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Poor ole Bret and America! (See 1, 1a, 1b, 1c and 1bd below)
And:
This is an afterthought but the more I listen to Bernie and watch his gestures the more I believe he would be better suited behind the counter of a delicatessen with is finger on the scales than the desk in the Oval Office.
As for "Joe" I believe if he is elected (God forbid) he would need a smaller desk to sit behind.
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The new warfare. (See 2 and 2a below.)
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This from a dear friend, former partner of my father and fellow memo reader:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/art
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Dick
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1) A Wretched Start for Democrats
The party seems interested in helping everyone except the voters it needs.
All 10 Democratic presidential candidates taking part in Thursday’s debate raised their hands to indicate that they would provide Medicaid benefits to illegal immigrants.Doug Mills/The New York Times
Amigos demócratas, Si ustedes siguen así, van a perder las elecciones. Y lo merecerán.
Translation for the linguistically benighted: “Democratic friends, if you go on like this, you’re going to lose the elections. And you’ll deserve it.”
In this week’s Democratic debates, it wasn’t just individual candidates who presented themselves to the public. It was also the party itself. What conclusions should ordinary people draw about what Democrats stand for, other than a thunderous repudiation of Donald Trump, and how they see America, other than as a land of unscrupulous profiteers and hapless victims?
Here’s what: a party that makes too many Americans feel like strangers in their own country. A party that puts more of its faith, and invests most of its efforts, in them instead of us.
They speak Spanish. We don’t. They are not U.S. citizens or legal residents. We are. They broke the rules to get into this country. We didn’t. They pay few or no taxes. We already pay most of those taxes. They willingly got themselves into debt. We’re asked to write it off. They don’t pay the premiums for private health insurance. We’re supposed to give up ours in exchange for some V.A.-type nightmare. They didn’t start enterprises that create employment and drive innovation. We’re expected to join the candidates in demonizing the job-creators, breaking up their businesses and taxing them to the hilt.
That was the broad gist of the Democratic message, in which the only honorable exceptions, like Maryland’s John Delaney and Colorado’s John Hickenlooper, came across as square dancers at a rave.
On closer inspection, the message got even worse.
Promising access to health insurance for north of 11 million undocumented immigrants at a time when there’s a migration crisis at the southern border? Every candidate at Thursday’s debate raised a hand for that one, in what was surely the evening’s best moment for the Trump campaign.
Calling for the decriminalization of border crossings (while opposing a wall)? That was a major theme of Wednesday’s debate, underlining the Republican contention that Democrats are a party of open borders, limitless amnesty and, in time, the Third World-ization of America.
Switching to Spanish? Memo to Beto O’Rourke and Cory Booker: If you can’t speak the language without a heavy American accent, don’t bother. It just reminds those of us who can that the only thing worse than an obnoxious gringo is a pandering one.
Eliminating private health insurance, an industry that employs more than 500,000 workers and insures 150 million? Elizabeth Warren, Bill de Blasio, Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris support it (though the California senator later recanted the position). Since Democrats are already committed to destroying the coal industry and seem inclined to turn Silicon Valley into a regulated utility, it’s worth asking: Just how much of the private economy are they even willing to keep?
And then there are the costs that Democrats want to impose on the country. Warren, for instance, favors universal child care (estimated cost, $70 billion a year), Medicare-For-All ($2.8 trillion to $3.2 trillion annually), student-debt cancellation and universal free college ($125 billion annually), and a comprehensive climate action plan ($2 trillion, including $100 billion in aid to poor countries), along with a raft of smaller giveaways, like debt relief for Puerto Rico.
As Everett Dirksen might have said: A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money. Someone will have to pay for all this, and it won’t just be the very rich making between seven and 10 figures a year. It will be you.
Throughout the debates, I kept wondering if any of the leading candidates would speak to Americans beyond the Democratic base. But Joe Biden seemed too feeble, oratorically and intellectually, to buck the self-defeating trend. Pete Buttigieg was, as always, fluent, knowledgeable and sincere. But his big moment — a mea culpa for a racially charged policing incident in South Bend — felt like another well-mannered white guy desperate to put his wokeness on display.
Harris, meanwhile, came across as Barack Obama in reverse, especially with her scurrilous attack on Biden for the sin of having had a functional political relationship with two former segregationist senators in the 1970s. This was portrayed as a clever debate move but it will come to haunt her.
Obama’s political genius was to emphasize what Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, authors of ‘The Coddling of the American Mind,” have called “common-humanity identity politics”— he made you feel comfortable no matter the color of your skin. Harris’s approach, by contrast, is “common-enemy identity politics.” Making white Americans feel racially on trial for views they may have held in the past on crime, busing and similar subjects is not going to help the Democrats.
None of this means that Democrats can’t win in 2020. The economy could take a bad turn. Or Trump could outdo himself in loathsomeness. But the Democratic Party we saw this week did even less to appeal beyond its base than the president. And at least his message is that he’s on their — make that our — side.
Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post.
1a) America's Detour from Sanity
My parents immigrated to an America whose economy boomed, then busted in 1929. Pop worked in the docks of New York City as a stevedore before the big crash. Mom was as passionate about raising a good family, regardless of difficulties, as she was about everything else. Nothing small, here – the scale was set high. Anything worth doing was carried out with a generous and loving heart. Our anchor was God and friends – not politicians and banks. It was a rough ride that made life all the more valuable for countering the many obstructions, day-to-day and hand-to-hand.
Up until about 1960, children that were not orphans had fathers and mothers living together in a nest secured with bonds of love and civil rules inspired by God. That life is sacred was taken as fact, not opinion. Women were cherished and respected by men who were brought up to be gentlemen. You did not require a high IQ to know that a man could never be the equal of a woman, and vice-versa. Respecting each other’s real differences, both sexes would laugh at the ridiculous notion that male and female are interchangeable, either in function or psyche. Such a claim, as made by post-Friedan feminists, reveal a mind tangled in abstractions and lost in wish lists.
It was concrete reality, not social science, that informed the actions and attitudes of the typical pre-1960s American, whether living in the boondocks or in the shadows of skyscrapers. He or she knew in the bones that science does not replace wisdom and aware that opinion is not a substitute for fact. The alert of every generation knew – and still know – that emoting is no substitute for thinking. The solution to real problems, not phony ones concocted by political pressure groups, needs a clear head grounded in objective reality.
1a) America's Detour from Sanity
My parents immigrated to an America whose economy boomed, then busted in 1929. Pop worked in the docks of New York City as a stevedore before the big crash. Mom was as passionate about raising a good family, regardless of difficulties, as she was about everything else. Nothing small, here – the scale was set high. Anything worth doing was carried out with a generous and loving heart. Our anchor was God and friends – not politicians and banks. It was a rough ride that made life all the more valuable for countering the many obstructions, day-to-day and hand-to-hand.
Our family was not unique. My parents were typical of the people who left their impoverished burgs and towns in Europe to strike new roots in American soil. As with the first Europeans who settled here and launched a new nation, the vast majority of subsequent settlers were God-and-family-oriented, strong in body and spirit, and fearless.
The early 20th Century saw America swirl into a storm of productivity, with creative advances in many fields. Breathless innovations in technology, industry, transportation, communications, and the arts remade the landscape and transformed the home almost overnight from “primitive” to “modern.”
The fantastic New York World’s Fair of 1939 enchanted me as a child and planted an unforgettable memory of progress with beauty. Growing up in the dizzying array of film masterpieces during cinema’s golden years – the 1940Fantasia still makes people gasp – spoiled me for life regarding excellence in screen entertainment. Soon color became the norm and black-and-white the option. Then television escaped science fiction and entered the living room to deliver live performances of stunning quality. I saw black-and-white TV turn to color and recorded music evolve from 78 rpm records to LPs, then to tape, as my ears witnessed the shift from “rich, warm sound” to exciting audio fidelity. All this with no computers, no satellites, no digital wizardry.
At mid-century, the drive and originality that delivered a vigorous and vibrant America to the world were still at play. Excellence was taken for granted in the performing arts. Sports and education reached incredible levels of achievement with a small fraction of today’s funding in equivalent dollars. Over 90% of students graduated from my high school (Bushwick, in Brooklyn), with far tougher standards than today’s.
Up until about 1960, children that were not orphans had fathers and mothers living together in a nest secured with bonds of love and civil rules inspired by God. That life is sacred was taken as fact, not opinion. Women were cherished and respected by men who were brought up to be gentlemen. You did not require a high IQ to know that a man could never be the equal of a woman, and vice-versa. Respecting each other’s real differences, both sexes would laugh at the ridiculous notion that male and female are interchangeable, either in function or psyche. Such a claim, as made by post-Friedan feminists, reveal a mind tangled in abstractions and lost in wish lists.
It was concrete reality, not social science, that informed the actions and attitudes of the typical pre-1960s American, whether living in the boondocks or in the shadows of skyscrapers. He or she knew in the bones that science does not replace wisdom and aware that opinion is not a substitute for fact. The alert of every generation knew – and still know – that emoting is no substitute for thinking. The solution to real problems, not phony ones concocted by political pressure groups, needs a clear head grounded in objective reality.
Not everyone was aware of how easily the mind is warped by media bias and the will turned by mob attitude. But it was an essential aspect of the times that people who were serious about getting out of trouble or improving anything acted within the framework of reality and truth – the objective kind, not the “truth” of opinion marinated in myth and served with scientific dressing. Adulterated truth – the kind peddled by deceivers – is a trick that predates Christ.
It was understood – just as bleeding follows wounded flesh and friendship follows kindness – that freedom comes with responsibility for the consequences, bad or good, of one’s actions. “Experts” were home-grown, not hired by well-funded groups to push their agendas. People depended on priests, pastors and rabbis for guidance on troublesome matters, not on TV anchors, think tanks, NGOs, and others with questionable loyalties and ideas about justice and progress.
Change is inevitable. But the alert of every generation demand to know what any proposed change is from and to what. Being specific and clear is a basic element of communication, without which confusion, misunderstanding and, yes, deceit abound. Training the mind to perceive and to conceive clearly was, during my youth, a function of subjects like grammar and geometry – essential preparation for everyone, not just students preparing for professional or technical careers. Hard, disciplined thinking in youth forms essential neural connections not obtained any other way. The mushy language and fuzzy logic that prevail today would be considered evidence of poor education or sign of a weak mind by those who came of age before the dumbing-down of the last century.
The foregoing take on life generated a beneficial social atmosphere – friendlier and more open than it is today. We kids were safe on the streets and in school. Yes, there were gangs, as always, but schools were free of drugs and violence and none of them had barbed wire fences and police guards. Despite the presence of every form of corruption and deceit known to exist among humans, life in America was nevertheless upbeat and people generally succeeded in living their lives as they saw fit – not as agenda-peddling moguls think they should. The Constitution of the United States still grants citizens the right to live their lives and conduct their affairs with minimum interference from government.
In short, before 1960, this country was – it’s been said often – “another planet.” Having lived in that freer, far more open and natural environment, I report from personal experience as a resident of New York in that time frame that the graph of social well-being after 1960 turned swiftly toward the bottom of the chart. The atmosphere all over America has soured with a slew of prescriptions for thought, speech and behavior that stifle initiative, creativity, originality, and pit “oppressor class” against “victim class,” according to the latest designations posted by groups and agencies not elected by or representing the American people.
Like “the invasion of the body-snatchers,” America has changed from a relatively free and happy land to a decidedly fretful and contentious place. The fouling of an open mind in an open atmosphere and the collapse of morals that began after the 1950s was not evolutionary and not inevitable. It was the accomplishment of change agents infiltrating America’s schools and institutes of learning, publication, entertainment, seminaries – change agents with Marxist ideas and no loyalty to America. Americans fell for this programmed, “evolutionary” transformation. And before any could pick up the pieces, the changes became the “new normal” – that hoodwinking cliché of “progressives.”
Open political revolution, justified or not, is to some degree understandable. In 1776, serious grievances with the British Crown led American colonists to cut their ties with England and give birth to a new and independent country, America. In 1861 the South tried to sever its ties with the North for serious grievances; the failure of the South and the success of the North are chapters in America’s political upheavals.
But a social revolution? Over what? Were we suddenly not the same people? Was justice a matter of personal opinion, now? Was anything-goes to replace moral principle and sound judgment? Was the family obsolete? Was life no longer sacred? How did right become wrong? When did up become down? And not the least of the questions: Were the 1960s rebels smarter than the millions of people who came before them?
When I returned from Korea in 1955, I witnessed the start of the civil rights movement, which brought promise of major social progress in race relations. (It made no difference what color our skin was in the Korean War; we were all brother soldiers, thanks to a change in DOD policy following World War II.) But as the net descended over a hoodwinked populace whose offspring were being groomed in school to live in a socialist society under a global government, instead of in a free nation under God, those of us awake shouted foul.
Media-mesmerized Americans have no idea what happened to their country, let alone the rape of their minds and their souls by well-funded globalists manipulating media, education, politics and public service channels to advance their new world order.
For those who dismiss or downplay the seriousness of America’s “transformation,” let me remind you that when it has become “legal” to kill a baby on its day of birth, mutilate a child’s body when a boy thinks he’s a girl or a girl thinks she’s a boy, when it has become possible – nay, likely under duress of the law – to lose reputation, job, and liberty for speaking the truth (the “legal” outrages to society are beyond count), then you know we have taken a terribly wrong turn.
It is time for waking Americans to shout down every action witnessed or contemplated that devalues human life, denigrates fatherhood and motherhood, makes speaking the truth “hate speech,” and replaces common sense and morality with political correctness. This is a hard but necessary stand in order to make loud and clear to everyone throughout the land that Americans will no longer tolerate the deliberate and systematic dismantling of this nation.
In the meantime, God spare the children and their children from the worst of the rough road ahead.
1c) Bernie Sanders Won the
Debate
He may not be the nominee, but he has set the Democratic agenda.
By The Editorial Board
Trump is a lucky man. Typically a re-election campaign is a referendum on the incumbent, and Mr. Trump is losing that race. But the Democrats are moving left so rapidly that they may let him turn 2020 into a choice between his policy record and the most extreme liberal agenda since 1972 (which may be unfair to George McGovern).
This is Mr. Sanders’ vision of America relentlessly divided by class, race and gender. Women live in “The Handmaid’s Tale” and minorities in the pre-Civil Rights Act South. Do they think Americans don’t remember that an African-American was President and so were his two attorneys general?
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2)US cyber attack on Iran exploited flaw in heavily-guarded network, experts say
Modern cyber crime units, especially American and Israeli, have massive resources at their disposal and recruit high-level experts.
1c) Bernie Sanders Won the
Debate
He may not be the nominee, but he has set the Democratic agenda.
By The Editorial Board
Trump is a lucky man. Typically a re-election campaign is a referendum on the incumbent, and Mr. Trump is losing that race. But the Democrats are moving left so rapidly that they may let him turn 2020 into a choice between his policy record and the most extreme liberal agenda since 1972 (which may be unfair to George McGovern).
That’s the most significant political message from two nights of debate in Miami this week among 20 Democratic presidential candidates. The party hasn’t merely moved to the left of Bill Clinton’s New Democrats of the 1990s. Democrats have moved to the left of where they were in 2010 when they last ran the government. Bernie Sanders lost to Hillary Clinton in 2016, but he has won the ideological debate.
Start with the Democrats’ description of America in 2019 as a bleak house for everyone but the very rich. The economy is “doing great for people who want to invest in private prisons, just not for the African-Americans and Latinx whose families are torn apart, whose lives are destroyed, and whose communities are ruined,” said Elizabeth Warren, in a dirge typical of the two debates. “It’s doing great for giant oil companies that want to drill everywhere, just not for the rest of us who are watching climate change bear down upon us.”
This is Mr. Sanders’ vision of America relentlessly divided by class, race and gender. Women live in “The Handmaid’s Tale” and minorities in the pre-Civil Rights Act South. Do they think Americans don’t remember that an African-American was President and so were his two attorneys general?
Perhaps their image of America as an Argentina of inequality might sell in a recession year like 2008. But Americans give Mr. Trump high marks on the economy, and consumer confidence is high despite a recent dip. Incomes are finally rising faster for the lower-skilled than for managers. The jobless rate is the lowest in two generations, and notably low for blacks and Hispanics.
Or take health care, as nearly all of the candidates now consider ObamaCare to be inadequate. Ms. Warren has endorsed Bernie’s Medicare for All bill, which would abolish private insurance for 177 million Americans. So has Kamala Harris, though she now seems to be hedging and says she’d allow private insurance for “supplemental” coverage. But she isn’t clear if that’s for optional procedures like cosmetic surgery or regular health coverage.
Most of the other candidates favor expanding the Affordable Care Act with a “public option,” or government-run plan, that would compete with private insurance. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand said this would “move us to single-payer more quickly.” She may be right, which is one reason the public option couldn’t pass even the Democratic House in 2010. Yet now this is the “moderate” party position.
The same leftward lurch is apparent on issue after issue.
• Climate change is now an urgent crisis that demands eliminating not merely the coal industry but all fossil fuels.
• Enforcing immigration laws that were once passed by bipartisan majorities in Congress is now inhumane. Joe Biden is attacked because the Obama Administration deported millions of undocumented migrants.
• Free health care for Americans isn’t enough; now it must also be an entitlement for any foreign migrant who enters the U.S.
• College loans must be forgiven in part or whole, and tuition now must be free.
• Taxes must be raised to rates unheard of since the 1960s because, as New York Mayor Bill de Blasio put it, money is “just in the wrong hands.”
• The Electoral College must be killed to save American democracy, and the Supreme Court must be packed with more Justices because the left now sometimes loses decisions.
Not all of the candidates on stage in Miami endorse all of these positions, but most do favor most of them. The two candidates who dared to warn that some of this might go too far—former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper and former Maryland Congressman John Delaney—are being dismissed as irrelevant in the post-debate coverage. They are said to have no chance at the nomination.
It isn’t clear why the Democrats have moved so far left so fast. Perhaps it is changing demographics led by the millennial socialists scarred by the Great Recession. Perhaps Mr. Trump’s conservative populism has inspired its counterpart on the left.
Whatever the cause, this Bernie Sanders triumph is the single most important development in the 2020 campaign. Mr. Trump should be grateful. If this is the opposition agenda next year, he might win a second term.
1d) The 2020 Democrats Lack
Hindsight
They ignore reality and march in lockstep with their base. Did they learn anything from 2016?
By Peggy Noonan
I’ve received tens of thousands of letters and other communications from Trump supporters the past few years, some of which have sparked extended dialogues. Two I got after last week’s column struck me as pertinent to this moment, and they make insufficiently appreciated points.
A gentleman of early middle age in Kansas City wrote to say he’d sat out the 2016 election because he was dissatisfied with both parties. But now he’s for Donald Trump, and the reason “runs deeper than politics.”
America’s elites in politics, media and the academy have grown oblivious to “the average Joe’s intense disgust” at being morally instructed and “preached to.”
“Every day, Americans are told of the endless ways they are falling short. If we don’t show the ‘proper’ level of understanding according to a talking head, then we are surely racist. If we don’t embrace every sanitized PC talking point, then we must be heartless. If we have the audacity to speak our mind, then we are most definitely a bigot.” These accusations are relentless.
“We are jabbed like a boxer with no gloves on to defend us. And we are fed up. We are tired of being told we aren’t good enough.” He believes the American people are by nature kind and generous—“they would give you the shirt off their back if you were in trouble”—and that “in Donald Trump, voters found a massive sledgehammer that pulverizes the ridiculous notion that Americans aren’t good enough.” Mr. Trump doesn’t buy the guilt narrative.
“It’s surely not about the man at this point. It stopped being about Trump long ago. It is about that counter-punch that has been missing from our culture for far too long.”
The culture of accusation, he says, is breaking us apart.
A reader who grew up upper-middle-class in the South writes on the politics of the situation. His second wife, also a Southerner, grew up poor. She is a former waitress and bartender whose politics he characterizes as “pragmatic liberal.” They watched Mr. Trump’s 2015 announcement together, and he said to her, “He doesn’t have a chance.” She looked at him “with complete conviction” and said, “He’s going to win.”
As the campaign progressed, she never wavered. At the end, with the polls saying Hillary, “I asked my wife how she could be so certain Trump was going to win.” He found her response “astute and telling.”
“She told me, ‘He speaks my language, and there’s a lot more of me than there is of you.’ ”
I have to say after a week of reading such letters that emotionally this cycle feels like 2016 all over again. Various facts are changed (no Mrs. Clinton) but the same basic dynamic pertains—the two Americas talking past each other, the social and cultural resentments, the great estrangement. It’s four years later but we’re re-enacting the trauma of 2016.
And the Democrats again appear to be losing the thread.
They’ve spent the past few months giving the impression they are in a kind of passionate lockstep with a part of their base, the progressives, and detached from everyone else.
And in the debates they doubled down. Both nights had fizz. There was a lot of earnestness and different kinds of brightness.
But what Night One did was pick up the entire party and put it down outside the mainstream and apart from the center.
This is what the candidates said:
They are, functionally, in terms of the effects of their stands, for open borders.
They are in complete agreement with the abortion regime—no reservations or qualms, no sense of just or civilized limits.
They’re all in on identity politics. One candidate warned against denying federally funded abortions to “a trans female.”
Two said they would do away with all private health insurance.
Every party plays to its base in the primaries and attempts to soften its stands in the general. But I’m wondering how the ultimate nominee thinks he or she will walk this all back. It is too extreme for America, and too extreme for the big parts of its old base that the Democrats forgot in 2016.
It was as if they were saying, “Hi, middle-American people who used to be Democrats and voted for Trump, we intend to alienate you again. Go vote for that jerk, we don’t care.”
Another problem: America has a painful distance between rich and poor, but it is hard to pound the “1%” hammer effectively in a nation enjoying functional full employment. Our prosperity is provisional and could leave tomorrow, but right now America’s feeling stronger.
“Grapes of Wrath” rhetoric resonates when people think they’re in or entering a recession or depression. The debaters Wednesday night looked like they were saying, “Who ya gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?”
After these big facts, candidate-by-candidate analysis seems secondary. Beto O’Rourke’s fatuous, self-actualizing journey makes the Democrats look sillier than they have to. Elizabeth Warren was focused and energetic, and her call to break up concentrations of power, including big tech, was strong and timely. She made a terrible mistake in holding to her intention to do away with private health insurance. An estimated 180 million Americans have such policies. Why force potential supporters to choose between her and their family’s insurance? Who does she think is going to win that? Why put as the headline on your plan, “This is what I’m going to take away from you”? Why would she gamble a serious long-term candidacy on such a vow? It is insane.
If she is extremely lucky Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won’t endorse her soon and make it worse.
Bill de Blasio had the best moment in the first half-hour, suggesting Democrats shouldn’t bicker about policy differences but instead unite as progressives. He has that air of burly, happy aggression that is the special province of idiots. Tulsi Gabbard broke through when it became clear she was the only explicitly antiwar candidate on the stage; this had the interesting effect of showing the others up.
Night two was more raucous but similarly extreme. The first 15 minutes included higher taxes, free college and student-loan forgiveness. Most candidates agreed on free health insurance for illegal immigrants. They also appeared to believe that most or all U.S. immigration law should be abolished.
The big dawgs did OK. If Kamala Harris was not a big dawg, she is now. Joe Biden sort of held his own but seemed to flag. Bernie Sanders seemed not as interesting as last cycle, more crotchety and irritable.
Eric Swalwell’s uncorking of a memory from when he was 6—ol’ Sen. Biden came to town and talked about passing the torch to younger leaders—was an attempt at slyness that so widely missed its mark, was so inelegant and obvious, that it was kind of fabulous. By the end of the night Mr. Swalwell had flamed out from sheer obnoxiousness.
The nonpolitician Marianne Williamson was delightfully unshy, sincere and, until her daffy closing statement, sympathetic. Kirsten Gillibrand yippily interrupted—“It’s my turn!”—and did herself no good.
It was an odd evening in that it was lively, spirited, at moments even soulful, and yet so detached from reality.
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2)US cyber attack on Iran exploited flaw in heavily-guarded network, experts say
Assault that crippled Revolutionary Guard missile system result of massive investment in cyber warfare by American military, likely took extensive preparation
A cyber attack on Iranian missile systems claimed by the US last week would have had to exploit a flaw in the heavily-guarded network, experts said.
Citing US official sources, American media last week reported that the Army Cyber Command had crippled the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s air defense units that shot down a sophisticated drone on June 20.
Military computing security is usually “hardened” to defend against attack but highly-skilled computer scientists in cyber units of modern armies are always working to find a way in.
“The simplest way would be for a special forces member to plug in a USB [carrying a virus] to the right place,” Loic Guezo of the French Information Security Club told AFP.
This is almost certainly how the well-known US-Israeli Stuxnet virus was introduced in 2010, into the computers of Iran’s nuclear complex, according to experts.
Iran at the time accused the US and Israel of using the virus to target its centrifuges used for uranium enrichment.
The Revolutionary Guards are believed to have since bolstered precautionary measures in a bid to isolate their military computer networks from the internet.
However, according to a military expert who requested anonymity, an “anti-aircraft defense system requires radars, control and command centers and ground-to-air missile sites to be inter-connected.”
Those components are connected by intranet networks that “at one time or another” must be connected to the internet.
“In the past, there was no way to connect to a weapon system,” said Guezo.
Today, however, he said most computer operating systems are commercial and vulnerable to attacks even if “everything is done to make them impenetrable.”
“Nothing is impenetrable,” said Guezo
Modern cyber crime units, especially American and Israeli, have massive resources at their disposal and recruit high-level experts.
The Cyber Command became a fully-fledged combat unit within the US army in May with a budget running into billions of dollars.
In Israel, the renowned electronic warfare Unit 8200 attracts the country’s best talent.
When cyber attackers “have identified an entry point,” they “intrude the network with messages carrying hyper-aggressive malware which will at least partially cripple the air defense network,” said an anonymous military specialist.
In March 2017, researcher Remy Hemez of the French Institute for International Relations (IFRI) told of how the Israeli army had used a program called SUTER in 2007 to temporarily blind Syrian air defense radars.
Operation Orchard, according to Hemez, showed how cyber weapons can successfully be used in battle.
Israeli fighter jets had penetrated deep into Syrian air space to destroy a suspected nuclear facility after having disabled Syrian air defenses.
Last week’s US claim of an attack on Iranian missile launching systems would have required months or even years of preparation, said Guezo.
“You have to study the architecture of the equipment and then create attack plans,” Guezo said.
2a)GPS jamming affecting Israel comes from Russian base in Syria: US researcher
A series of sensors on the International Space Station created by aerospace engineer Todd Humphreys, from a presentation by Humphreys to the US government in June 2019. (Courtesy)
Signal that has been interfering with airplanes in Israeli airspace is detectable from space, appears to come from new deployment of Moscow’s electronic warfare systems
The signal that has been disrupting satellite navigation for planes flying through Israeli airspace in recent weeks originates inside a Russian air base inside Syria, according to data collected by a US-based researcher.
This interference to the Global Positioning System (GPS) reception does not appear to be specifically directed at Israel, but rather the Jewish state is likely collateral damage in an effort by Moscow both to protect its troops from drone attacks and to assert its dominance in the field of electronic warfare, Todd Humphreys, a professor at the University of Texas, told The Times of Israel this week.
Since last spring, pilots flying through the Middle East, specifically around Syria, have noted that their GPS systems have displayed the wrong location or stopped working entirely. This came shortly after a large suicide drone attack on Russian forces in Syria.
Using a series of sensors onboard the International Space Station, Humphreys and his team have been tracking the phenomenon for several months. They were able to identify the geographic source of the signal: the Khmeimim Air Base, which was built by Russia in 2015 along Syria’s western coast as one of Moscow’s permanent facilities as part of its support for Syrian dictator Bashar Assad in the country’s civil war.
“[The signal] is so strong that I can see it from space,” said Humphreys, an aerospace engineer, specializing in satellite-based navigation.
A series of sensors on the International Space Station created by aerospace engineer Todd Humphreys, from a presentation by Humphreys to the US government in June 2019. (Courtesy)
Similar GPS disruptions have been reported in recent years around the Black Sea, along Russia’s borders with Norway and Finland, and near the Kremlin and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s palace.
The issue did not affect Israeli airspace until a few weeks ago, when pilots started reporting navigation problems during takeoff and landing in Ben Gurion International Airport, as well as around Cyprus’s Larnaca International Airport.
According to Israel’s Airports Authority, the interference has not caused any safety issues as there are several methods that can be used for takeoffs and landings, but it has had a significant, though not overly dangerous, impact on pilots’ ability to fly their planes, as modern aircraft rely heavily on GPS navigation.
“It’s a nuisance that pilots have become accustomed to,” Humphreys said.
The issue only affects planes in the air over Israel; there is no interruption of GPS service on the ground. Humphreys explained that this is because the technology being used works on lines of sight. Due to the curvature of the earth, the signal cannot reach GPS receivers over the horizon.
According to Humphreys, the method being used by Russia appears to be a combination of jamming, in which GPS service is outright denied, and spoofing, the term for feeding GPS receivers false information.
He said the sudden appearance of the problem in Israel could be the result of any number of changes to Russia’s deployment of its transmitters, also known as jammers — either the deployment of additional transmitters, an increase in the power of them or a repositioning of one of the jammers closer to the border with Israel.
“But my assumption is that Russia relocated one of its transmitters recently,” he said.
Israeli officials have also said Russia appeared to be to blame for the GPS interference, with some unnamed defense officials telling the Haaretz newspaper on Friday that the source of the problem seems to be coming from either a land-based or ship-based jammer.
The Russian Embassy denied the claims by Israeli officials, saying the allegations were “fake news.”
I don’t find Russia’s denials credible. I can actually see [the signal] from space
But Humphreys said based on his data, he was 90 to 95 percent positive that Moscow was behind the interference.
“I don’t find Russia’s denials credible,” he said, repeating, “I can actually see [the signal] from space.”
This GPS denial of service does not affect Russian pilots taking part in the civil war in Syria, as Russia does not rely on GPS satellites for its navigation. Instead, Russia uses its indigenous Global Navigation Satellite System, or GLONASS.
As a result, the Russian military has little to lose in disrupting GPS reception.
Humphreys said the jamming appeared to be an effort by Russia to prevent attacks by drones that rely on GPS navigation to attack their bases and personnel, but also is a way for Moscow to demonstrate to the entire world its “dominance in the radio spectrum.”
He noted a recent comment by Gen. Raymond Thomas, head of US Special Operations Command: “[Syria is] the most aggressive electronic warfare environment on the planet.”
In addition to Russia’s GPS spoofing, Israel has been accused by Syria and Arab media of carrying out electronic warfare attacks on the Syrian military, falsely triggering or knocking out its air defenses.
Earlier this month, Humphreys presented his findings to the National Coordination Office for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing — the branch of the government responsible for maintaining the Global Positioning System.
He said he also spoke to Israel’s El Al airline about the issue, but has not discussed it with Israeli military or civil officials.
The Israel Defense Forces refused to comment publicly on the source of the interference, but said it has not affected its operations.
“The issue is of civilian concern and the IDF provides technological support in order to facilitate freedom of movement within Israel’s airspace,” the army said. “The IDF operates continuously to maintain operational freedom of movement and superiority in the electromagnetic spectrum.”
Since the interference began, planes in Israel have had to use an alternative method for landings, known as the Instrument Landing System.
“It is a safe and professional method that is used every day in airports around the world, including Israel,” the Airports Authority said.
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