organization:russian intelligence

Ex-U.S. marine held in Russia for spying was misled, says lawyer | Reuters
▻https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-usa-espionage-whelan-idUSKCN1PG0Y4

https://s3.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20190122&t=2&i=1348457427&w=1200&r=LYNXNPEF0L0LM#.jpg

The lawyer for a former U.S. marine accused of spying by Russia said on Tuesday that his client had been misled before his arrest and believed that a thumb drive handed to him in a hotel room had contained holiday snaps rather than secret information.

Russia’s Federal Security Serviced detained Paul Whelan, who holds U.S., British, Canadian and Irish passports, in a Moscow hotel room on Dec. 28.

Whelan appeared in a Moscow court on Tuesday, where a judge rejected a release on bail. If found guilty of espionage, he could be jailed for up to 20 years.

Whelan, who denies the charges, was detained after receiving a thumb drive containing a list of all the employees of a secret Russian state agency, the Russian online news portal Rosbalt.ru reported this month.

Rosbalt cited an unnamed Russian intelligence source as saying that Whelan had been spying for 10 years, using the internet to identify targets from whom he could obtain information, and that the list he was caught with had long been of interest to U.S. spies.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov appeared to support that version of events, later telling reporters Whelan had been “caught red-handed” carrying out “specific illegal actions” in his hotel room.

But Vladimir Zherebenkov, Whelan’s lawyer, said on Tuesday that his client had accepted the information unknowingly.

“Paul was actually meant to receive information from an individual that was not classified,” Zherebenkov told reporters.

“These were cultural things, a trip to a cathedral, Paul’s holiday ... photographs. But as it turned out, it (the thumb drive) contained classified information.”

The lawyer said Whelan had not been able to see what was on the thumb drive because he had been detained before he had a chance to do so.

Russian agents allegedly used Bitcoin to fund the DNC hack - MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/611648/russian-agents-allegedly-used-bitcoin-to-fund-the-dnc-hack

https://cdn.technologyreview.com/i/images/gettyimages-997833174chipsomodevilla.jpg?sw=1200

Among the many new details in today’s indictment (PDF) of 12 Russian intelligence officers for cyberattacks meant to interfere with the US presidential election in 2016, one in particular should stand out to techies: the defendants allegedly used Bitcoin to fund the operation.

A web of dark money: According to the US Department of Justice’s indictment, the defendants “conspired to launder” more than $95,000 “through a web of transactions structured to capitalize on the perceived anonymity of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.” They allegedly mined coins and acquired them “through a variety of means to obscure the origin of the funds,” which were used to finance cyberattacks against Democratic party officials, members of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and others.

Cat and mouse: Though the indictment says they used hundreds of different e-mail accounts with fake names to handle Bitcoin payments and cover their tracks, investigators linked messages from “several dedicated email accounts” to corresponding transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain. According to the indictment, the defendants also sometimes facilitated Bitcoin payments on the same computers they used to “conduct their hacking activity.”

The takeaway: If you weren’t convinced that cryptocurrencies are a magnet for would-be money launderers, this should help. Beyond that, though: Bitcoin is not anonymous! Using clues from outside the internet, which the Mueller team clearly had, it’s quite possible to follow the money on the blockchain and root out individuals behind the transactions (see “Criminals thought Bitcoin was a perfect hiding place, but they thought wrong”).

#Bitcoin #Argent_sale #Cybersécurité

A New York Times Reporter Is Making a Stunning Admission That She Became an ’Unwitting Agent of Russian Intelligence’ | Alternet
▻https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/new-york-times-reporter-making-stunning-admission-she-became-unwitting-age

https://www.alternet.org/sites/default/files/story_images/screen_shot_2018-04-25_at_2.51.48_pm.png

New York Times reporter Amy Chozick’s just-released memoir, Chasing Hillary, offers a detailed and direct admission that major media outlets played into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hands by devoting obsessive coverage to hacked Democratic emails during the 2016 presidential campaign. It’s a striking acknowledgment, given how defensive the Times and its campaign journalists have generally been about their work. But rather than writing off Chozick’s mea culpa as proof of personal weakness or a one-off error, journalists should take it as a warning. The 2016 election may have been the first time that journalists found themselves the tools of a foreign government aimed at undermining American democracy. It won’t be the last.

"If you get email correspondence of newsworthiness from any source, you have an obligation to publish it, assuming it’s true, which in this case it was. You have an obligation to publish it,” Baquet said on NPR. “And if a powerful figure writes emails that are newsworthy, you’ve just got to publish them.”

Baquet presents a false choice between hiding vital information from the public and behaving exactly as media outlets did during the 2016 election — one that seems to appeal to other Times political reporters. This formulation ignores a third option — that the failure wasn’t that news outlets had published emails stolen by a hostile source, but that the scope of their coverage greatly exceeded the actual news value of the emails. The hacked email coverage is one of a series of cases in which poor editorial judgment led to an overwhelming focus on Clinton email-related purported scandals instead of pressing policy issues.

#Fake_news #Manipulation #Elections_USA

Exclusive: Russia used Facebook to try to spy on Macron campaign - sources
▻http://www.reuters.com/article/us-cyber-france-facebook-spies-exclusive-idUSKBN1AC0EI

Russian intelligence agents attempted to spy on President Emmanuel Macron’s election campaign earlier this year by creating phony Facebook personas, according to a U.S. congressman and two other people briefed on the effort.

About two dozen Facebook accounts were created to conduct surveillance on Macron campaign officials and others close to the centrist former financier as he sought to defeat far-right nationalist Marine Le Pen and other opponents in the two-round election, the sources said. Macron won in a landslide in May.

Facebook said in April it had taken action against fake accounts that were spreading misinformation about the French election. But the effort to infiltrate the social networks of Macron officials has not previously been reported.

Russia has repeatedly denied interfering in the French election by hacking and leaking emails and documents. U.S. intelligence agencies told Reuters in May that hackers with connections to the Russian government were involved, but they did not have conclusive evidence that the Kremlin ordered the hacking.

Facebook confirmed to Reuters that it had detected spying accounts in France and deactivated them. It credited a combination of improved automated detection and stepped-up human efforts to find sophisticated attacks.

Company officials briefed congressional committee members and staff, among others, about their findings. People involved in the conversations also said the number of Facebook accounts suspended in France for promoting propaganda or spam - much of it related to the election - had climbed to 70,000, a big jump from the 30,000 account closures the company disclosed in April.

Facebook did not dispute the figure.

The spying campaign included Russian agents posing as friends of friends of Macron associates and trying to glean personal information from them, according to the U.S. congressman and two others briefed on the matter.

Facebook employees noticed the efforts during the first round of the presidential election and traced them to tools used in the past by Russia’s GRU military intelligence unit, said the people, who spoke on condition they not be named because they were discussing sensitive government and private intelligence.

WikiLeaks Has Joined the Trump Administration | Foreign Policy
▻https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/03/08/wikileaks-has-joined-the-trump-administration

The anti-American group has become the preferred intelligence service for a conspiracy-addled White House.
[…]
Is it just a coincidence that WikiLeaks dumped a massive database pertaining to CIA hacking and wiretapping just three days after Trump made wiretapping a major political issue? Perhaps so. But there is cause for suspicion.
[…]
Again, maybe this is entirely coincidental, but WikiLeaks’ history of being used by Russian intelligence to support Trump should lead to much greater scrutiny not only of who leaked this information — is there a mole in the CIA? — but why it was released now. Even if there is no active collusion between the White House and the Kremlin, the extent to which their agendas coincide is striking. Both Putin and Trump want to discredit the U.S. intelligence community because they see it as an obstacle to their power.

bref, WikiLeaks = Poutine = Trump, mais c’est peut-être une coïncidence…

Why I Still Don’t Buy the Russian Hacking Story - Leonid Bershidsky
▻https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-12-22/why-i-still-don-t-buy-the-russian-hacking-story

Hence, it’s hard for me to believe that this infected app — found somewhere on the internet and likely never used by Ukrainian soldiers — offers evidence tying the GRU to APT28. And that’s even if one accepts the initial logical leap to the GRU, as opposed to any of the other Russian spy services also involved in the Ukrainian conflict. I sincerely hope that when the U.S. intelligence community finally produces its findings on the election-related hacks, it will be more convincing. 

Don’t get me wrong. It stands to reason that Russian intelligence was interested in the U.S. election campaign, and it’s a distinct possibility that it leaked what it found to the press via WikiLeaks, despite the latter’s denials. Russian President Vladimir Putin dislikes Hillary Clinton, and he probably would have been happy to hurt her chances of getting elected — thus, by default, helping Trump. It’s all quite logical, which is why a third of Americans believe Russia influenced the outcome of the election.

In the real world outside of soap operas and spy novels, however, any conclusions concerning the hackers’ identity, motives and goals need to be based on solid, demonstrable evidence. At this point, it’s inadequate.

COLIN POWELL IN LEAKED EMAIL SAYS #ISRAEL HAS 200 NUKES
▻http://europe.newsweek.com/colin-powell-says-israel-has-200-nukes-leaked-email-499192

Hacker group DCLeaks, which has reported links to Russian intelligence, released a slew of emails from #Powell Wednesday, which were subsequently reviewed by U.S. foreign policy blog LobeLog. Powell’s aides have confirmed the veracity of the leaked emails. The four-star U.S. general went on to publicly support the Iranian nuclear deal, saying that “it’s a pretty good deal.”

#nucléaire

Special Report: How Russia allowed homegrown radicals to go and fight in Syria
▻http://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-militants-specialreport-idUSKCN0Y41OP

Four years ago, Saadu Sharapudinov was a wanted man in Russia. A member of an outlawed Islamist group, he was hiding in the forests of the North Caucasus, dodging patrols by paramilitary police and plotting a holy war against Moscow.

Then his fortunes took a dramatic turn. Sharapudinov, 38, told Reuters that in December 2012 Russian intelligence officers presented him with an unexpected offer. If he agreed to leave Russia, the authorities would not arrest him. In fact, they would facilitate his departure.

“I was in hiding, I was part of an illegal armed group, I was armed,” said Sharapudinov during an interview in a country outside Russia. Yet he says the authorities cut him a deal. “They said: ’We want you to leave.’”

[...]

Moscow wanted to eradicate the risk of domestic terror attacks, so intelligence and police officials turned a blind eye to Islamic militants leaving the country.

Mystery in Sochi Doping Case Lies With Tamper-Proof Bottle - The New York Times
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/14/sports/russia-doping-bottles-olympics-2014.html

The bottles, used for testing at the Olympics since the Sydney Games in 2000, are made by #Berlinger, a Swiss company founded in 1865 as a mechanical cotton weaving mill. Until this week, they were largely ignored vessels in the global fight against doping.

Now they are prominent characters in an extraordinary ploy that affected the results of the Winter Olympics, according to Grigory Rodchenkov, who ran Russia’s antidoping laboratory for a decade. His accounts of the doping operation were first reported by The New York Times this week.

Berlinger’s bottles were first presented to the International Olympic Committee’s medical commission in the late 1990s, in a meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland, said Andrea Berlinger, the sixth generation of her family to run the company.

Dr. Catlin, then a member of that commission, recalled that the Berlingers showcased various bottle designs to a roomful of doctors. “All of us were particularly pleased and excited by this bottle,” he said, “because it looked pretty bulletproof.”

Russian officials somehow figured out a way to remove the cap without breaking it, he said, enabling him to replace the steroid-tainted urine of top athletes with clean urine, stockpiled in soda bottles and other containers in the months leading up to the Games.

“We’re all a bit speechless, to be honest,” Ms. Berlinger said Friday. “We’re seeing a lot of support. No one can believe it.”
[…]
The only way to open the bottle, according to Berlinger, is to use a special machine sold by the company for about $2,000; it cracks the bottle’s cap in half, making it apparent that the sample has been touched.

Dr. Rodchenkov said that for at least 15 Russian athletes who won medals at Sochi, both the A and B samples were substituted before they were tested. None of the bottles’ caps — which are branded with unique seven-digit codes — showed any signs of having been opened.

Each night at Sochi, Dr. Rodchenkov said, sealed bottles were passed through a hole in the wall of the storage closet that served as his shadow laboratory. The bottles were handed to a man who he believed worked for the Russian intelligence service, the F.S.B. Within two hours, he said, those same bottles were returned to him, their caps unlocked.

“Magicians were on duty,” Dr. Rodchenkov said, suspecting that F.S.B. officers had studied the toothed metal rings that lock the bottle when the cap is twisted shut. According to him, they collected hundreds of them leading up to the Olympics.

Dr. Catlin theorized that heat had been applied to remove the bottles’ caps.

He said he had expressed some concern about the bottles years ago, asking if they could be outfitted with internal thermometers, to show if the sample had been frozen or heated. “But that’s just a wild guess,” he said.

#tamper-proof or not ?

OSCE observer in Luhansk region found to be Russian intelligence officer - media
▻http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/osce-observer-in-luhansk-region-found-to-be-russian-intelligence-officer-m

An observer of the Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) of the OSCE in Luhansk region, Maxim Udovichenko, has been revealed to be an employee of the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) of the Russian Federation, the TSN news service of the “1+1” TV channel has reported.

(intégralité de la brève)

Ça ne va pas arranger les membres de la mission qui sont — déjà — soupçonnés par les deux côtés…

Fears grow as Ukraine rightwing militia puts Kiev in its sights - FT.com
▻http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/7925dacc-369c-11e5-bdbb-35e55cbae175.html

But fears are growing that Right Sector — the only major volunteer battalion Kiev has not yet managed to bring under regular army control — could turn its fire on the new government itself.
Dmytro Yarosh, Right Sector’s leader, called late last month for a nationwide no-confidence referendum in President Petro Poroshenko. He was addressing a rally in Kiev of up to 5,000 Right Sector activists, angry over what they say is the government’s slow progress in fighting corruption and excessive concessions to Moscow as it attempts to reach a settlement over eastern Ukraine.
“We are an organised revolutionary force that is opening the new phase of the Ukrainian revolution,” Mr Yarosh told the rally.
[…]
Russian officials and media have long demonised Right Sector as neo-Nazis who, they claim, were the real driving force behind Ukraine’s revolution. Moscow media’s obsession led some Ukrainian officials to suggest privately that Right Sector might have been penetrated by Russian intelligence as a subversive “project” aimed at undermining the government.
Now some Ukrainians who previously dismissed the threat posed by Right Sector are growing nervous.
“[Right Sector] have been mainly a problem for Ukraine’s image in the west, but now there is added concern because they have turned against the government,” said Andreas Umland, a German academic based in Kiev who studies the far right. “But they don’t yet have the political support or firepower to topple the government, and they know this.”
Popular support for the group remains low, although a poll found it had risen from 1.8 per cent last October to 5.4 per cent by July.

Mysterious group takes claim for high-profile murders
▻http://www.kyivpost.com/content/kyiv-post-plus/mysterious-group-takes-claim-for-high-profile-murders-386483.html

The recent assassinations have been blamed alternatively on either Ukrainian nationalists or Russian intelligence agencies and have re-ignited speculation about possible links between the Kremlin and some Ukrainian ultranationalist groups. According to another version, Kalashnikov and Buzina were killed by ex-Yanukovych allies to prevent them from giving testimony.
(…)
Political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Penta research group, wrote on Facebook on April 17 that a group calling itself the Ukrainian Insurgent Army had sent him an e-mail taking responsibility for the murder of Kalashnikov and Buzina. They also claimed they were responsible for the deaths of former Yanukovych associates Mykhailo Chechetov, Oleksandr Peklushenko and Stanislav Melnyk earlier this year. According to the police, Chechetov, Peklushenko and Melnyk committed suicide.

The unknown group borrowed its name from nationalist leader Roman Shukhevych’s Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which fought against Nazi and Soviet troops in 1942-1956 and is demonized by the Kremlin to this day.

“We are launching a ruthless insurgency against the anti-Ukrainian regime of traitors and Moscow’s lackeys, and from now on we will speak to them only in the language of arms until they are completely eliminated,” the group said, as cited by Fesenko.

To prove its links to the murders, the organization said that Kalashnikov had been killed with two weapons with calibers of 7.65х17 and 9х18. They also said that Kalashnikov had shot his pistol before he was killed.

“This just confirms my suspicion that Russian intelligence agencies are behind these people, though the killers themselves may not even know this,” Fesenko wrote. “The statement also gives us grounds to suspect that the campaign of assassinations will continue and may be directed against top government representatives.”
(…)
Analysts have speculated that Russia allegedly uses some Ukrainian nationalists to present Ukraine as a “fascist” country and to destabilize the political situation.

One of those accused, Dmytro Korchinsky, used to cooperate with Alexander Dugin, a pro-Kremlin Russian imperialist who has called for killing Ukrainians. Korchinsky was on the board of Dugin’s International Eurasian Union before falling out with his Russian ally in 2007. In 2005 Korchinsky trained Russia’s Nashi pro-Kremlin youth group on ways to combat “color revolutions.”

Secret services often attempt to influence nationalist groups to use them for their goals, Fesenko told the Kyiv Post.

“Intelligence agencies often act this way,” he said. “They use local nationalist groups and plant moles there. They give them ideas and funding.”

Un terreau propice pour toutes sortes de #barbouzeries

Les néo-nazis, c’est Poutine… comme ça il peut les diaboliser comme l’UIA et Chouchkevytch (qui viennent tout récemmment d’être reconnus comme combattants pour l’indépendance ukrainienne ►http://seenthis.net/messages/359655 )

MH17 investigators still awaiting U.S., Russian intelligence reports | Reuters
▻http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/28/us-ukraine-crisis-mh-idUSKBN0IH15N20141028

The United States said its satellite imagery proved it was shot down with a ground-to-air missile by Russian-backed rebels. Russian says a Ukrainian military aircraft downed it.

“It is desirable for prosecutors to receive further information from the U.S. in connection with the criminal investigation,” the government said in a letter to Parliament.

Lawmakers had asked whether the United States had provided imagery from the 10 minutes before and after the crash. Only the latter were referred to in an interim air crash inspection report published last month.

“In the American legal system it is judicially complicated to pass intelligence information to the criminal justice system,” the letter said.

It added that the government was sure the information would come.

#c'est_compliqué

350: Operational Games: The Espionage Wars - CI CENTRE
▻https://cicentre.site-ym.com/?page=350

350: Operational Games: The Espionage Wars

LENGTH: 3 days

This groundbreaking course for counterintelligence professionals chronologically examines significant cases of Russian intelligence officers who spied for the United States and American intelligence officers who spied for Russia since 1950 and how their cases affected one another.

This unprecedented course "connects the dots” of the past 50 years of counterintelligence:

The recruitment of agents

Officers who volunteered to spy

The sophisticated use of ‘operational games’ or deception operations to protect spies

Including an in-depth look at the Soviet/Russian deceptions to protect their prize spies Rick Ames and Bob Hanssen)

The arrest and sometimes execution of these spies.

Both sides fought hard and had an equal share of successes and failures.

For the first time, you will be able to see a chronological birds-eye view of the espionage battles, what went right, what went wrong and why identifying what went wrong is far more complicated than most realize.

NOTE: This is an intensive, advanced course and it is recommended that students have some familiarity with the important espionage cases of these two countries over the past 50 years.