This web page amounts to a long critical review, largely various web sites complementing each other to show us how real-life cyber espionage happens within politics.
2017 April Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign by Allen (NBC) and Parnes (The Hill), from hundreds of anonymous interviews. NYT review: "a wildly dysfunctional and ‘spirit-crushing’ campaign that embraced a flawed strategy (based on flawed data) that failed, repeatedly, to correct course...an out-of-touch candidate and her strife-ridden staff.” New York Times
2017 October 26 https://thepoliticalinsider.com/legal-analyst-hillary-clinton-can-charged-13-crimes/
Legal Analyst: Hillary Clinton Can Be Charged With 13 Crimes By Rusty
2017 Oct 28 https://townhall.com/columnists/jeffcrouere/2017/10/28/hillary-you-can-run-but-you-cant-hide-n2401577
"Hillary, You Can Run, But You Can't Hide" Jeff Crouere
While Hillary Clinton has been in Europe promoting her new book, What Happened, the heavily fortified wall of protection around her is crumbling. Late Wednesday night, the Justice Department finally lifted a gag order that prevented a FBI informant from testifying to Congress about Russian attempts to offer bribes, kickbacks, and other incentives to secure approval for the highly controversial Uranium One deal...evidence on how the Russians schemed to bribe the Clintons and others in the Obama administration. Seemingly, the efforts were quite successful as former President Bill Clinton received a $500,000 speaking fee from a Moscow bank and Russian insiders promoting the deal contributed approximately $145 million to the Clinton Foundation.
2017 Oct https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/democrats-young-diverse-voters/542682/
Democrats have grown top-heavy with leaders rooted in its past. Hillary Clinton, the party’s 69-year-old presidential nominee, struggled to excite Millennial and minority voters in 2016. In the Senate, Democrats are led by three white seniors: Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (age 67) and assistant leaders Dick Durbin (72) and Patty Murray (67). In the House, the big three are Nancy Pelosi (77) and Steny Hoyer (78), both white; and James Clyburn (77), who is black.
Congressional Republicans' leadership is younger; House Speaker Paul Ryan, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and Senate Conference Chair John Thune. In the 2016 presidential contest, two 40-something Hispanic Republicans, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, fought their way into the race’s final rounds. Whites older than 45 now routinely provide a majority of the votes for GOP presidential candidates.
In 2016, Democrat turnout among white and Hispanic Millennials disappointed, and it plummeted among younger African Americans compared with 2012. Grooming candidates who reflect the Democratic coalition hasn’t been a priority for party officials in the racially diverse states that should be producing the next generation of leaders. “Do you want to give that up now and start with a freshman senator, or do you want somebody who is going to take them on on issues like immigration and has the skill and the clout to get things done?” Feinstein strategist Carrick asked.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-election-dnc.html?_r=0
By ERIC LIPTON, DAVID E. SANGER and SCOTT SHANE DEC. 13, 2016
(After JE saw PBS Frontline Putin's Revenge two hours in Oct/Nov 2017)
JE: a critical review shouldn't quote at length, I have limited my quotes here. See the full NewYork Times article for much more. We can appreciate The NewYork Times for this valuable contribution. It is hard for the public to understand criminal hacking. The NewYork Times has done a good deed to educate the American public. People in any organization are busy. Any time spent worrying about security is time taken away from useful pursuits. When an organization hires a security firm to make the changes that are described below, it is paying a lot of money for work that it can't evaluate. The organization just has to trust the contractor.
Russian hackers could roam freely through the Democratic National Committee’s network for nearly seven months before top D.N.C. officials were alerted to the [phishing] attack and hired cyberexperts [CrowdStrike, below] to protect their systems. In the meantime, the hackers moved on to targets outside the D.N.C., including Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman.
Resignations of Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, the chairwoman of the D.N.C., and most of her top party aides. Leading Democrats were sidelined at the height of the campaign.
The D.N.C. was a nonprofit group, dependent on donations, [recently heavily in debt (2015)], with a fraction of the security budget that a corporation its size would have.
2015 Mr. Tamene, who reports to Mr. Brown and fielded the call from the F.B.I. agent, was not a full-time D.N.C. employee; he works for a Chicago-based contracting firm called The MIS Department. Special Agent Hawkins did not show up in person at the D.N.C. Nor could he email anyone there, as that risked alerting the hackers that the F.B.I. knew they were in the system. Special Agent Hawkins called repeatedly in October.
[A phishing attack:] Billy Rinehart...then working for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, got an odd email warning from Google. “Someone just used your password to try to sign into your Google account,” the March 22 2016 email said, adding that the sign-in attempt had occurred in Ukraine. “Google stopped this sign-in attempt. You should change your password immediately.” Mr. Rinehart was in Hawaii at the time. He remembers checking his email at 4 a.m. for messages from East Coast associates. Without thinking much about the notification, he clicked on the “change password” button [that was displayed within the e-mail] and half asleep, as best he can remember, he typed in a new password. He gave the Russian hackers access to his email account. [He should have changed the password through the Google web site, not by clicking on the link embedded in the phishing e-mail.] [JE received similar warning from Google in Sept 2018 that an unknown computer was signed into his account. Google disabled John's Google account for half a day and recommended to John that he change his password. John saw his Linux computer and his smart phone, but also the unknown computer.]
Hundreds of similar phishing emails were being sent to American political targets, including an identical email sent on March 19 2016 to Mr. Podesta, chairman of the Clinton campaign. ... Charles Delavan, a Clinton campaign aide, replied to another of Mr. Podesta’s aides, who had noticed the alert. “John needs to change his password immediately.” With another click, a decade of emails that Mr. Podesta maintained in his Gmail account — a total of about 60,000 — were unlocked for the Russian hackers.
The F.B.I. observed this surge of activity as well, again reaching out to Mr. Tamene to warn him.
One bit of progress had finally been made by the middle of April 2016: The D.N.C., seven months after it had first been warned, finally installed a “robust set of monitoring tools,” Mr. Tamene’s internal memo says.
Mandiant, a cybersecurity firm that is now a division of FireEye — and the company the Clinton campaign brought in to secure its own systems. [Mandiant was an employer of Doug Burks, who gave an entertaining talk to the Augusta, Georgia Linux Users' Group shortly before 2014, when Doug started Security Onion Solutions LLC to help Security Onion users peel back the layers of their networks. Security Onion is a free Linux distribution for Intrusion Detection and Network Security Monitoring which shows network activity on one screen (doesn't bury critical data on other screens) and allows a trained user to recognize unusual activity.]
But in 2014 and 2015, a Russian hacking group began systematically targeting the State Department, the White House and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Each time, they eventually met with some form of success,” Michael Sulmeyer and Ben Buchanan. The Russians grew stealthier and stealthier, tricking government computers into sending out data while disguising the electronic “command and control” messages that set off alarms for anyone [in the U.S. agencies] looking for malicious actions. The State Department was so crippled that it repeatedly closed its systems to throw out the intruders. Mr. Obama ...did not name Russians publicly, or issue sanctions...“We’d have all these circular meetings,” one senior State Department official said, “in which everyone agreed you had to push back at the Russians and push back hard. But it didn’t happen.”
The Open Society Foundation, run by George Soros, was a major target. [Soros is often named by Rush Limbaugh as the funder of many left-wing protests, and perhaps Black Lives Matter and Antifa.] See this timeline at 2017 Apr 27.
In April 2016...with the new monitoring system in place, Mr. Tamene ... “The D.N.C. may have been hacked in a serious way this week, with password theft, etc.” A secret committee was immediately created, including Ms. Dacey, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, Mr. Brown and Michael Sussmann, a former cybercrimes prosecutor.
The D.N.C. immediately hired CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, to scan its computers, identify the intruders and build a new computer and telephone system from scratch. Within a day, CrowdStrike confirmed that the intrusion had originated in Russia, Mr. Sussmann said. CrowdStrike investigators recognized the distinctive handiwork of Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear. ... Dukes or A.P.T. 29, for “advanced persistent threat” — may or may not be associated with the F.S.B., the main successor to the Soviet-era K.G.B..
The D.N.C. executives and their lawyer had their first formal meeting with senior F.B.I. officials in mid-June 2016, nine months after the bureau’s first call to the tech-support contractor. On July 22 2016, three days before the start of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, WikiLeaks dumped out 44,053 D.N.C. emails...some of them crude or insulting. [This caused a public sensation and is thought by some to have nudged some voters away from Democrats.]
A version of this article appears in print on December 14, 2016, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Hacking the Democrats.
2017 Sep 19 How the Democrats plan to stop hackers from breaching 2018 campaigns https://www.cyberscoop.com/democrats-cybersecurity-dccc-shield-crowdstrike-wickr/
by Chris Bing CyberScoop
...a recently-launched program known as “Shield,” a plan to implement tighter security controls on campaigns...The plan has so far involved reorganizing staff at headquarters, making new hires, allocating budget resources, forming relationships with private technology firms and taking some applicable best practices from the private sector.
NIST’s cybersecurity framework is voluntary guidance for how organizations should approach cybersecurity.
In addition to offering educational resources and basic guidelines to campaign staff, Trujillo’s team has made inroads with several important technology vendors, including social media giant Facebook, Microsoft, encrypted messaging app Wickr and cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. Several of them have played a part in improving the DCCC’s own internal security since the January 2017 autopsy, said Trujillo.
Trujillo told CyberScoop that the organization was able to strike deals with Wickr and CrowdStrike in order to offer Democratic campaigns their products at a discount through the DCCC. As a result, many of the party’s most prominent campaign races in 2018 may rely on CrowdStrike products for protection and Wickr to communicate internally and with DCCC headquarters.
[JE: Employees who are agents of Russia or agents of the other political party remain a threat to the security of all these political organizations.]
2017 Nov 2 http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/02/politics/donna-brazile-dnc-book/index.html
Donna Brazile's upcoming Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House blames former chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz for taking on costly loans after Pres. Obama left debt at DNC. Around Labor Day 2015, the DNC was nearing the end of their credit rope. The Clinton campaign, through its joint fundraising agreement with the DNC, gave Clinton control of the "party's finances, strategy, and all the money raised." The agreement "was not illegal, but it sure looked unethical." Clinton claimed support for the DNC meant supporting state parties, [but] state parties kept less than 1/2% of the $82 million raised by Clinton's campaign fundraisers. "Clinton is looting funds meant for the state parties to skirt fundraising limits on her presidential campaign," Bernie Sanders campaign chairman Jeff Weaver said. He also said, "Let me tell this to the elites who today still control much of the Democratic Party apparatus: If you do not open up the party, if you do not allow the people in, if you do not advocate for the types of reforms that we need, you will be destroying the opportunity we have to take on Donald Trump."
Brazile resigned from her role as a CNN contributor in October 2016 after WikiLeaks released embarrasing emails. She received questions in advance of a broadcast CNN debate and town hall event that the Sanders campaign did not get. She then sent the questions to Clinton's campaign.
2017 Nov 3 http://www.bizpacreview.com/2017/11/03/geraldo-rivera-calls-dnc-criminal-enterprise-predicts-newest-scandal-end-forever-clinton-era-557292
Geraldo Rivera stuns Fox News viewers by revealing new scandal that is ‘end forever of Clinton era’ Carmine Sabia
Rivera said Brazile is “throwing Hillary Clinton under the bus and revealing — that the DNC was virtually a criminal enterprise.” Of the revelations of primary rigging that has Democrats, including Clinton supporter Sen. Elizabeth Warren abandoning the Clinton ship, he said “not only is it the nail in the coffin and the end forever of the Clinton era, but it also, more relevantly, shows that the Democratic National Committee is in total disarray.”
2017 Nov 5 The "dossier" is increasingly on T.V. news as liberal media let it out that the dossier is fiction and political disinformation.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dnc-clinton-campaign-paid-for-research-in-trump-dossier-report/
Oct 25, 2017 DNC, Clinton campaign paid for research that resulted in Trump dossier: Report
Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee contributed funding [millions of $] for research that culminated in the infamous dossier alleging Donald Trump's connections to Russia, according to a Washington Post report citing people familiar with the matter. [Rush Limbaugh and others have said for a long time that the dossier is fiction, but liberal media act like there is validity in it and potential to impeach Pres. Trump.]
"Tom Perez and the new leadership of the DNC were not involved in any decision-making regarding Fusion GPS, nor were they aware that Perkins Coie was working with the organization," DNC Communications Director Xochitl Hinojosa said in a statement provided to CBS News. "But let's be clear, there is a serious federal investigation [prosecutor Mueller] into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia, and the American public deserves to know what happened." Former DNC chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Shultz of Florida, confronted with the report on Wednesday, repeatedly said, "I was not aware." [The Trump campaign's alleged ties to Russia are being upstaged by proven ties of Clinton's campaign to Russia. See 2017 Oct 25 below.]
On Wednesday, speaking to reporters outside the White House, Mr. Trump called the development a "disgrace." "Well I think it's very sad what they've done with this fake dossier," Mr. Trump said. "Hillary Clinton always denied it, the Democrats always denied it," he added.
2017 Nov 6 Rush Limbaugh says that, before Donna Brazile's book, in all the decades of the Clintons in power, there has never been an intimate insider of the Clintons that has made such an exposé. There have been FBI and Secret Service retirees that have written, but their writings have been covered up by the liberal media. In early November on the PBS Newshour, either Amy Walters or Tamara Keith said that Brazile had expected to go places with Democrats, and the pressure to collude with dishonest Clinton practices scuttled her hopes. Writing her book is her way of coming back into politics.
2017 Oct 25 http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/fec-complaint-alleges-clinton-campaign-dnc-violated-campaign-law-by-funding-trump-dossier/article/2638643
FEC complaint alleges Clinton campaign, DNC violated campaign law by funding 'Trump dossier' by Mandy Mayfield
The Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign committee violated campaign finance laws after they failed to disclose payments linked to the so-called "Trump dossier," alleged a complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission by the Campaign Legal Center. According to Lawnewz, the DNC and the Clinton campaign could face fines.