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Peter Thiels reverse Midas touch
by professor rat 21 Oct '21

21 Oct '21

https://decrypt.co/83980/peter-thiel-ive-been-underinvested-bitcoin-crypto-… What a fuckwit. With enemies like this central banksters don't need friends.

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Hester Peirce needs killing ( My 20$ )
by professor rat 21 Oct '21

21 Oct '21

The USA can be sliced up for scrap. Death for America. https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2021/10/20/some-nfts-are-probably-illegal-d… Anarchist revolution is always highly illegal. Viva la revolution!

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Cryptocurrency: Biden Nominating RusSocCom Omarova to Currencey Control, CBDC, WarOnCash
by grarpamp 21 Oct '21

21 Oct '21

After filling every position, including the Vice Presidency, with worthless Woke-Left-Socialist-Marxist-Commies, Biden (who sold out the US to China to raise Hunter) appoints yet another, a straight up Russian Socialist Agent... Biden Nominee For Top Banking Regulator Facing Growing Resistance In Senate https://www.wsj.com/articles/comptroller-of-the-economy-saule-omarova-joe-b… https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/19/biden-pick-to-run-bank-regulator-faces-demo… Unsurprisingly, some influential Senate Democrats are getting cold feet about the prospect of President Biden nominating Saule Omarova to lead the OCC. The Cornell law professor educated in the USSR who has proposed that the Fed take over most retail banking activities from the private sector (which a Fedcoin - or ZuckCoin - just might help it to do) while wholeheartedly supporting the progressives' "Green New Deal" agenda. This has, understandably, made many in both Congress, and the industry she is about to regulate, uncomfortable. As we have reported, Omarova has previously favorably compared the USSR to the US - at least when it comes to the "gender pay gap". "Until I came to the US, I couldn’t imagine that things like gender pay gap still existed in today’s world. Say what you will about old USSR, there was no gender pay gap there. Market doesn’t always ‘know best,’" Omarova tweeted in 2019, adding (after receiving harsh criticism) "I never claimed women and men were treated absolutely equally in every facet of Soviet life. But people’s salaries were set (by the state) in a gender-blind manner. And all women got very generous maternity benefits. Both things are still a pipe dream in our society!" Additionally, as the Wall Street Journal editorial board notes, "Ms. Omarova thinks asset prices, pay scales, capital and credit should be dictated by the federal government. In two papers, she has advocated expanding the Federal Reserve’s mandate to include the price levels of “systemically important financial assets” as well as worker wages. As they like to say at the modern university, from each according to her ability to each according to her needs." In a recent paper “The People’s Ledger,” she proposed that the Federal Reserve take over consumer bank deposits, “effectively ‘end banking,’ as we know it,” and become “the ultimate public platform for generating, modulating, and allocating financial resources in a modern economy.” She’d also like the U.S. to create a central bank digital currency—as Venezuela and China are doing—to “redesign our financial system & turn Fed’s balance sheet into a true ‘People’s Ledger,’” she tweeted this summer. What could possibly go wrong? -WSJ Omarova also wants to create a "Public Interest Council" of "highly paid" academics who would wield subpoena power over regulatory agencies, including the Fed. But President Biden has put these concerns aside and said he plans to nominate Omarova, though he has yet to make it official. Many speculate her nomination is mostly a sop to the party's progressive wing, since even Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen opposes her nomination. But according to a report published Wednesday by CNBC, Omarova's nomination is running into resistance in the Senate, including among key Democratic members of the committee that must approve her nomination before it goes before the entire Senate. Senate Democrats are fractured over whether to support Saule Omarova, Biden’s indicated choice to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, jeopardizing her candidacy. Any Democratic defection, or an indication of such, could force Senate leadership to scrap the nomination before putting Omarova up to a vote. According to CNBC's main source (who remains anonymous) is that these Senators have already shared their misgivings with President Biden. Her selection, coupled with her views on how to overhaul the US banking system, prompted several Senate Democrats or their staff to complain to the White House and suggest that the president’s choice will be tough to support on Capitol Hill, according to a person familiar with the matter. This person declined to be named in order to speak openly about private discussions between the White House and Senate offices. Others surrounding the OCC nomination process said a handful of moderate Democrats harbor reservations about Omarova and her aspirations to “end banking as we know it,” as she suggested in a Vanderbilt Law Review article. Those people cautioned that skeptical senators likely haven’t made a final decision yet but are leaning against her candidacy. But it's not just the whispers of anonymized sources from the Hill suggesting that the nomination of what would be America's first formerly Communist chief of the OCC (Saule once earned a "Lenin" award back in the USSR, which has favorably compared to the US in at least one notable instance) is in trouble. Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, a critical red state Democrat and community banking champion, told CNBC that he's having second thoughts - though he didn't say he opposes the nomination. Sen. Jon Tester of Montana told CNBC on Tuesday that he has "concerns about Omarova’s candidacy. Tester, known in the Senate as a champion of community banks, did not indicate whether he opposes her outright. "Some of Ms. Omarova’s past statements about the role of government in the financial system raise concerns about her ability to impartially serve at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency," he said. "I’m looking forward to meeting with her to discuss them." Tester, a moderate member of the Senate banking committee, would also vote on whether to recommend Omarova to the broader chamber. A representative for Sen. Mark Warner, another moderate on the banking committee, said the Virginia Democrat has not yet made a decision on whether to support Omarova. Of course, Senate progressives like Sherrod Brown of Ohio still full-throatedly back Saule's nomination. The office of banking committee Chairman Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, a fierce advocate of Omarova’s, reiterated its support for Biden’s pick. "Senator Brown and the White House continue to push back against Republicans’ misleading statements against Ms. Omarova’s character and policy positions," a spokesperson said. The White House continues to support Omarova’s nomination, an official said. In a sign of how little the leadership wants to deal with this right now, with so many other Democratic priorities being hammered out, including Biden's entire domestic agenda, when approached by CNBC, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer refused to even return their request for comment. At the very least, the takeaway from all of this is that even if Omarova's nomination isn't already dead in the water, the Dems won't have the bandwidth to deal with a high-profile nomination fight until next year.

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Naval of the world
by professor rat 20 Oct '21

20 Oct '21

naval - 12h Bitcoin is the bet that there is only one kind of valuable token. Altcoins are the bet that there are many kinds of valuable tokens. NFTs are the bet that each and every token can be uniquely valuable. Similar to Monotheism is the belief that there is only one kind of valuable person. Deist’s are of the belief that there are many kinds of valuable persons. Atheists believe that each and every person can be uniquely valuable. Or Bitcoin is the steampunk crypto-industrial revolution. Altcoins are workers-councils and the electrification of the entire planet NFTs are the possibility of ubiquitous crypto-anarchy saving this planet and preparing us for the stars

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Where they lie about abortion they will libel anarchism
by professor rat 20 Oct '21

20 Oct '21

https://www.vox.com/culture/22715333/tv-abortion-plot-storyline-lies complex elements of real public discourse were oversimplified into a pro/anti debate, where “reasonable” people on both sides framed the issue in moral terminologies

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Big Gods PR problem
by professor rat 20 Oct '21

20 Oct '21

Bitcoin Hits New All-Time High Above $65K on Strength of ETF Debut. That means increasing enmeshments with govts, up to and including the Great Satan itself. Though it has catalyzed a lot of rapid cryptoanarchist evolution the Mangy Dog is increasingly attracting bigger disease-ridden fleas and so must be put down, sorry , sent to that big sunny farm upstate. Bitcoin also threatens the environment https://www.somagnews.com/bitcoin-mining-with-fossil-power-plants-threatens… Any attack on the environment demands a measured and proportional response. And if there was a God it would be necessary to destroy it.

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State-capacity libertarianism considered fascist
by professor rat 20 Oct '21

20 Oct '21

https://sanseverything.wordpress.com/2007/12/15/mises-and-the-merit-of-fasc…

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"Kidnapping, assassination and a London shoot-out: Inside the CIA's secret war plans against WikiLeaks"
by Jacob Appelbaum 20 Oct '21

20 Oct '21

https://news.yahoo.com/kidnapping-assassination-and-a-london-shoot-out-insi… Yahoo News Kidnapping, assassination and a London shoot-out: Inside the CIA's secret war plans against WikiLeaks Zach Dorfman, Sean D. Naylor and Michael Isikoff Sun, September 26, 2021, 11:00 AM In 2017, as Julian Assange began his fifth year holed up in Ecuador’s embassy in London, the CIA plotted to kidnap the WikiLeaks founder, spurring heated debate among Trump administration officials over the legality and practicality of such an operation. Some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request “sketches” or “options” for how to assassinate him. Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred “at the highest levels” of the Trump administration, said a former senior counterintelligence official. “There seemed to be no boundaries.” The conversations were part of an unprecedented CIA campaign directed against WikiLeaks and its founder. The agency’s multipronged plans also included extensive spying on WikiLeaks associates, sowing discord among the group’s members, and stealing their electronic devices. While Assange had been on the radar of U.S. intelligence agencies for years, these plans for an all-out war against him were sparked by WikiLeaks’ ongoing publication of extraordinarily sensitive CIA hacking tools, known collectively as “Vault 7,” which the agency ultimately concluded represented “the largest data loss in CIA history.” President Trump’s newly installed CIA director, Mike Pompeo, was seeking revenge on WikiLeaks and Assange, who had sought refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy since 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden on rape allegations he denied. Pompeo and other top agency leaders “were completely detached from reality because they were so embarrassed about Vault 7,” said a former Trump national security official. “They were seeing blood.” Michael Pompeo, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), listens during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Thursday, May 11, 2017. ( Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images) Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo in 2017. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images) The CIA’s fury at WikiLeaks led Pompeo to publicly describe the group in 2017 as a “non-state hostile intelligence service.” More than just a provocative talking point, the designation opened the door for agency operatives to take far more aggressive actions, treating the organization as it does adversary spy services, former intelligence officials told Yahoo News. Within months, U.S. spies were monitoring the communications and movements of numerous WikiLeaks personnel, including audio and visual surveillance of Assange himself, according to former officials. This Yahoo News investigation, based on conversations with more than 30 former U.S. officials — eight of whom described details of the CIA’s proposals to abduct Assange — reveals for the first time one of the most contentious intelligence debates of the Trump presidency and exposes new details about the U.S. government’s war on WikiLeaks. It was a campaign spearheaded by Pompeo that bent important legal strictures, potentially jeopardized the Justice Department’s work toward prosecuting Assange, and risked a damaging episode in the United Kingdom, the United States’ closest ally. The CIA declined to comment. Pompeo did not respond to requests for comment. “As an American citizen, I find it absolutely outrageous that our government would be contemplating kidnapping or assassinating somebody without any judicial process simply because he had published truthful information,” Barry Pollack, Assange’s U.S. lawyer, told Yahoo News. Assange is now housed in a London prison as the courts there decide on a U.S. request to extradite the WikiLeaks founder on charges of attempting to help former U.S. Army analyst Chelsea Manning break into a classified computer network and conspiring to obtain and publish classified documents in violation of the Espionage Act. “My hope and expectation is that the U.K. courts will consider this information and it will further bolster its decision not to extradite to the U.S.,” Pollack added. There is no indication that the most extreme measures targeting Assange were ever approved, in part because of objections from White House lawyers, but the agency’s WikiLeaks proposals so worried some administration officials that they quietly reached out to staffers and members of Congress on the House and Senate intelligence committees to alert them to what Pompeo was suggesting. “There were serious intel oversight concerns that were being raised through this escapade,” said a Trump national security official. Some National Security Council officials worried that the CIA’s proposals to kidnap Assange would not only be illegal but also might jeopardize the prosecution of the WikiLeaks founder. Concerned the CIA’s plans would derail a potential criminal case, the Justice Department expedited the drafting of charges against Assange to ensure that they were in place if he were brought to the United States. In late 2017, in the midst of the debate over kidnapping and other extreme measures, the agency’s plans were upended when U.S. officials picked up what they viewed as alarming reports that Russian intelligence operatives were preparing to sneak Assange out of the United Kingdom and spirit him away to Moscow. The intelligence reporting about a possible breakout was viewed as credible at the highest levels of the U.S. government. At the time, Ecuadorian officials had begun efforts to grant Assange diplomatic status as part of a scheme to give him cover to leave the embassy and fly to Moscow to serve in the country’s Russian mission. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange appears at the window before speaking on the balcony of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London on Feb. 5, 2016. (Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP) WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange appears at the window of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London on Feb. 5, 2016. (Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP) In response, the CIA and the White House began preparing for a number of scenarios to foil Assange’s Russian departure plans, according to three former officials. Those included potential gun battles with Kremlin operatives on the streets of London, crashing a car into a Russian diplomatic vehicle transporting Assange and then grabbing him, and shooting out the tires of a Russian plane carrying Assange before it could take off for Moscow. (U.S. officials asked their British counterparts to do the shooting if gunfire was required, and the British agreed, according to a former senior administration official.) “We had all sorts of reasons to believe he was contemplating getting the hell out of there,” said the former senior administration official, adding that one report said Assange might try to escape the embassy hidden in a laundry cart. “It was going to be like a prison break movie.” The intrigue over a potential Assange escape set off a wild scramble among rival spy services in London. American, British and Russian agencies, among others, stationed undercover operatives around the Ecuadorian Embassy. In the Russians’ case, it was to facilitate a breakout. For the U.S. and allied services, it was to block such an escape. “It was beyond comical,” said the former senior official. “It got to the point where every human being in a three-block radius was working for one of the intelligence services — whether they were street sweepers or police officers or security guards.” White House officials briefed Trump and warned him that the matter could provoke an international incident — or worse. “We told him, this is going to get ugly,” said the former official. As the debate over WikiLeaks intensified, some in the White House worried that the campaign against the organization would end up “weakening America,” as one Trump national security official put it, by lowering barriers that prevent the government from targeting mainstream journalists and news organizations, said former officials. The fear at the National Security Council, the former official said, could be summed up as, “Where does this stop?” When WikiLeaks launched its website in December 2006, it was a nearly unprecedented model: Anyone anywhere could submit materials anonymously for publication. And they did, on topics ranging from secret fraternity rites to details of the U.S. government’s Guantánamo Bay detainee operations. Yet Assange, the lanky Australian activist who led the organization, didn’t get much attention until 2010, when WikiLeaks released gun camera footage of a 2007 airstrike by U.S. Army helicopters in Baghdad that killed at least a dozen people, including two Reuters journalists, and wounded two young children. The Pentagon had refused to release the dramatic video, but someone had provided it to WikiLeaks. Wikileaks releases leaked 2007 footage of a U.S. Apache helicopter fatally shooting a group of men at public square in Eastern Baghdad. (U.S. Military via Wikileaks.org) WikiLeaks releases leaked 2007 footage of a U.S. Apache helicopter fatally shooting a group of men at a public square in eastern Baghdad. (U.S. Military via Wikileaks.org) Later that year, WikiLeaks also published several caches of classified and sensitive U.S. government documents related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables. Assange was hailed in some circles as a hero and in others as a villain. For U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies, the question was how to deal with the group, which operated differently than typical news outlets. “The problem posed by WikiLeaks was, there wasn’t anything like it,” said a former intelligence official. How to define WikiLeaks has long confounded everyone from government officials to press advocates. Some view it as an independent journalistic institution, while others have asserted it is a handmaiden to foreign spy services. “They’re not a journalistic organization, they’re nowhere near it,” William Evanina, who retired as the U.S.’s top counterintelligence official in early 2021, told Yahoo News in an interview. Evanina declined to discuss specific U.S. proposals regarding Assange or WikiLeaks. But the Obama administration, fearful of the consequences for press freedom — and chastened by the blowback from its own aggressive leak hunts — restricted investigations into Assange and WikiLeaks. “We were stagnated for years,” said Evanina. “There was a reticence in the Obama administration at a high level to allow agencies to engage in” certain kinds of intelligence collection against WikiLeaks, including signals and cyber operations, he said. That began to change in 2013, when Edward Snowden, a National Security Agency contractor, fled to Hong Kong with a massive trove of classified materials, some of which revealed that the U.S. government was illegally spying on Americans. WikiLeaks helped arrange Snowden’s escape to Russia from Hong Kong. A WikiLeaks editor also accompanied Snowden to Russia, staying with him during his 39-day enforced stay at a Moscow airport and living with him for three months after Russia granted Snowden asylum. In the wake of the Snowden revelations, the Obama administration allowed the intelligence community to prioritize collection on WikiLeaks, according to Evanina, now the CEO of the Evanina Group. Previously, if the FBI needed a search warrant to go into the group’s databases in the United States or wanted to use subpoena power or a national security letter to gain access to WikiLeaks-related financial records, “that wasn’t going to happen,” another former senior counterintelligence official said. “That changed after 2013.” U.S. whistle-blower Edward Snowden is displayed on a giant screen during a local news program in Hong Kong, China on June 23, 2013. The Hong Kong government has confirmed that Edward Snowden has left Hong Kong and is on a commercial flight to Russia. (Sam Tsang/South China Morning Post via Getty Images) An image of Edward Snowden on a giant screen in Hong Kong on June 23, 2013. (Sam Tsang/South China Morning Post via Getty Images) >From that point onward, U.S. intelligence worked closely with friendly spy agencies to build a picture of WikiLeaks’ network of contacts “and tie it back to hostile state intelligence services,” Evanina said. The CIA assembled a group of analysts known unofficially as “the WikiLeaks team” in its Office of Transnational Issues, with a mission to examine the organization, according to a former agency official. Still chafing at the limits in place, top intelligence officials lobbied the White House to redefine WikiLeaks — and some high-profile journalists — as “information brokers,” which would have opened up the use of more investigative tools against them, potentially paving the way for their prosecution, according to former officials. It “was a step in the direction of showing a court, if we got that far, that we were dealing with agents of a foreign power,” a former senior counterintelligence official said. Among the journalists some U.S. officials wanted to designate as “information brokers” were Glenn Greenwald, then a columnist for the Guardian, and Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker, who had both been instrumental in publishing documents provided by Snowden. “Is WikiLeaks a journalistic outlet? Are Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald truly journalists?” the former official said. “We tried to change the definition of them, and I preached this to the White House, and got rejected.” The Obama administration’s policy was, “If there’s published works out there, doesn’t matter the venue, then we have to treat them as First-Amendment-protected individuals,” the former senior counterintelligence official said. “There were some exceptions to that rule, but they were very, very, very few and far between.” WikiLeaks, the administration decided, did not fit that exception. In a statement to Yahoo News, Poitras said reported attempts to classify herself, Greenwald and Assange as “information brokers” rather than journalists are “bone-chilling and a threat to journalists worldwide.” “That the CIA also conspired to seek the rendition and extrajudicial assassination of Julian Assange is a state-sponsored crime against the press,” she added. “I am not the least bit surprised that the CIA, a longtime authoritarian and antidemocratic institution, plotted to find a way to criminalize journalism and spy on and commit other acts of aggression against journalists,” Greenwald told Yahoo News. By 2015, WikiLeaks was the subject of an intense debate over whether the organization should be targeted by law enforcement or spy agencies. Some argued that the FBI should have sole responsibility for investigating WikiLeaks, with no role for the CIA or the NSA. The Justice Department, in particular, was “very protective” of its authorities over whether to charge Assange and whether to treat WikiLeaks “like a media outlet,” said Robert Litt, the intelligence community’s senior lawyer during the Obama administration. Glenn Greenwald (L) speaks to the media next to Laura Poitras during a news conference after receiving the George Polk Awards in New York, April 11, 2014. (Eduardo Munoz/Reuters) Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras at a news conference in 2014. (Eduardo Munoz/Reuters) Then, in the summer of 2016, at the height of the presidential election season, came a seismic episode in the U.S. government’s evolving approach to WikiLeaks, when the website began publishing Democratic Party emails. The U.S. intelligence community later concluded the Russian military intelligence agency known as the GRU had hacked the emails. In response to the leak, the NSA began surveilling the Twitter accounts of the suspected Russian intelligence operatives who were disseminating the leaked Democratic Party emails, according to a former CIA official. This collection revealed direct messages between the operatives, who went by the moniker Guccifer 2.0, and WikiLeaks’ Twitter account. Assange at the time steadfastly denied that the Russian government was the source for the emails, which were also published by mainstream news organizations. Even so, Assange’s communication with the suspected operatives settled the matter for some U.S. officials. The events of 2016 “really crystallized” U.S. intelligence officials’ belief that the WikiLeaks founder “was acting in collusion with people who were using him to hurt the interests of the United States,” said Litt. After the publication of the Democratic Party emails, there was “zero debate” on the issue of whether the CIA would increase its spying on WikiLeaks, said a former intelligence official. But there was still “sensitivity on how we would collect on them,” the former official added. The CIA now considered people affiliated with WikiLeaks valid targets for various types of spying, including close-in technical collection — such as bugs — sometimes enabled by in-person espionage, and “remote operations,” meaning, among other things, the hacking of WikiLeaks members’ devices from afar, according to former intelligence officials. The Obama administration’s view of WikiLeaks underwent what Evanina described as a “sea change” shortly before Donald Trump, helped in part by WikiLeaks’ release of Democratic campaign emails, won a surprise victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. As Trump’s national security team took their positions at the Justice Department and the CIA, officials wondered whether, despite his campaign trail declaration of “love” for WikiLeaks, Trump’s appointees would take a more hard-line view of the organization. They were not to be disappointed. “There was a fundamental change on how [WikiLeaks was] viewed,” said a former senior counterintelligence official. When it came to prosecuting Assange — something the Obama administration had declined to do — the Trump White House had a different approach, said a former Justice Department official. “Nobody in that crew was going to be too broken up about the First Amendment issues.” On April 13, 2017, wearing a U.S. flag pin on the left lapel of his dark gray suit, Pompeo strode to the podium at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank, to deliver to a standing-room-only crowd his first public remarks as Trump’s CIA director. Rather than use the platform to give an overview of global challenges or to lay out any bureaucratic changes he was planning to make at the agency, Pompeo devoted much of his speech to the threat posed by WikiLeaks. “WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service and has encouraged its followers to find jobs at the CIA in order to obtain intelligence,” he said. “It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia,” he continued. CIA Director Mike Pompeo answers questions at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, Thursday, April 13, 2017. Pompeo denounced WikiLeaks, calling the anti-secrecy group a Pompeo answers questions at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington in 2017. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP) It had been barely five weeks since WikiLeaks had stunned the CIA when it announced it had obtained a massive tranche of files — which it dubbed “Vault 7” — from the CIA’s ultrasecret hacking division. Despite the CIA’s ramped up collection on WikiLeaks, the announcement came as a complete surprise to the agency, but as soon as the organization posted the first materials on its website, the CIA knew it was facing a catastrophe. Vault 7 “hurt the agency to its core,” said a former CIA official. Agency officials “used to laugh about WikiLeaks,” mocking the State Department and the Pentagon for allowing so much material to escape their control. Pompeo, apparently fearful of the president’s wrath, was initially reluctant to even brief the president on Vault 7, according to a former senior Trump administration official. “Don’t tell him, he doesn’t need to know,” Pompeo told one briefer, before being advised that the information was too critical and the president had to be informed, said the former official. Irate senior FBI and NSA officials repeatedly demanded interagency meetings to determine the scope of the damage caused by Vault 7, according to another former national security official. The NSA believed that, although the leak revealed only CIA hacking operations, it could also give countries like Russia or China clues about NSA targets and methods, said this former official. Pompeo’s aggressive tone at CSIS reflected his “brash attitude,” said a former senior intelligence official. “He would want to push the limits as much as he could” during his tenure as CIA director, the former official said. The Trump administration was sending more signals that it would no longer be bound by the Obama administration’s self-imposed restrictions regarding WikiLeaks. For some U.S. intelligence officials, this was a welcome change. “There was immense hostility to WikiLeaks in the beginning from the intelligence community,” said Litt. Vault 7 prompted “a brand-new mindset with the administration for rethinking how to look at WikiLeaks as an adversarial actor,” Evanina said. “That was new, and it was refreshing for the intelligence community and the law enforcement community.” Updates on Assange were frequently included in Trump’s President’s Daily Brief, a top-secret document prepared by U.S. intelligence agencies that summarizes the day’s most critical national security issues, according to a former national security official. The immediate question facing Pompeo and the CIA was how to hit back against WikiLeaks and Assange. Agency officials found the answer in a legal sleight of hand. Usually, for U.S. intelligence to secretly interfere with the activities of any foreign actor, the president must sign a document called a “finding” that authorizes such covert action, which must also be briefed to the House and Senate intelligence committees. In very sensitive cases, notification is limited to Congress’s so-called Gang of Eight — the four leaders of the House and Senate, plus the chairperson and ranking member of the two committees. But there is an important carveout. Many of the same actions, if taken against another spy service, are considered “offensive counterintelligence” activities, which the CIA is allowed to conduct without getting a presidential finding or having to brief Congress, according to several former intelligence officials. Often, the CIA makes these decisions internally, based on interpretations of so-called “common law” passed down in secret within the agency’s legal corps. “I don’t think people realize how much [the] CIA can do under offensive [counterintelligence] and how there is minimal oversight of it,” said a former official. Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, discusses publication of secret US documents about the war in Afghanistan at a press conference in the Frontline Club, London on July 26, 2010. (Julian Simmonds/Shutterstock) Assange discusses the publication of secret U.S. documents about the war in Afghanistan at a 2010 press conference in London. (Julian Simmonds/Shutterstock) The difficulty in proving that WikiLeaks was operating at the direct behest of the Kremlin was a major factor behind the CIA’s move to designate the group as a hostile intelligence service, according to a former senior counterintelligence official. “There was a lot of legal debate on: Are they operating as a Russian agent?” said the former official. “It wasn’t clear they were, so the question was, can it be reframed on them being a hostile entity.” Intelligence community lawyers decided that it could. When Pompeo declared WikiLeaks “a non-state hostile intelligence service,” he was neither speaking off the cuff nor repeating a phrase concocted by a CIA speechwriter. “That phrase was chosen advisedly and reflected the view of the administration,” a former Trump administration official said. But Pompeo’s declaration surprised Litt, who had left his position as general counsel of the Office of the Director for National Intelligence less than three months previously. “Based on the information that I had seen, I thought he was out over his skis on that,” Litt said. For many senior intelligence officials, however, Pompeo’s designation of WikiLeaks was a positive step. “We all agreed that WikiLeaks was a hostile intelligence organization and should be dealt with accordingly,” said a former senior CIA official. Soon after the speech, Pompeo asked a small group of senior CIA officers to figure out “the art of the possible” when it came to WikiLeaks, said another former senior CIA official. “He said, ‘Nothing’s off limits, don’t self-censor yourself. I need operational ideas from you. I’ll worry about the lawyers in Washington.’” CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., sent messages directing CIA stations and bases worldwide to prioritize collection on WikiLeaks, according to the former senior agency official. The CIA’s designation of WikiLeaks as a non-state hostile intelligence service enabled “the doubling down of efforts globally and domestically on collection” against the group, Evanina said. Those efforts included tracking the movements and communications of Assange and other top WikiLeaks figures by “tasking more on the tech side, recruiting more on the human side,” said another former senior counterintelligence official. This was no easy task. WikiLeaks associates were “super-paranoid people,” and the CIA estimated that only a handful of individuals had access to the Vault 7 materials the agency wanted to retrieve, said a former intelligence official. Those individuals employed security measures that made obtaining the information difficult, including keeping it on encrypted drives that they either carried on their persons or locked in safes, according to former officials. WikiLeaks claimed it had published only a fraction of the Vault 7 documents in its possession. So, what if U.S. intelligence found a tranche of those unpublished materials online? At the White House, officials began planning for that scenario. Could the United States launch a cyberattack on a server being used by WikiLeaks to house these documents? Wikileaks founder Julian Assange presents Iraq war logs at press conference, Westminster, London on October 23, 2010. (Shutterstock) Assange presents U.S. military documents on the Iraq War at press conference in London on Oct. 23, 2010. (Shutterstock) Officials weren’t sure if the Defense Department had the authority to do so at the time, absent the president’s signature. Alternatively, they suggested, perhaps the CIA could carry out the same action under the agency’s offensive counterintelligence powers. After all, officials reasoned, the CIA would be erasing its own documents. However, U.S. spies never located a copy of the unpublished Vault 7 materials online, so the discussion was ultimately moot, according to a former national security official. Nonetheless, the CIA had some successes. By mid-2017, U.S. spies had excellent intelligence on numerous WikiLeaks members and associates, not just on Assange, said former officials. This included what these individuals were saying and who they were saying it to, where they were traveling or going to be at a given date and time, and what platforms these individuals were communicating on, according to former officials. U.S. spy agencies developed good intelligence on WikiLeaks associates’ “patterns of life,” particularly their travels within Europe, said a former national security official. U.S. intelligence was particularly keen on information documenting travel by WikiLeaks associates to Russia or countries in Russia’s orbit, according to the former official. At the CIA, the new designation meant Assange and WikiLeaks would go from “a target of collection to a target of disruption,” said a former senior CIA official. Proposals began percolating upward within the CIA and the NSC to undertake various disruptive activities — the core of “offensive counterintelligence” — against WikiLeaks. These included paralyzing its digital infrastructure, disrupting its communications, provoking internal disputes within the organization by planting damaging information, and stealing WikiLeaks members’ electronic devices, according to three former officials. Infiltrating the group, either with a real person or by inventing a cyber persona to gain the group’s confidence, was quickly dismissed as unlikely to succeed because the senior WikiLeaks figures were so security-conscious, according to former intelligence officials. Sowing discord within the group seemed an easier route to success, in part because “those guys hated each other and fought all the time,” a former intelligence official said. But many of the other ideas were “not ready for prime time,” said the former intelligence official. “Some dude affiliated with WikiLeaks was moving around the world, and they wanted to go steal his computer because they thought he might have” Vault 7 files, said the former official. The official was unable to identify that individual. But some of these proposals may have been eventually approved. In December 2020, a German hacker closely affiliated with WikiLeaks who assisted with the Vault 7 publications claimed that there had been an attempt to break into his apartment, which he had secured with an elaborate locking system. The hacker, Andy Müller-Maguhn, also said he had been tailed by mysterious figures and that his encrypted telephone had been bugged. Andy Müller-Maguhn speaks at the Cyber Security Summit 2014 in Bonn Germany. (Ollendorf/Itterman (Telekom)) Andy Müller-Maguhn speaks at the Cyber Security Summit in Bonn, Germany, in 2014. (Ollendorf/Itterman (Telekom)) Asked whether the CIA had broken into WikiLeaks’ associates’ homes and stolen or wiped their hard drives, a former intelligence official declined to go into detail but said that “some actions were taken.” By the summer of 2017, the CIA’s proposals were setting off alarm bells at the National Security Council. “WikiLeaks was a complete obsession of Pompeo’s,” said a former Trump administration national security official. “After Vault 7, Pompeo and [Deputy CIA Director Gina] Haspel wanted vengeance on Assange.” At meetings between senior Trump administration officials after WikiLeaks started publishing the Vault 7 materials, Pompeo began discussing kidnapping Assange, according to four former officials. While the notion of kidnapping Assange preceded Pompeo’s arrival at Langley, the new director championed the proposals, according to former officials. Pompeo and others at the agency proposed abducting Assange from the embassy and surreptitiously bringing him back to the United States via a third country — a process known as rendition. The idea was to “break into the embassy, drag [Assange] out and bring him to where we want,” said a former intelligence official. A less extreme version of the proposal involved U.S. operatives snatching Assange from the embassy and turning him over to British authorities. Such actions were sure to create a diplomatic and political firestorm, as they would have involved violating the sanctity of the Ecuadorian Embassy before kidnapping the citizen of a critical U.S. partner — Australia — in the capital of the United Kingdom, the United States’ closest ally. Trying to seize Assange from an embassy in the British capital struck some as “ridiculous,” said the former intelligence official. “This isn’t Pakistan or Egypt — we’re talking about London.” British acquiescence was far from assured. Former officials differ on how much the U.K. government knew about the CIA’s rendition plans for Assange, but at some point, American officials did raise the issue with their British counterparts. A general view of the Ecuadorian embassy in London where Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is residing, London on January 18, 2017. (Will Oliver/EPA/Shutterstock) The Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange resided for seven years. (Will Oliver/EPA/Shutterstock) “There was a discussion with the Brits about turning the other cheek or looking the other way when a team of guys went inside and did a rendition,” said a former senior counterintelligence official. “But the British said, ‘No way, you’re not doing that on our territory, that ain’t happening.’” The British Embassy in Washington did not return a request for comment. In addition to diplomatic concerns about rendition, some NSC officials believed that abducting Assange would be clearly illegal. “You can’t throw people in a car and kidnap them,” said a former national security official. In fact, said this former official, for some NSC personnel, “This was the key question: Was it possible to render Assange under [the CIA’s] offensive counterintelligence” authorities? In this former official’s thinking, those powers were meant to enable traditional spy-versus-spy activities, “not the same kind of crap we pulled in the war on terror.” Some discussions even went beyond kidnapping. U.S. officials had also considered killing Assange, according to three former officials. One of those officials said he was briefed on a spring 2017 meeting in which the president asked whether the CIA could assassinate Assange and provide him “options” for how to do so. “It was viewed as unhinged and ridiculous,” recalled this former senior CIA official of the suggestion. It’s unclear how serious the proposals to kill Assange really were. “I was told they were just spitballing,” said a former senior counterintelligence official briefed on the discussions about “kinetic options” regarding the WikiLeaks founder. “It was just Trump being Trump." Nonetheless, at roughly the same time, agency executives requested and received “sketches” of plans for killing Assange and other Europe-based WikiLeaks members who had access to Vault 7 materials, said a former intelligence official. There were discussions “on whether killing Assange was possible and whether it was legal,” the former official said. Yahoo News could not confirm if these proposals made it to the White House. Some officials with knowledge of the rendition proposals said they had heard no discussions about assassinating Assange. In a statement to Yahoo News, Trump denied that he ever considered having Assange assassinated. “It’s totally false, it never happened,” he said. Trump seemed to express some sympathy for Assange’s plight. “In fact, I think he’s been treated very badly,” he added. Whatever Trump’s view of the matter at the time, his NSC lawyers were bulwarks against the CIA’s potentially illegal proposals, according to former officials. “While people think the Trump administration didn’t believe in the rule of law, they had good lawyers who were paying attention to it,” said a former senior intelligence official. President Donald Trump speaks at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, on January 21, 2017. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images) Then-President Donald Trump at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., in 2017. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images) The rendition talk deeply alarmed some senior administration officials. John Eisenberg, the top NSC lawyer, and Michael Ellis, his deputy, worried that “Pompeo is advocating things that are not likely to be legal,” including “rendition-type activity,” said a former national security official. Eisenberg wrote to CIA General Counsel Courtney Simmons Elwood expressing his concerns about the agency’s WikiLeaks-related proposals, according to another Trump national security official. It’s unclear how much Elwood knew about the proposals. “When Pompeo took over, he cut the lawyers out of a lot of things,” said a former senior intelligence community attorney. Pompeo’s ready access to the Oval Office, where he would meet with Trump alone, exacerbated the lawyers’ fears. Eisenberg fretted that the CIA director was leaving those meetings with authorities or approvals signed by the president that Eisenberg knew nothing about, according to former officials. NSC officials also worried about the timing of the potential Assange kidnapping. Discussions about rendering Assange occurred before the Justice Department filed any criminal charges against him, even under seal — meaning that the CIA could have kidnapped Assange from the embassy without any legal basis to try him in the United States. Eisenberg urged Justice Department officials to accelerate their drafting of charges against Assange, in case the CIA’s rendition plans moved forward, according to former officials. The White House told Attorney General Jeff Sessions that if prosecutors had grounds to indict Assange they should hurry up and do so, according to a former senior administration official. Things got more complicated in May 2017, when the Swedes dropped their rape investigation into Assange, who had always denied the allegations. White House officials developed a backup plan: The British would hold Assange on a bail jumping charge, giving Justice Department prosecutors a 48-hour delay to rush through an indictment. Eisenberg was concerned about the legal implications of rendering Assange without criminal charges in place, according to a former national security official. Absent an indictment, where would the agency bring him, said another former official who attended NSC meetings on the topic. “Were we going to go back to ‘black sites’?” As U.S. officials debated the legality of kidnapping Assange, they came to believe that they were racing against the clock. Intelligence reports warned that Russia had its own plans to sneak the WikiLeaks leader out of the embassy and fly him to Moscow, according to Evanina, the top U.S. counterintelligence official from 2014 through early 2021. The United States “had exquisite collection of his plans and intentions,” said Evanina. “We were very confident that we were able to mitigate any of those [escape] attempts.” Officials became particularly concerned when suspected Russian operatives in diplomatic vehicles near the Ecuadorian Embassy were observed practicing a “starburst” maneuver, a common tactic for spy services, whereby multiple operatives suddenly scatter to escape surveillance, according to former officials. This may have been a practice run for an exfiltration, potentially coordinated with the Ecuadorians, to get Assange out of the embassy and whisk him out of the country, U.S. officials believed. Julian Assange greets supporters outside the Ecuadorian embassy in London on May 19, 2017. (Frank Augstein/AP) Assange greets supporters outside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on May 19, 2017. (Frank Augstein/AP) “The Ecuadorians would tip off the Russians that they were going to be releasing Assange on the street, and then the Russians would pick him up and spirit him back to Russia,” said a former national security official. Officials developed multiple tactical plans to thwart any Kremlin attempt to spring Assange, some of which envisioned clashes with Russian operatives in the British capital. “There could be anything from a fistfight to a gunfight to cars running into each other,” said a former senior Trump administration official. U.S. officials disagreed over how to interdict Assange if he attempted to escape. A proposal to initiate a car crash to halt Assange’s vehicle was not only a “borderline” or “extralegal” course of action — “something we’d do in Afghanistan, but not in the U.K.” — but was also particularly sensitive since Assange was likely going to be transported in a Russian diplomatic vehicle, said a former national security official. If the Russians managed to get Assange onto a plane, U.S. or British operatives would prevent it from taking off by blocking it with a car on the runway, hovering a helicopter over it or shooting out its tires, according to a former senior Trump administration official. In the unlikely event that the Russians succeeded in getting airborne, officials planned to ask European countries to deny the plane overflight rights, the former official said. Eventually, the United States and the U.K. developed a “joint plan” to prevent Assange from absconding and giving Vladimir Putin the sort of propaganda coup he had enjoyed when Snowden fled to Russia in 2013, Evanina said. Russia's President Vladimir Putin speaks during his press conference at the Kremlin in Moscow, on July 1, 2013. Putin said today that his country had never extradited anyone before and added that US leaker Edward Snowden could remain in Moscow if he stopped issuing his leaks. (Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images) Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a press conference in Moscow on July 1, 2013, that his country had never extradited anyone before. (Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images) “It’s not just him getting to Moscow and taking secrets,” he said. “The second wind that Putin would get — he gets Snowden and now he gets Assange — it becomes a geopolitical win for him and his intelligence services.” Evanina declined to comment on the plans to prevent Assange from escaping to Russia, but he suggested that the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance between the United States, the U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand was critical. “We were very confident within the Five Eyes that we would be able to prevent him from going there,” he said. But testimony in a Spanish criminal investigation strongly suggests that U.S. intelligence may also have had inside help keeping tabs on Assange’s plans. By late 2015, Ecuador had hired a Spanish security company called UC Global to protect the country’s London embassy, where Assange had already spent several years running WikiLeaks from his living quarters. Unbeknownst to Ecuador, however, by mid-2017 UC Global was also working for U.S. intelligence, according to two former employees who testified in a Spanish criminal investigation first reported by the newspaper El País. The Spanish firm was providing U.S. intelligence agencies with detailed reports of Assange’s activities and visitors as well as video and audio surveillance of Assange from secretly installed devices in the embassy, the employees testified. A former U.S. national security official confirmed that U.S. intelligence had access to video and audio feeds of Assange within the embassy but declined to specify how it acquired them. By December 2017, the plan to get Assange to Russia appeared to be ready. UC Global had learned that Assange would “receive a diplomatic passport from Ecuadorian authorities, with the aim of leaving the embassy to transit to a third state,” a former employee said. On Dec. 15, Ecuador made Assange an official diplomat of that country and planned to assign him to its embassy in Moscow, according to documents obtained by the Associated Press. Watched by the media WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange looks out from the balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy prior to speaking, in London on May 19, 2017. (Matt Dunham/AP) Assange prepares to make a statement at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on May 19, 2017. (Matt Dunham/AP) Assange said he “was not aware” of the plan struck by the Ecuadorian foreign minister to assign him to Moscow, and refused to “accept that assignment,” said Fidel Narvaez, who was the first secretary at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in 2017 and 2018. Narvaez told Yahoo News that he was directed by his superiors to try and get Assange accredited as a diplomat to the London embassy. “However, Ecuador did have a plan B,” said Narvaez, “and I understood it was to be Russia.” Aitor Martínez, a Spanish lawyer for Assange who worked closely with Ecuador on getting Assange his diplomat status, also said the Ecuadorian foreign minister presented the Russia assignment to Assange as a fait accompli — and that Assange, when he heard about it, immediately rejected the idea. On Dec. 21, the Justice Department secretly charged Assange, increasing the chances of legal extradition to the United States. That same day, UC Global recorded a meeting held between Assange and the head of Ecuador’s intelligence service to discuss Assange’s escape plan, according to El País. “Hours after the meeting” the U.S. ambassador relayed his knowledge of the plan to his Ecuadorian counterparts, reported El País. Martínez says the plan — organized by the head of Ecuadorian intelligence — to sneak Assange out of the London embassy and onward, as a diplomat, to a third country was canceled after they learned the Americans were aware of it. But U.S. intelligence officials believed Russia planned to exfiltrate Assange, reportedly on Christmas Eve. According to the former UC Global employee, the company’s boss discussed with his American contacts the possibility of leaving the embassy door open, as if by accident, “which would allow persons to enter from outside the embassy and kidnap the asylee.” In testimony first reported in the Guardian, another idea also took shape. “Even the possibility of poisoning Mr. Assange was discussed,” the employee said his boss told him. Even Assange appeared to fear assassination. Some Vault 7 material, which CIA officials believed to be even more damaging than the files WikiLeaks had published, had been distributed among Assange’s colleagues with instructions to publish it if one of them were killed, according to U.S. officials. A primary question for U.S. officials was whether any CIA plan to kidnap or potentially kill Assange was legal. The discussions occurred under the aegis of the agency’s new “offensive counterintelligence” authorities, according to former officials. Some officials thought this was a highly aggressive, and likely legally transgressive, interpretation of these powers. Without a presidential finding — the directive used to justify covert operations — assassinating Assange or other WikiLeaks members would be illegal, according to several former intelligence officials. In some situations, even a finding is not sufficient to make an action legal, said a former national security official. The CIA’s newfound offensive counterintelligence powers regarding WikiLeaks would not have stretched to assassination. “That kind of lethal action would be way outside of a legitimate intelligence or counterintelligence activity,” a former senior intelligence community lawyer said. In the end, the assassination discussions went nowhere, said former officials. The idea of killing Assange “didn’t get serious traction,” said a former senior CIA official. “It was, this is a crazy thing that wastes our time.” Inside the White House, Pompeo’s impassioned arguments on WikiLeaks were making little headway. The director’s most aggressive proposals were “probably taken seriously” in Langley but not within the NSC, a former national security official said. Even Sessions, Trump’s “very, very anti-Assange” attorney general, was opposed to CIA’s encroachment onto Justice Department territory, and believed that the WikiLeaks founder’s case was best handled through legal channels, said the former official. Sessions’ concerns mirrored the tensions between the ramped-up intelligence collection and disruption efforts aimed at WikiLeaks, and the Justice Department’s goal of convicting Assange in open court, according to former officials. The more aggressive the CIA’s proposals became, the more other U.S. officials worried about what the discovery process might reveal if Assange were to face trial in the United States. “I was part of every one of those conversations,” Evanina said. “As much as we had the greener light to go do things, everything we did or wanted to do had repercussions in other parts of the administration.” As a result, he said, sometimes administration officials would ask the intelligence community to either not do something or do it differently, so that “we don’t have to sacrifice our collection that’s going to be released publicly by the bureau to indict WikiLeaks.” Eventually, those within the administration arguing for an approach based in the courts, rather than on espionage and covert action, won the policy debate. On April 11, 2019, after Ecuador’s new government revoked his asylum and evicted him, British police carried the WikiLeaks founder out of the embassy and arrested him for failing to surrender to the court over a warrant issued in 2012. The U.S. government unsealed its initial indictment of Assange the same day. That indictment focused exclusively on allegations that in 2010, Assange offered to help Manning, the Army intelligence analyst, crack a password to break into a classified U.S. government network, an act that would have gone beyond journalism. But in a move that drew howls from press advocates, prosecutors later tacked on Espionage Act charges against Assange for publishing classified information — something that U.S. media outlets do regularly. Assange’s legal odyssey appears to have only just begun. In January, a British judge ruled Assange could not be extradited to the United States, finding that he would be a suicide risk in a U.S. prison. Although Assange supporters hoped the Biden administration might drop the case, the United States, undeterred, appealed the decision. In July, a U.K. court formally permitted the U.S. appeal to proceed. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange arrives at Westminster Magistrates Court in a police escort to appear where he faces an extradition warrant in London on April 11, 2019. (Rob Pinney/LNP/Shutterstock) Assange, facing an extradition warrant in London, is seen arriving at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on April 11, 2019. (Rob Pinney/LNP/Shutterstock) Pollack, Assange’s lawyer, told Yahoo News that if Assange is extradited to face trial, “the extreme nature of the type of government misconduct that you’re reporting would certainly be an issue and potentially grounds for dismissal.” He likened the measures used to target Assange to those deployed by the Nixon administration against Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers, noting the charges against Ellsberg were ultimately dismissed as well. Meanwhile, WikiLeaks may be increasingly obsolete. The growing ability of groups and individuals — whistleblowers or dissidents, spies or criminals — to publish leaked materials online diminishes the group’s raison d’être. “We’re kind of post-WikiLeaks right now,” said a former senior counterintelligence official. Yet spy services are increasingly using a WikiLeaks-like model of posting stolen materials online. In 2018, the Trump administration granted the CIA aggressive new secret authorities to undertake the same sort of hack-and-dump operations for which Russian intelligence has used WikiLeaks. Among other actions, the agency has used its new powers to covertly release information online about a Russian company that worked with Moscow’s spy apparatus. For a former Trump national security official, the lessons of the CIA’s campaign against WikiLeaks are clear. “There was an inappropriate level of attention to Assange given the embarrassment, not the threat he posed in context,” said this official. “We should never act out of a desire for revenge.” EOF

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Netflix movie available for 2 days!!! Hummingbird Project
by jim bell 20 Oct '21

20 Oct '21

"the hummingbird project" People install a straight optical fiber between New York and the Kansas electronic exchange, in order to accelerate transactions, reducing the delay from 17 to 16 milliseconds. Relevance to me? My invention, an isotope modified optical fiber, https://www.freepatentsonline.com/9459401.html will be about 5.6% faster than ordinary germania-doped silica fiber, and thus would reduce the transit time by about a millisecond. In addition, according to the movie, each regenerator slows the signal by 20 microseconds. My fiber should have a loss of about 0.001 decibels/kilometer, which means that no regenerators nor amplifiers should be necessary, this saving hundreds more microseconds.

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Cryptocurrency: Regulators Busy With Stablecoin CBDC Tax Insurance and Enforcement Team
by grarpamp 20 Oct '21

20 Oct '21

While adoption of distributed privacy capable crypto, development of cross coin DEX, etc all continue apace according to plan with your help since day one. After all, crypto was created to route around the problems of GovBank. DOJ Announces Launch Of National Crypto Enforcement Team As FDIC Mulls Insuring Stablecoins https://cointelegraph.com/news/us-justice-dept-announces-launch-of-national… https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2021/10/06/us-fdic-said-to-be-studying-depo… https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/federal-reserve-chair-jerome-powell-u-… https://decrypt.co/82265/billionaire-investor-chamath-palihapitiya-bitcoin-… One of the catalysts behind crypto's impressive surge in the past week emerged last Friday, when the WSJ reported that the Biden admin was seeking to regulate stablecoin issuers as banks and was "considering ways to impose bank-like regulation on the cryptocurrency companies that issue stablecoins, including prodding the firms to register as banks." Coming at the same time as both Jerome Powell and Gary Gensler said they did not seek to bank crypto, the news was confirmation that the regulatory apparatus was seeking to integrate the crypto space within the confines of the state - especially since taxes on cryptos are expected to generate tens of billions in government revenues to the Democrats "deficit neutral" multi-trillion spending plan. In short, this was very good news for digital tokens as it eliminated the worst possible outcome: a China-style terminal crackdown on the sector. Today, we got more good news when Cointelegraph reported that an official from the Office of the Attorney General said the United States government is going to take a more active role in enforcement action against actors using cryptocurrencies for money laundering and other cybercrimes. In effect, the DOJ is already policing cryptos as if they were securities, providing an implicit security to investors even though the formal regulatory treatment of cryptos remains nebulous. Speaking at the Aspen Institute Cyber Summit on Wednesday, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said the Justice Department had launched the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, who aim is to target platforms “that help criminals launder or hide their criminal proceeds.” Monaco cited her office’s work against Darknet-based Bitcoin (BTC) mixing service Helix in August but said the U.S. government should be doing more. “We want to strengthen our capacity to dismantle the financial ecosystem that enables these criminal actors to flourish and — quite frankly — to profit from what they’re doing,” said Monaco. “We’re going to do that by drawing on our cyber experts and cyber prosecutors and money-laundering experts.” Monaco, who has often been a central figure in the U.S. government’s response to major ransomware and cyberattacks involving cryptocurrency payments, added that “cryptocurrency exchanges want to be the banks of the future. We need to make sure that folks can have confidence when they’re using these systems, and we need to make sure we’re poised to root out abuse that can take hold on them.” She should know: she was part of a task force that “found and recaptured” millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin paid to the allegedly Russia-based DarkSide hackers following an attack on the Colonial Pipeline system in May. What Monaco didn't say is that by accelerating enforcement actions, the DOJ was in effect providing confidence to millions of retail investors that someone was looking after their interest in a market which the government had for years depicted as the "wild wild west." Needless to say, such as intervention will only increase retail participation. Meanwhile, in a clear indication that the government is already planning how to capitalize, and not penalize, the incipient stablecoin industry, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, or FDIC, a key U.S. banking regulator, is reportedly studying whether certain stablecoins might be eligible for its coverage, Coindesk reported citing five people familiar with the agency’s thinking said. The agency is trying to analyze what so-called pass-through FDIC insurance might look like for the reserves that stablecoin issuers hold at banks, the sources said. Such coverage would insure holders of the tokens against losses up to $250,000 if the bank holding the collateral were to fail. The FDIC is also looking at what regular, direct deposit insurance might look like for banks that want to issue stablecoins, people familiar with the discussions said. “This is all part of a process by which they are trying to bring stablecoins into the banking system in a responsible manner,” one insider said. “It depends on what’s backing the stablecoins. If it’s backed by reserves at the Fed[eral Reserve] for cash then I think you just make the argument that it’s a deposit. If it’s backed by Treasurys, I think you’ll have a hard time treating it as a deposit.” That all may be, but once again it misses the forest for the trees, namely that the government is taking increasingly permissive steps to give new investors some implicit comfort that the government is watching out for their interests and, in the case of stablecoins, that they may even be insured from total losses should the stablecoin issuer collapse. That said, it wasn't exactly clear how an FDIC backstop would work for stablecoins: if the FDIC went ahead and provided deposit insurance for stablecoins, it would apply only if a bank that was banking a stablecoin issuer or that was issuing a stablecoin itself went into receivership. Even in this scenario, it’s rare that FDIC insurance would enter into the picture because the agency generally takes a failed bank’s assets and deposits and sells them to a healthy bank. “The FDIC is probably looking at whether stablecoins can count as deposits or whether someone’s ownership of a stablecoin is a deposit at the stablecoin issuer,” said Todd Phillips, a former FDIC lawyer who is now the director of financial regulation and corporate governance at the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank. The coverage could present challenges for issuers. Typically, these companies identify customers when they deposit cash for stablecoins or redeem the tokens for cash. But since stablecoins run on open, public blockchain networks (usually Ethereum), theoretically anyone with a crypto wallet that hasn’t been blacklisted can receive stablecoins from and send them to other wallets. “One thing to remember is that each person has insurance of only up to $250,000,” said Phillips. “So, the stablecoin issuer would need to keep track of who is the current holder of their stablecoin, and how many they own.” Whatever the FDIC insures has to not compromise the rest of the agency’s mission, he said. How the agency proceeds could potentially help protect consumers, Phillips added. “The FDIC basically has one overriding mission which is to ensure the safety of the Deposit Insurance Fund, the DIF,” Phillips said. “If the FDIC were to insure a stablecoin, that insurance would come out of the DIF and the FDIC will want to be very sure that they are on legal footing and that whatever they do doesn’t risk the DIF.” “The FDIC has strict rules as to which institutions may call themselves FDIC-insured or use the FDIC logo for advertising,” he said. “Just as how the FDIC’s logo on a bank’s website allows savers to be confident that the bank is a safe, insurance of particular stablecoins and permission to use the FDIC logo would provide clarity about which stablecoins, up to the insurance limit, will not lose value.” It’s likely that the agency will ask for public comment from the industry before any actual policy change is taken, Phillips said. “I also imagine there are conversations going on between the four FDIC directors, since you need a majority of them to approve a new regulation,” he said. In Welcome News For Cryptos, Biden Admin Seeks To Regulate Stablecoin Issuers As Banks As we noted earlier, traders have been at a loss to explain today's sharp 10% move higher in bitcoin and the broader crypto universe, with a variety of explanations being proffered including Jerome Powell’s comments Thursday that the central bank had “no intention” to ban cryptocurrencies, others pointing to Chamath's statement that Bitcoin has “effectively replaced gold”, some pointing to Visa's announcement on Thursday outlining for what it calls a "universal payments channel" that will facilitate CBDC transactions and which will be deployed on an Ethereum layer, while the more technical traders cited price levels such as moving averages that are closely watched by technical analysts. And while it is likely that today's burst higher in the crypto sector is some combination of all of these, we can now add one more reason for near-term crypto optimism: amid rampant speculation that the US Treasury and/or regulators seek a permanent crackdown on stablecoins such as Tether and Circle's USDC - which has for a long time been viewed as the weakest link in the crypto ecosystem, with many speculation that it facilitates currency flight out of China - moments ago the WSJ reported that the Biden administration is considering ways to impose bank-like regulation on the cryptocurrency companies that issue stablecoins, including prodding the firms to register as banks. Just as importantly, the administration is also expected to urge Congress to consider legislation to create a special-purpose charter for such firms that would be tailored to their business models, the WSJ sources said. According to the WSJ, the moves "are intended to address regulators’ fears that stablecoins—digital currencies pegged to national currencies like the U.S. dollar—could fuel financial panics and need to be more tightly regulated." This would take place in parallel with the Financial Stability Oversight Council deciding whether to designate stablecoin activities as systemically important. From the administration’s perspective, it would be preferable if Congress were to impose or authorize a bank-like regulatory framework for stablecoins, as well as a series of investor protections for cryptocurrencies. If Congress doesn’t act, and its other recommendations go unheeded, the administration wouldn’t be reluctant to use FSOC, one of the people said. And since it appears that bank-like regulation for stablecoins is now inevitable, it is also virtually assured that stablecoins will be deemed systematically important. Which is actually great news for both stablecoins, and the greater crypto ecosystem, because it means that instead of crushing this vital link between fiat and digital tokens and seeking to snuff out cryptocurrencies at the root - as China has done - the US will instead push aggressively with a regulatory approach, one which most industry participants had already expected. Indeed while at present many stablecoins are lightly overseen at the state level, some companies, such as Circle, have said they are seeking to become banks. And at least some members of Congress, such as Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R., Wyo.), have recently signaled that stablecoins may need to be regulated in this manner. “It may be the case that stablecoins should only be issued by depository institutions” or by firms regulated as mutual funds, Ms. Lummis said in a Senate speech this week.

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