:
Former CIA Director Leon Panetta revealed the name of the Navy SEAL unit that carried out the Osama Bin Laden raid and named the unit’s ground commander at a 2011 ceremony attended by Zero Dark Thirty filmmaker Mark Boal, according to a draft Pentagon inspector general’s report obtained by a watchdog group.Panetta also disclosed classified information designated as “top secret” and “secret” during his presentation at the CIA awards ceremony, says the draft IG report published Wednesday by the Project on Government Oversight.The report does not make clear whether Panetta was aware that Boal was present at the ceremony, held under a tent at the CIA complex on June 24, 2011. “Approximately 1300” people from the military and the intelligence community were on hand for the event, according to a CIA press release issued the following week.
The timing of the report also sounds … very familiar:
The disclosure of the IG report could complicate the Obama administration’s claims that senior officials have not leaked classified information. Last spring, Republicans publicly attacked President Barack Obama and his top aides, alleging that the administration leaked national security secrets to burnish Obama’s standing for his re-election bid.The release of the findings in the draft report also raises questions about why the findings have been under wraps for so long, and which of the document’s conclusions were known to White House officials prior to last November’s election.
Say, didn’t the same thing happen with the IG report at the IRS that uncovered political corruption at the agency? Why, yes it did. And that now raises questions about politicization not just within another agency — Defense — but also within the Inspector General corps, too.
I’d expect the House Armed Services Committee and its chair, Rep. Buck McKeon, to take an interest in these questions. Soon.
and of course , in contrast....... hammer time !
WikiLeaks trial: US prosecutors demand 60 years jail for Bradley Manning
Agence France-Presse | Updated: August 20, 2013 01:00 IST
Preschool Center – Local Preschool & Day Care Center. Registration is easy. Call today!
Fort Meade: US military prosecutors demanded that Private Bradley Manning spend at least 60 years in jail for handing a vast trove of secret files to anti-secrecy site WikiLeaks.
Captain Joe Morrow urged trial judge Colonel Denise Lind to impose a tough sentence to "send a message to any soldier contemplating stealing classified information."
The 25-year-old former army intelligence analyst has been convicted on a raft of espionage and theft charges that could see him jailed for more than a century.
But Lind is conducting a sentencing at Fort Meade, a military base just outside Washington, to decide how long the young man, who has apologised, should serve.
Morrow dismissed the defense argument that Manning was a naive and troubled soldier who believed he was doing good by exposing what he saw as abuses in America's conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Instead, the prosecutor branded the leaks "destructive" and said Manning was a "determined insider who exploited an imperfect system."
Captain Joe Morrow urged trial judge Colonel Denise Lind to impose a tough sentence to "send a message to any soldier contemplating stealing classified information."
The 25-year-old former army intelligence analyst has been convicted on a raft of espionage and theft charges that could see him jailed for more than a century.
Morrow dismissed the defense argument that Manning was a naive and troubled soldier who believed he was doing good by exposing what he saw as abuses in America's conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Instead, the prosecutor branded the leaks "destructive" and said Manning was a "determined insider who exploited an imperfect system."
No comments:
Post a Comment