Tag Archives: responsibilities

Bar Them

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It turns out the hacks into various cloud-based services and cloud providers by the People’s Republic of China was far more extensive in depth and breadth than heretofore reported.

They came in through cloud service providers, where companies thought their data was safely stored. Once they got in, they could freely and anonymously hop from client to client, and defied investigators’ attempts to kick them out for years.
Cybersecurity investigators first identified aspects of the hack, called Cloud Hopper by the security researchers who first uncovered it, in 2016….
A Wall Street Journal investigation has found that the attack was much bigger than previously known. It goes far beyond the 14 unnamed companies listed in the indictment, stretching across at least a dozen cloud providers, including CGI Group Inc, one of Canada’s largest cloud companies; Tieto Oyj, a major Finnish IT services company; and International Business Machines Corp.

Disgustingly, the cloud providers spent their efforts trying to cover up the breaches rather than working effectively to contain them and eject the spies.

Investigators in and out of government said many of the major cloud companies tried to stonewall clients about what was happening inside their networks. “It was like trying to pin down quicksand,” one investigator said.

Those companies should see their customers walk away, and those companies should be boycotted—and not only of their cloud “services.” They’ve demonstrated that none of their products can be trusted because the companies themselves cannot be trusted.

The government’s response? One example:

Officials at the Department of Homeland Security grew so frustrated by resistance by the cloud companies that they are now working to revise federal contracts that would force them to comply with future probes….

This is the wrong answer. Those contracts should be canceled for cause (obstructing a criminal investigation comes to mind), and those cloud companies barred from doing business with the government. Answers to Requests for Proposals that include these companies as partners or subcontractors in the answers should be rejected, too. Some of the cloud providers became more cooperative after government—ours or overseas—pressure, but that’s not enough.

Cut them all off.

And develop offensive cyber weapons and use them against the PRC’s intelligence, military, and political establishments.

Reduced NBA Viewership

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The TV ratings of National Basketball Association games are down by 15% compared to last year.

Some folks ascribe this to fewer folks subscribing to television generally. Others blame it on geography:

Many of the league’s best teams are on the West Coast, meaning their games end after some viewers in the East have already gone to bed.

Yet others assign at least some of the blame to injuries, especially to marque players.

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver blames in on a “broken” pay-TV system.

All of those would seem to be factors in the public’s decreasing interest in the doings of the NBA.

I have to wonder, though, how much of the drop is due to dismay over the NBA’s despicable behavior toward the Houston Rockets’ GM tweeting in support of Hong Kong protestors and to contempt for the league’s disgracefully obsequious kowtowing, from Silver, through team management, on down to players on the floor, to the People’s Republic of China government.

“Circle Games” and Losers

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One last thought on this, and then I’ll depart from the foolishness.  Recall the cadets and midshipmen who made the OK sign as part of a so-called circle game and whose academy management teams then were cowed into investigating those cadets and midshipmen.

In the circle game, you try to trick someone into looking at your hand while you make an “OK” sign, usually below the waist. If the mark falls for it, you’re awarded a free punch.

The real losers of the round of the circle game played at the recent Army-Navy college football game are the management teams of the two academies. Their meek surrender to “woke” pressure constitutes their falling for the game’s jape, and so they have earned free punches from each of the cadets and midshipmen who were targets of those managers’ foolish investigations.

“Management teams:” those worthies are unsuited to be leaders of our nation’s military academies, and they are unqualified to be teachers of our future military officers.

Impeachment And Trial

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) is continuing to refuse to deliver her caucus’ Article of Impeachment to the Senate for trial.  Leave aside the premises that by withholding her Articles, she is confessing that her caucus has no case to present for trial or that she is functionally absolving President Donald Trump of any impeachable wrong-doing.  As The Wall Street Journal noted, her move only trivializ[es] a serious constitutional power and process. As the WSJ further noted,

There’s nothing in the Constitution that says impeachment requires a formal transmittal of the articles to the Senate, whether by sedan chair or overnight FedEx, or that the House must appoint impeachment managers.

Here, though, the WSJ misstated the case:

If she never sends the articles and there is no trial, she will have effectively trampled on executive power and Senate prerogatives by maligning a President without the chance for acquittal at trial.

The claim is certainly true in the latter part, if there is no trial; however, Pelosi’s not sending along the Articles does not mean there can be no trial.

The Progressive-Democrat caucus’ Articles of Impeachment are recorded in the House Journal IAW our Constitution’s Article I, Section 5:

Each House shall keep a Journal of its Proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting such Parts as may in their Judgment require Secrecy….

Of course, there’s nothing requiring Secrecy in the publicly done impeachment process.  The Senate can simply collect the Articles from the House’s publicly available Journal and proceed from there. If current Senate Rules don’t have provision for that, it’s a simply enough matter—a majority vote—to adjust its Rules.

Even with the Articles collected on Senate initiative, its current Rules say that a trial can’t be begun until the House appoints its impeachment managers, which Pelosi also is refusing to do. This is another easy adjustment to relevant Senate Rules.

The Progressive-Democrats have impeached our President, and with that, the House’s role in the process is done. All that’s happening now on the House side is a toddler’s temper tantrum, a toddler holding his breath until he turns…blue.

The FBI and Surveillance

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DoJ’s Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, has produced a report that’s pretty damning of the FBI and its surveillance practices.  This has raised concerns about how far the FBI goes, and whether it exceeds the spirit, even the letter, of our laws governing FBI surveillance.

Monday’s report…also faulted the bureau for its “failure to adhere to its own standards of accuracy and completeness when filing applications” to conduct electronic surveillance on Carter Page, a former Trump campaign staffer, under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Privacy advocates said the report’s findings validated their belief that surveillance practices under the FISA law…lacked adequate oversight and transparency.

Indeed. And this is the crux of the matter.  I suspect that the FISA law and other of our government surveillance-related laws are adequate to their task (eliding questions about FISA’s courts). It’s the humans in charge of the FBI, and their subordinates, who are wanting in this.

It’s virtually certain that additional law, or tweakings of existing laws, will accomplishment a good approximation of nothing in redressing this.

I suggest that what is needed are a couple of things.  One is an increase in the severity of sanction applied to those FBI managers (I won’t call them leaders; failure here disqualifies them from that favorable label) who fail in their oversight duties and separately in their transparency duties.  This will produce improvement, but that will erode, just as we’ve reached our present sorry pass via erosion over the past several years. J Edgar Hoover and James Comey are merely the culmination of such erosion.

The other thing promises to produce more long-lasting results. FBI managers who are Presidentially nominated and Senate confirmed should be barred from any service, including pro bono and lobbying, within DoJ under any immediately subsequent administration; they can go work in the private sector instead. Their eligibility for DoJ employment could be restored with the election of the second President (not the next President reelected) after the one in whose administration they served.

This removal from employment should extend into and across the top tiers just below the confirmation positions, as well.

None of those folks will have necessarily done anything wrong or even untoward; it’s merely necessary to break up and terminate the accumulating power of incumbency and bureaucratic inertia.  Some might worry that too much corporate memory would be lost.  Such memory and history are valuable in any enterprise; however, in the case of the FBI, there will be sufficient value in the senior agents and remaining other senior employees. As well as from the non-FBI DoJ with its outside-looking-in perspective.