In The Garden of Treason? Cyber Attacks - An Act of War?

                                                                                Blake graduates from kindergarten

Dagny loses more teeth.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Buy American -  Rebuild America
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
How deep to the roots of the Democrats and those in cahoots with the FBI go in the garden of treason?

Plot Against Flynn Aimed To Cripple Trump’s Moves In The Middle East

By BENNY AVNI, Special to the Sun

As Attorney General Barr and General Michael Flynn battle in court to rescind the general's guilty plea, a deeper look deserves to be taken at the phone conversations that underlay the controversy. The calls were, in part, meant to protect the incoming administration from an effort to cripple the Mideast policy on which Mr. Trump campaigned for office.

The effort to cripple Mr. Trump’s Mideast policy centered, in large part, on the UN Security Council’s Resolution 2334. There is a good account of this by Lee Smith, writing in Tablet Magazine. The resolution was designed to undercut Israel’s claims to Jerusalem. The general, in his guilty plea, claimed that he misled FBI agents when he told them that “on or about December 22 (2016), Flynn did not ask the Russian Ambassador to delay the vote on or defeat a pending United Nations Security Council resolution.”

Yet Mr. Flynn was absolutely right to undermine the resolution. Security Council resolution 2334 was widely seen as Mr. Obama’s parting shot against Benjamin Netanyahu. Mr. Obama was still fuming over the fact that Mr. Netanyahu had publicly denounced Mr. Obama’s articles of appeasement with Iran. Mr. Netanyahu saw the Iran deal as a threat to Israel. He marked the point memorably in his third speech to a joint meeting of Congress.

The real aim of 2334, though, was an attempt by Mr. Obama to tie the hands of the incoming Trump administration. It was particularly galling because Mr. Trump’s transition team — indeed, Mr. Trump himself during the campaign — had clearly signaled its intention to reverse Mr. Obama’s Israel policies.

Mr. Trump had specifically campaigned against the Obama administration’s view that Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem settlements were the top, perhaps only, stumbling block to peacemaking. Mr. Obama decided to forgo battles with Jerusalem-friendly lawmakers on Capitol Hill, where turning his Israel policy into a lasting legacy would be difficult. Instead, as in the Iran deal case, he turned to the friendly turf of the United Nations.

Ostensibly, resolution 2334 was an Egyptian idea. Cairo, as the Arab representative at the council, supposedly pushed a global condemnation of Israel’s settlement policies, rendering even Israel's hold on Judaism’s holiest sites illegal in international law. In reality, as several diplomats told me at the time, Washington conceived, shaped and pushed the resolution.

Unlike in the past, when the American team at UN headquarters would consult with Israeli counterparts on measures involving their county, Ambassador Samantha Power’s team refused to return Israeli diplomats’ phone calls. “It’s your guess how the Americans will vote, because they sure don’t talk to me,” a senior Israeli diplomat told me at the time. Frozen out of the process, Jerusalem then turned to the Trump team.

Mr. Flynn, according to his guilty plea, discussed the proposed resolution with the Russian ambassador in Washington at the time, Sergei Kislyak. He also tried his luck with UN representatives from then-council members Uruguay and Malaysia. Also, the President-elect’s adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, spoke with Britain’s ambassador in Washington, Kim Darroch.

Then Mr. Trump got on the blower, calling President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi. The Cairo strongman seemed to realize he’d be better off on the good side of a soon-to-be president than carrying water for a less-than-friendly Mr. Obama.

Shortly after that December 22, 2016, call, Egypt’s UN team withdrew its proposed “settlements resolution.” Still, Ms. Power’s pressure prevailed, as the resolution’s cosponsors — New Zealand, Malaysia, and Venezuela — scheduled the vote for the next day anyway.

On December 23, 14 council members raised their hand in favor of the anti-Israel resolution. Ms. Power abstained, breaking from a long tradition of American vetoes of resolutions regarding Israel.

So who was the villain here? Was it General Flynn, who tried to return America to its familiar position on Israel’s side, or Mr. Obama's aides, who used the United Nations to impose its failed policy on the incoming president?

Since Mr Flynn asked to rescind his guilty plea, much ink has been dedicated to the Logan Act — a law that since 1799 was tested only twice, yielding zero convictions.

Instead, Mr. Obama’s December 2016 maneuvering suggests a new act may be needed to regulate the actions of the presidency, rather than the citizens, during the lame duck transition period between the early November election and the late January inauguration.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Are cyber attacks the equivalent of war? If not why not?

Israeli cyber chief: Attack on water systems ‘a changing point in cyber warfare’

Yigal Unna says attempted hacking into civilian systems, widely ascribed to Iran, marked a historic first, and could have resulted in disaster had it not been detected in time

By AP Today, 

Last month’s major cyber attack against Israel’s water systems was a “synchronized and organized attack” aimed at disrupting key national infrastructure, Israel’s national cyber chief said Thursday.

The assault has been widely attributed to Iran. Yigal Unna, who heads the National Cyber Directorate, did not mention Iran directly, nor did he comment on the alleged Israeli retaliation two weeks later said to have shut down a key Iranian port, but he said recent developments have ushered in a new era of covert warfare, ominously warning that “cyber winter is coming.”

“Rapid is not something that describes enough how fast and how crazy and hectic things are moving forward in cyberspace and I think we will remember this last month and May 2020 as a changing point in the history of modern cyber warfare,” he said in a video address to CybertechLive Asia, a digital international cyber conference.

“If the bad guys had succeeded in their plot we would now be facing, in the middle of the Corona crisis, very big damage to the civilian population and a lack of water and even worse than that,” he added.

Israel and Iran are bitter foes who have engaged in years of covert battles that have included high-tech hacking and cyber attacks. Most famously, US and Israeli intelligence agencies are suspected of unleashing a computer worm called Stuxnet years ago in an attempt to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program.

But Unna said the attempted hacking into Israel’s water systems marked the first time in modern history that “we can see something like this aiming to cause damage to real life and not to IT or data.”

Had Israel’s National Cyber Directorate not detected the attack in real time, he said chlorine or other chemicals could have been mixed into the water source in the wrong proportions and resulted in a “harmful and disastrous” outcome. His office released a brief statement after the attempt, acknowledged it had been thwarted and no damage had been caused. But Unna’s comments marked the first official detailed account of what happened.

“It is a part of some attack over Israel and over the national security of Israel and not for financial benefit,” he said. “The attack happened but the damage was prevented and that is our goal and our mission. And now we are in the middle of preparing for the next phase to come because it will come eventually.”

Iran hasn’t commented on the attempted hacking and has played down the alleged reprisal on May 9 against the Shahid Rajaee port. Mohammad Rastad, head of Iran’s port and marine agency, told the semiofficial ILNA news agency that the attack failed to infiltrate into the agency’s systems and only damaged “several private sector systems.”

Israel has not officially commented on the attack against Iran, but in an interview with Israel’s Army Radio, Amos Yadlin, a former head of military intelligence, said it was significant.

“The attack displayed the cyber ability of a world power. It appears that this was a clear Israeli message to Iran, don’t dare to touch civilian systems, the water and electricity systems in Israel, which were attacked this past month. You, the Iranians, are more vulnerable than we are,” he said.

Without discussing the attack directly, Unna said the past month marked a historic turning point in cyber warfare.

“Cyber winter is coming and coming even faster than I suspected,” he said. “We are just seeing the beginning.”

A television report earlier this month said Israeli leadership viewed the attempted attack on water systems as a significant escalation by Iran and a crossing of a red line because it targeted civil infrastructure.

“This is an attack that goes against all the codes of war. Even from the Iranians we didn’t expect something like this,” Channel 13 news quoted an official saying.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++