If he's telling the truth, then I would do the same.
If he's lying, then it might work, I would also probably do the same.
The interesting thing here is that two publications allowed the journalist to call Kushner "corrupt". This means that the lawyers would have seen compelling evidence that would mean one of two things:
1) Kushner wouldn't take them to court, because he would have to settle out of court in an expensive way
2) Kushner, if he were to take court action, would not win civil case.
This leads me to think that there is more than a shred of evidence, but an awful lot of evidence that he didn't declare what he was supposed to (at best) and at worse laundered foreign cash for his own purposes
After Russiagate that seems like a rather generous allowance to the profession of journalism. They managed a Pulitzer-winning investigation that failed to uncover the eventual truth, which is the whole thing was ginned up out of whole cloth and everyone pushing it would like to move on from that, thankyouverymuch.
Although it is always possible that they've got something worth saying it is also entirely possible that they're just making up a story out of nothing.
I’m not sure where you are getting your sources but almost every report that the Times and Post won the Pulitzer for were mostly validated by both the Mueller report, Congressional investigations and 2 different reviews by the Pulitzer board.
Rather than moving on from this the Pulitzer Board is vigorously defending their decision in court as we speak.
There certainly hasn’t been a retraction. You’ll also note Trump never sued the papers over their coverage.
Journalists (un)covered everything that would be in a Special Counsel report months/years later - in what world is that bad reporting? It's the exact opposite.
I wasn't expecting to reply, but then I realised that the last time [0] I described Trump was too charming not to tack on the thread.
> [Donald Trump] at once put on an extremely arrogant demeanour instead of the modest gait and bearing proper to --the gentle sex-- [his office], began to walk and speak and do all things more stiffly and haughtily than [he] had been wont … [he] arranged everything as [he himself] thought fit and according to [his] own arbitrary will.
And it has to be admitted is a fair description of the man.
The white house recently released reports into electoral interference that showed that the majority of Russian influence was targeted at supporting trump. I assumed that people would notice this massive foot in mouth moment, but it seems people don't actually read the source material, and just claim that it supports their position. Unfortunately, this stance seems to work.
What is going on? How does a government release a report that directly contradicts what they claim they're releasing the report for, and then steadfastly stand by the claims that were disproven by the report they released?
Everyone already made up their minds. People who know Russiagate happened looked at the evidence. People who believe it didn’t listened to Trump’s denials. New evidence won’t cause them to not believe Trump, because the old evidence was sufficient.
As always you can’t logic people out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.
And the second reply to him calls his father-in-law an orange turd. Gotta love how social media has erased class divides; even the onepercenters can't escape what the peasants think of them.
It's over for the US they will never wake up no matter how bad things get. It's so comically bad you'd imagine the so called well-regulated militia would have intervened by now
The "so called well-regulated militia" hasn't been a real thing in the USA since shortly after the "founding" of the nation (if it even existed then). The closest thing (maybe) might be the National Guard, but these day they're clearly mostly just puppets for the rich and powerful.
Well-regulated militia is the National Guard. They’re military personnel that belong to the states, but still operate alongside the regular force. What do you mean by puppets?
> Well-regulated militia is the National Guard. Note the term well-regulated. They’re military personnel that belong to the states, but still operate alongside the regular force.
That is wrong, see DC v. Heller, """ the “militia” in colonial America consisted of a subset of “the people”—those who were male, able bodied, and within a certain age range. Reading the Second Amendment as protecting only the right to “keep and bear Arms” in an organized militia therefore fits poorly with the operative clause’s description of the holder of that right as “the people.” """
I'm interested in seeing the chaos of a republican party with all the ideas of power that Trump has given them, but without any of them having the godhead position that Trump has in order to keep the rest of them in line. There will be a bunch of wannabe Trump's, and all the puffery that goes with it, but without the large supportive entourage. It will be infighting like never before seen.
And if the Democrats don't do an absolutely stellar job of trying to fix things, and making life at least seem better for most of the US voting public, then an entirely chaotic Republican party could still get back in.
... and that's saying nothing of the possibilities for repeats of Jan 6th come midterm results or the 2028 election.
That was Trump's 'magic', somehow appearing that he related with those types. Probably mostly accidentally because of his limited vocabulary, resulting in a very basic style of communication, in combination with only seeing the way the world works at a first-order effects level.
I wonder if the militia types like Trump because people like you, talk about them, like you do. Regardless how much Trump is on their side, he is your enemy, they are obviously your enemy with the disdain you feel for them, so its at worst an alliance of convenience.
I never said they were my enemy, and it's very telling that you put it like that.
They're easily convinced by simplistic causality arguments that, on the surface, satisfy what they feel is an injustice.
They're not even necessarily wrong about the injustices they feel, but they're too easily convinced about what may be the causes, and how those causes may be solved.
The fact we're talking about militia types indicates a simplicity of thought: enough guns can solve it. So we're starting with a pretty self selected group.
It is some kind of magic that Trump, son of a billionaire, success by nepotism, can have any chance of reaching them.
Scott Adams (crazy I know) had a good point about calling Trump a mass hypnotist. He seems to have a way of speaking that lets people hear whatever they want to, it's mystifying.
I think it’s just because he’s a hateful bigot. That resonates with other hateful bigots. “Trumps” basically anything else. They don’t care how much they have to pay for gas if they think brown people are suffering more than they are. Doesn’t matter if Trump shits on a golden throne. He hates the same people they hate so they love him for it.
Eh, there are a lot of anti-Trump and "liberal" gun owners, but I think nearly all of them know that if they go all violent and rogue against this admin it's only going to be used to justify much worse.
I'm kind of curious if New Yorkers will try and do a tea party impression with the Russian diesel ship though.
So if I followed the story, it as GRU (Russian intel) that hacked his phone. Dutch intel then recruited a spy from GRU that handed over the data.
In any case, Kushner - and rightfully so - could not obtain a security clearance the first time around, due to massive debt. But it was overruled / waived by higher ups.
I've worked in intel, and Kushner seems like the textbook example - a cautionary tale - on the type of person you do not want to grant anything of importance.
Honestly it sort of blows my mind that the US has a system decisions by security professionals can simply be overruled.
It's strange to me, as it appears that in the US it apparently doesn't matter if any charges have already been filed. In my country a pardon can only be given to someone, who was already sentenced - there was even some controversy when a couple of years ago the president gave out a pardon before the legal process concluded. As a PhD in law he should have known this made no sense.
You could certainly argue US pardons are supposed to work the same way too, it's just no one has standing to challenge the blanket pardons, but I don't think anyone has tried recently. And the current regime is happy to keep such things around so they can use it on the way out the door.
Correct - it's even weirder, pardons can be given for a categories or even just a blanket pardon for any crimes that might have been committed. There aren't a lot of limits on it.
Ah yes ... looks at calendar ... it's a Friday ... whooo boy, the President is in some pretty hot water today! Like yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that, and all the tomorrows until he's not the president any more.
Seriously, there is absolutely nothing the current US president could do that could constitute a "hot water" situation for him give the willingness of the Republican party and the SCOTUS to support him unconditionally.
It does? You're talking about a country that tells its civil servants to say "Super Intelligence" in stead of "Artificial Intelligence" [0], because... It's just so Super.
Came across it here [1]: "Per Executive Order 14434, federal agencies are now using "Super Intelligence" (SI) in place of "Artificial Intelligence" (AI). You may see both terms across NIH content during this transition."
> I've worked in intel, and Kushner seems like the textbook example - a cautionary tale - on the type of person you do not want to grant anything of importance.
> recruited a spy from GRU that handed over the data.
Isn't that kinda bad for their health? Polonium intake is unhealthy.
I'm not an American so don't take this the wrong way, but Jared's response to the tweet, that the story is fabricated because of how complicated it is and VanityFair disclosed no evidences, should be considered as well.
> Isn't that kinda bad for their health? Polonium intake is unhealthy.
I believe the current modus operandi is to offer a window.
On a serious note: plenty of people were surprised that Navalny returned to Russia. I suspect that after his poisoning it became clear Putin and his cronies wanted him dead, so he chose to give them the judicial spectacle they wanted so that they would at least spare his family.
I feel like your comment is a perfect example of what he was talking about.
> Russian politics over the last decades has so inculcated society with cynicism and conspiracy theory that people fundamentally do not believe in simple motives.
He was poisoned inside Russia in late 2020, and was extracted (by his family, he was in a coma) to Germany for treatment. He returned immediately after recovering in early 2021.
> Jared's response to the tweet, that the story is fabricated because of how complicated it is and VanityFair disclosed no evidences, should be considered as well.
You are right that it has nonzero value, but appropriate bayesian priors should take into account Vanity Fair being a reliable source, and Jared being a historically unreliable, untransparent source.
tl;dr: VF > JK absent further evidence in either direction
> People can mask their lies using their prior honest reputation. If anything this kind of lie can be more damaging.
Likewise, people with a prior lying reputation can continue lying. So those two things combined result in no net effect on the bayesian priors, and we are again left with `VF > JK`, absent further evidence.
> I'm not saying VF is lying in this case, it could all be true, but extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence.
Given the bayesian priors, VF's claim doesn't seem all that extraordinary, whereas JK's claim of innocence in comparison seems rather extraordinary. From there I apply the same heuristic of extraordinary claims.
Personally the article reads to me like a international spy thriller short story, so until they disclose some evidence I'll just file this under "Americans flinging shit at each other" directory lol.
> Dutch intel then recruited a spy from GRU that handed over the data.
Dutch intel can think that happened, or not. It is independent from if that is true. The whole thing equally sounds like a setup using the Dutch to launder the story.
Which is also entirely independent from any stories of this sort in the media being true one way or another.
> the US has a system decisions by security professionals can simply be overruled
Also a problem in the UK (Boris Johnson with Lord Lebedev).
Unfortunately I think it does have to sit somewhere on the elected side. A situation where the permanent state can overrule elected representatives unconditionally isn't great. But what really ought to happen is an open court case; you cannot have public policy decisions made on the basis of secret intel in a democracy. That gives you the Iraq war.
Lebedev isn't a clean example: appointment to the Lords really isn't the same as getting Top Secret clearance. In fact, one of MI5s reported reasons for revising their assessment was that peers don't routinely see classified information iirc. Mandelson getting DV clearance via an FCO override so he could be ambassador is a better example, although they're still claiming Starmer didn't put his finger on the scales there, where Trump clearly did.
> you cannot have public policy decisions made on the basis of secret intel in a democracy.
That is the direct consequence of what you said right before. You don't want decisions made by unelected officials non-overridable in a democracy, but for that democratic process to work effectively, the information needs to be in the open. Anything not in the open can just as well stay beyond the reach of elected folks.
"Dutch government hacked into Jared Kushner's phone" is accurate.
The GRU double-agent proved that the GRU had compromised Kushner's phone. Subsequently, Dutch intelligence themselves independently attempted to hack Kushner's phone.
"In The Hague, the MIVD hacking team tried to reverse engineer the Russian penetration of Kushner’s iPhone." [...]
"The Dutch team had been trying to pick the phone’s door lock, so to speak, when it occurred to them that the Russians may have found an unlocked window to gain entry instead. Their hypothesis was correct. By early 2018, the MIVD had found a vulnerability in the iPhone that gave them access." [...]
"when Kushner used the phone, they could see his screen. Almost as soon as they got inside, the intelligence service began capturing every image of Kushner’s screen as he used it, filing their own cache of surveillance on their internal computer servers."
> Digital privacy is important to me. I think that all humans should have it. Feel free to disagree. Jared Kushner is a human.
This isn't about the privacy of one individual human. This is about the security practices of a politically exposed person and the information they have access to.
Any high profile, high security clearance individual must have top-notch security. Any information gleaned or stolen from them can have enormous repercussions.
Submitting yourself for security clearances involves signing up for these investigations. Either he did so and regrets it, or he took a job that absolutely requires that he did, but he didn't.
Kushner should not have been near any job of any importance. Especially not after it became known that corruption and crime wasn't just an individual thing but something that runs in the family.
This just isn’t true. They _should_ have top notch security but that also requires responsible, security-aware action from the principal.
This assumption was destroyed during the first Trump administration and continued being eroded in his second. They do not practice good opsec. (See Signal app usage) Nobody is enforcing policies, and nobody tells the bosses that they can’t do something because [reason].
The U.S. spent years explaining to the world that nothing is extrajudicial that happens to non-Americans outside of the United States. So please explain how this activity of the MIVD broke any Dutch laws.
Becoming a public servant means you should have fewer privacy rights compared to the average person because of the outsized power and influence a public c=S=servant has. All the info that Kushner hid should have been in the security clearance form that he was exempted from.
Kushner's behavior undermined the world far more than this phone hack.
I agree with you but by this time we know that this has become business as usual. I mean the U.S lead the way: Spy anyone including friends and allies. Find what they talk with their mother as well, maybe it would serve the orange pumpkin well in a negotiation.
Spying on everyone including your friends and allies has been standard practice for hundreds of years. The US's major sin, from an international politics perspective, might only be that they've been so hamfisted about it.
Compare to courtly politics in post-Renaissance Europe. All sorts of intrigue and backstabbing, largely only governed by two cardinal rules. First, never conduct yourself in an unseemly manner. Second, don't get caught.
I'd love to correlate this comment of yours with the ones made around the time when it was found that the USA was spying wholesale on EU government officials, hacking telecommunications providers and so on.
Regarding the Dutch intelligence officials (in fact regardless of their country), targeted and legally authorised information collection is fine. That is what intelligence agencies are supposed to do. "Trust but verify", and all that.
It's blanket surveillance, unauthorised surveillance that crosses the line.
One of the biggest outcrys was when it was alleged the us hacked Merkel's phone. Surely that fits in your constraints. But it was the worst of the worst that the us could do when it emerged. Let's not equivocate
To whoever said that other countries do this, so it's ok (bandwagon fallacy):
Have the moral courage to do the right thing for the right reasons, regardless of everyone else doing the wrong thing. Take responsibility for your own actions, instead of offloading it to the actions of others. Act according to what you think is right instead of failing to think altogether.
Deciding your own version of what is right instead of adopting the beliefs of others, and acting according to what you believe instead of blindly following, is an expression of free will and dignity.
To whoever said that Jared Kushner is a bad person, so it's ok (double standard fallacy):
If you stop applying the law equally, your country is lawless. If you do not grant human rights to those who you justifiably hate, you no longer have human rights. When you bring before a court evidence obtained by crime, you are the criminal.
If you believe that arbitrary surveillance is wrong, as I do, you can either defend Jared Kushner's right to to privacy, or endorse arbitrary and unequal justice.
Would you accept anonymous men and women, secretly recording sexually explicit photos of you? If no, you have a double standard or some mental gymnastics to prove that Kushner is guilty of a crime without a trial. Or, you can assert that 'the ends justify the means', which is the death of civility.
In 2014, Christopher Brannan among others, leaked sexual photos of female celebrities from icloud. He was charged with unauthorized access and imprisoned for 38 months. Should he have been allowed to do the same thing because he was paid to do it? No, and the Dutch intelligence officers are his equal; equally disgusting people. If you hack someone's phone, you are repulsive, because the ends do not justify the means.
So I will defend Kushner's privacy, as I would my own, and demand that if someone wants to search his iphone, they can go to the judge and get a warrant instead of taking screenshots like a little creep.
Moreover, I defend without exception, Kushner's immunity to anything on his phone, because whatever derives from hacking the phone is illegitimate.
Of course. So if you find on Jared's phone a video of him murdering your daughter, and there is no other evidence for it, I hope you will stick to your principles about him having immunity.
I don't consider it extrajudicial. Kushner should be charged with crimes in the united states. It is not extrajudicial just because the US is corrupt and won't prosecute kushner. Had that prosecution happened, everything the dutch did would be evidence against kushner.
I don't see why the dutch have any obligation to avoid monitoring a compromised phone that the US lets happen. The dutch have every right to know what the russians are getting from that phone.
The part of the story I actually care about is two governments hoarding an iphone zero day, and using it to secretly hack iphones. I condemn it.
Sorry, but the US threw this out of the window starting with the Patriot Act. Many tech companies were in the NSA PRISM program and the program probably still exists today. Common US E2E encrypted messengers can be read out by US services through weak defaults (e.g. iMessage in iCloud is encrypted at-rest unless ADP is enabled both sides of the chat, similarly, WhatsApp only encrypts backups at-rest by default).
> Digital privacy is important to me. I think that all humans should have it. Feel free to disagree. Jared Kushner is a human.
All the counter-arguments I've read to this comment so far have been along the lines of, "well they started it."
And well they did. But if your response to the U.S.'s brand of dehumanization is more dehumanization then you've actually helped them achieve their goal. The people who run the U.S. want a world where respect for privacy (among so many other things) is thrown away because they believe they have the guns and resources to gain the most from that kind of world.
It's part of why I'm getting out of the USA. Key norms of decency we had are broken now, and in our social system you can bet that the next powers who come in will do little more than make a show of repairing them. They now see what's possible and they'll use it for their own ends. It's a spiral.
You inspired a poem (with sincere apologies to Martin Niemöller):
First they came for the oligarchs, and I did not speak out -- because I was not an oligarch.
Then they came for the political cronies, and I did not speak out -- because I was not a political crony.
Then they came for the tech bros, and I did not speak out -- because I was not a tech bro.
Then they came for me -- and actually it was okay because now we live in a civil society, we were able to clear up the misunderstanding and everybody's doing fine.
A spy agency with a way to spy is expected to instead reveal the vuln so that nobody can use it? Are you wearing pajamas because that's a nice little dream. Of course a spy agency is going to exploit for their gain any vuln they find.
Also, what the Dutch did by following what the Russians did is exactly why government approved backdoors will not work. As soon as someone else finds out that there is a way, they will use it form themselves.
This guy was whining a few days ago that Anthropic is the most evil company in the world because they won't let the American military have free reign to murder people with it. Then he goes on to say he is against "hacking". What does he think the military and surviellance do?
Though I respect the sentiment of his concerns, it is indeed a pipe dream. What do we expect the five eyes are doing? Certainly not sacrificing intelligence to bolster iPhone security, any day of the week.
I honestly expect the spy agencies to be actively working to undermine any and every system up to and including having agents hired specifically to add/discover vulns from within the companies. It is there entire purpose to gather intelligence. To expect them to make it harder to do that is just not even near the realm of realistic.
To whoever said that other countries do this, so it's ok (bandwagon fallacy):
Have the moral courage to do the right thing for the right reasons, regardless of everyone else doing the wrong thing. Take responsibility for your own actions, instead of offloading it to the actions of others. Act according to what you think is right instead of failing to think altogether.
Deciding your own version of what is right instead of adopting the beliefs of others, and acting according to what you believe instead of blindly following, is an expression of free will and dignity.
To whoever said that Jared Kushner is a bad person, so it's ok (double standard fallacy):
If you stop applying the law equally, your country is lawless. If you do not grant human rights to those who you justifiably hate, you no longer have human rights. When you bring before a court evidence obtained by crime, you are the criminal.
If you believe that arbitrary surveillance is wrong, as I do, you can either defend Jared Kushner's right to to privacy, or endorse arbitrary and unequal justice.
Would you accept anonymous men and women, secretly recording sexually explicit photos of you? If no, you have a double standard or some mental gymnastics to prove that Kushner is guilty of a crime without a trial.
In 2014, Christopher Brannan among others, leaked sexual photos of female celebrities from icloud. He was charged with unauthorized access and imprisoned for 38 months. Should he have been allowed to do the same thing because he was paid to do it? No, and the Dutch intelligence officers are his equal.
So I will defend Kushner's privacy, as I would my own, and demand that if someone wants to search his iphone, they can go to the judge and get a warrant instead of taking screenshots like a little creep.
Moreover, I defend without exception, Kushner's immunity to anything on his phone, because whatever derives from hacking the phone is illegitimate.
Then why do you love the American military and intelligence having free reign to use AI to surveill on and attack people? Do you think the American military reveals its zero days?
You literally said Anthropic is the most evil in a comment discussion where the US military and Palantir were dicussed. Clearly you think somehow Anthropic are more evil than mass murderers. You haven't yet explained why one should think otherwise.
If you’ve got some sort of stain on your résumé so bad that you can’t get even get a job flipping burgers you can always fall back on a career in politics.
> Honestly it sort of blows my mind that the US has a system decisions by security professionals can simply be overruled.
Without commenting on the merits of Kushner, I don’t understand your comment about “professionals.” Security professionals, like lawyers or accountants or any other professional, are advisors, not final decision makers. Obviously the civilian government retains the final say.
I can’t imagine it’s any different in any European country. I’m fully willing to believe that in say the Netherlands, the civilian government is smart enough to listen to the advice of professionals. But surely there is no special legal status that makes professional judgments final decisions over that of elected or appointed officials?
Yes, Europe has also corrupt places and officials. OP might be from less corrupt place, the one where you dont get to overrule security professionals just because you want to.
It’s not about corruption. It’s about the allocation of power. At the end of the day, the power to make the final decision should obviously rest with the elected government.
While there's a lot of mysticism around the field, it is not a small one. In US alone tens and tens of thousands are employed at the various agencies. Only a tiny part are HUMINT working with assets, most have the most A4 office jobs imaginable.
But my point is: The one experience EVERYONE share (those that work there, or have worked), from the sanitary workers to the directors, is that they've gone through the security clearance process. A hefty enough credit card debt could jeopardize the clearance to any one of those.
The person that overruled Kushner's clearance is the same person that stores secret documents in a bathroom and golf club resort. He has stated that he can declassify any document on whim as he feels. Of course that's now how the security community thinks it should be handled, and that he has made that comment after the fact of showing classified documents to people not cleared for it. Secrecy/security isn't really a thing for him.
anyone associated with Trump, esp. guys like Kushner, are people you don't want to give clearances to.
we crossed that line like a decade ago. the entire administration is 100% compromised, and has been since the jump.
that Americans are not rioting in the streets a la the French is a sign that American democracy is over. all those guns and all that self-righteousness and for what?
> I've worked in intel, and Kushner seems like the textbook example.
Did you see the one* about Lindsay Graham today? Virulently anti-LGBT 5-time republican senator having sex with multiple male escorts. Some of it on tape (allegedly). Some of it involving minors. He had to be compromised by foreign and domestic intelligence agencies (It sounds quite odd for a South-Carolina Senator to make biweekly trips to Israel). He was the biggest war hawk in Washington serving at the highest levels and with the highest clearance - At his funeral, his buddy Trump said that Lindsay "never saw a war he didn't like". Yet he served more than 20 years as a senator - Never impeached, never indicted, never investigated. Not by his democrats, the media, journalists, the agencies, nobody. Everyone already heard the rumours already, it had become an internet meme. Hunter Biden casually mentioned alluded to him and the 'closetocracy' that secretly ruled washington. Why didn't anyone speak out before he died? He was staunch supporter of NATO so i guess Europeans weren't too interested to look to deeply.
Looking at it myself that is inaccurate. It seems like GRU hacked the phone first and then Dutch intelligence did the same thing. See my comment above.
Various sources also claim that Dutch intelligence deployed or was involved with deploying Stuxnet in Iran.
In 2019, it was reported that an Iranian mole working for Dutch intelligence at the behest of Israel and the CIA inserted the Stuxnet virus with a USB flash drive or convinced another person working at the Natanz facility to do so.
As a Flemish person I can attest that the Dutch have outstanding engineers. So if their intelligence agency has a proper budget, they definitely have a nice pool to select from.
Flanders has not been a part of the Netherlands for almost 200 years and was only ever really part of it for 15 years (It's the Dutch speaking part of Belgium).
“What was odd, the source said, was that the money in the account—hundreds of millions of dollars—had come from a bank in Azerbaijan. Most importantly, Kushner appeared to have transferred significant amounts of money from the Dubai account to other individuals, including a warlord, a mercenary, and a one-time hit man,” Cole wrote.
As an outsider, ever since I learned some things about the trump family and kushner ten years ago, he always stood out for me as the most interesting and dangerous character of the lot. Always in the background, never front and center, always making high stakes decisions, wielding power of large amounts of money, sitting in more important meetings than trump (in my opinion). Literally whenever anything happens regarding trump's/usa/global issues, I always ask myself, where is kushner, where is he involved? He gives me the same feeling as observing a young putin from 30 years ago, same power dynamics at play. Interesting person nonetheless.
And let's not forget, he was stupid enough to end up with massive amounts of debt despite his network, his education and his starting capital. Once the USA was stupid enough to elect Trump, every foreign agency must have had him in their crosshairs.
Imagine being born into the deep state transnatioal criminal class that runs the world, and still fucking up so bad that you end up with negative coins. Then get your phone hacked by mere spooks and have your dirty laundry aired out before the public. What an incompetent embarrassment, even for that whole lot who call themselves the elite.
Of course there will be no justice served, they're above that. But there may be a sliver of hope for the public, that the richest biggest criminals are visibly falling apart from generations of coddled degeneracy, all the power in the world cannot save them from their own idiocy. How do you become such losers that badly when you run a rigged game.
The 2 "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" books (mostly the second one) by Perkins do a good job of describing the relation between the US and the Saudis.
Why should we be warned. It's pretty much widely known that the entire Trump administration is compromised. That details may be salacious goes without saying.
Correct, 100% speculative. It could be true, seeing the history of secret services.
But this story is too good to be true! Real questions are: who benefits of this story? And why?
In my (probably naive) humble opinion, the entire population of the USA should benefit from knowing their leadership are corrupt and only interested in enriching themselves and their peers.
But having seen the huge amount of American citizens that spend their days justifying the actions of these corrupt politicians and bi/trillionaires where they apparently can do no wrong, I'm thinking that nobody will really benefit from this and it will be filed under "business as usual".
“Kushner’s counsel, however, said Kushner did not make any agreements or arrangements with leaders or officials in foreign countries that were not agreed to by the President of the United States and in the best interests of the United States.”
This is all categorically untrue and besides, I had permission.
Every government spies on every other government with every available tool. Even allied ones. (Especially Israel, because it has a really good spy agency)
Why wouldn't they? Only a deeply stupid world leader would carry their phone with them all the time, or conduct any sort of business on it.
My understanding is that the current crop of politicians is terrified of FOIA requests, and so pushes as much to their phones as possible. You can't FOIA many of the apps on there.
This is a cowardly practice. These officials are either overtly cowards, or they are too stupid to understand that their phones are targets for foreign intelligence agencies.
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[ 0.79 ms ] story [ 21.7 ms ] threadIf he's telling the truth, then I would do the same.
If he's lying, then it might work, I would also probably do the same.
The interesting thing here is that two publications allowed the journalist to call Kushner "corrupt". This means that the lawyers would have seen compelling evidence that would mean one of two things:
1) Kushner wouldn't take them to court, because he would have to settle out of court in an expensive way
2) Kushner, if he were to take court action, would not win civil case.
This leads me to think that there is more than a shred of evidence, but an awful lot of evidence that he didn't declare what he was supposed to (at best) and at worse laundered foreign cash for his own purposes
Although it is always possible that they've got something worth saying it is also entirely possible that they're just making up a story out of nothing.
Rather than moving on from this the Pulitzer Board is vigorously defending their decision in court as we speak.
There certainly hasn’t been a retraction. You’ll also note Trump never sued the papers over their coverage.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50194105
In short, the facts are:
- Trump's campaign met repeatedly with Russians and lied about it.
- Trump's inner circle took meetings with a Russian spy in hopes of getting dirt and lied about it.
- Russia actually did release dirt to help Trump campaign and lied about it.
- Trump's campaign eagerly accepted that help and asked for more publicly, and Russia obliged.
- Trump's campaign shared internal campaign data with Russian intelligence officers.
- If they could have exonerated Trump they would have, but they couldn't.
These are cold hard facts available in the mueller report and the senate intel committee report, both authored by Republicans.
One of whom pled guilty to lying about the proposed Trump Tower Moscow scheme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Tower_Moscow
> [Donald Trump] at once put on an extremely arrogant demeanour instead of the modest gait and bearing proper to --the gentle sex-- [his office], began to walk and speak and do all things more stiffly and haughtily than [he] had been wont … [he] arranged everything as [he himself] thought fit and according to [his] own arbitrary will.
And it has to be admitted is a fair description of the man.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49680033
What is going on? How does a government release a report that directly contradicts what they claim they're releasing the report for, and then steadfastly stand by the claims that were disproven by the report they released?
We truly are living in the post truth era...
As always you can’t logic people out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.
In the civilised world, those caught abusing public office resigned.
"Deny, deny, deny" in the face of all evidence is a curioulsy Trumpian move.
Only a couple of states actually have their own militia that is independent of federal government.
That is wrong, see DC v. Heller, """ the “militia” in colonial America consisted of a subset of “the people”—those who were male, able bodied, and within a certain age range. Reading the Second Amendment as protecting only the right to “keep and bear Arms” in an organized militia therefore fits poorly with the operative clause’s description of the holder of that right as “the people.” """
I'm on the ground and the conversations are changing. There is significant damage that will take decades to repair, but I do not think it impossible.
We broke the trust with allies on so many levels and you should continue to hedge, because America might not be peaking on absurdity yet...
And if the Democrats don't do an absolutely stellar job of trying to fix things, and making life at least seem better for most of the US voting public, then an entirely chaotic Republican party could still get back in.
... and that's saying nothing of the possibilities for repeats of Jan 6th come midterm results or the 2028 election.
And yet having enough reach to be on their radar.
They're easily convinced by simplistic causality arguments that, on the surface, satisfy what they feel is an injustice.
They're not even necessarily wrong about the injustices they feel, but they're too easily convinced about what may be the causes, and how those causes may be solved.
The fact we're talking about militia types indicates a simplicity of thought: enough guns can solve it. So we're starting with a pretty self selected group.
It is some kind of magic that Trump, son of a billionaire, success by nepotism, can have any chance of reaching them.
Hmm, where have I heard that before, the last time the fascists took over and we had a world war about it.
I'm kind of curious if New Yorkers will try and do a tea party impression with the Russian diesel ship though.
In any case, Kushner - and rightfully so - could not obtain a security clearance the first time around, due to massive debt. But it was overruled / waived by higher ups.
I've worked in intel, and Kushner seems like the textbook example - a cautionary tale - on the type of person you do not want to grant anything of importance.
Honestly it sort of blows my mind that the US has a system decisions by security professionals can simply be overruled.
America will need a number of constitutional amendments to counter the last 40+ years, which I hope is peaking this administration.
Seriously, there is absolutely nothing the current US president could do that could constitute a "hot water" situation for him give the willingness of the Republican party and the SCOTUS to support him unconditionally.
Came across it here [1]: "Per Executive Order 14434, federal agencies are now using "Super Intelligence" (SI) in place of "Artificial Intelligence" (AI). You may see both terms across NIH content during this transition."
[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/09/inau...
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/
It's like trying to make "fetch" happen by executive order.
And copy paste of the above for Trump.
Isn't that kinda bad for their health? Polonium intake is unhealthy.
I'm not an American so don't take this the wrong way, but Jared's response to the tweet, that the story is fabricated because of how complicated it is and VanityFair disclosed no evidences, should be considered as well.
I believe the current modus operandi is to offer a window.
On a serious note: plenty of people were surprised that Navalny returned to Russia. I suspect that after his poisoning it became clear Putin and his cronies wanted him dead, so he chose to give them the judicial spectacle they wanted so that they would at least spare his family.
Why return only after being poisoned and not earlier?
> Russian politics over the last decades has so inculcated society with cynicism and conspiracy theory that people fundamentally do not believe in simple motives.
He was poisoned inside Russia in late 2020, and was extracted (by his family, he was in a coma) to Germany for treatment. He returned immediately after recovering in early 2021.
You are right that it has nonzero value, but appropriate bayesian priors should take into account Vanity Fair being a reliable source, and Jared being a historically unreliable, untransparent source.
tl;dr: VF > JK absent further evidence in either direction
I'm not saying VF is lying in this case, it could all be true, but extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence.
Likewise, people with a prior lying reputation can continue lying. So those two things combined result in no net effect on the bayesian priors, and we are again left with `VF > JK`, absent further evidence.
> I'm not saying VF is lying in this case, it could all be true, but extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence.
Given the bayesian priors, VF's claim doesn't seem all that extraordinary, whereas JK's claim of innocence in comparison seems rather extraordinary. From there I apply the same heuristic of extraordinary claims.
Personally the article reads to me like a international spy thriller short story, so until they disclose some evidence I'll just file this under "Americans flinging shit at each other" directory lol.
Dutch intel can think that happened, or not. It is independent from if that is true. The whole thing equally sounds like a setup using the Dutch to launder the story.
Which is also entirely independent from any stories of this sort in the media being true one way or another.
Also a problem in the UK (Boris Johnson with Lord Lebedev).
Unfortunately I think it does have to sit somewhere on the elected side. A situation where the permanent state can overrule elected representatives unconditionally isn't great. But what really ought to happen is an open court case; you cannot have public policy decisions made on the basis of secret intel in a democracy. That gives you the Iraq war.
That is the direct consequence of what you said right before. You don't want decisions made by unelected officials non-overridable in a democracy, but for that democratic process to work effectively, the information needs to be in the open. Anything not in the open can just as well stay beyond the reach of elected folks.
The GRU double-agent proved that the GRU had compromised Kushner's phone. Subsequently, Dutch intelligence themselves independently attempted to hack Kushner's phone.
"In The Hague, the MIVD hacking team tried to reverse engineer the Russian penetration of Kushner’s iPhone." [...]
"The Dutch team had been trying to pick the phone’s door lock, so to speak, when it occurred to them that the Russians may have found an unlocked window to gain entry instead. Their hypothesis was correct. By early 2018, the MIVD had found a vulnerability in the iPhone that gave them access." [...]
"when Kushner used the phone, they could see his screen. Almost as soon as they got inside, the intelligence service began capturing every image of Kushner’s screen as he used it, filing their own cache of surveillance on their internal computer servers."
This isn't about the privacy of one individual human. This is about the security practices of a politically exposed person and the information they have access to.
Any high profile, high security clearance individual must have top-notch security. Any information gleaned or stolen from them can have enormous repercussions.
This assumption was destroyed during the first Trump administration and continued being eroded in his second. They do not practice good opsec. (See Signal app usage) Nobody is enforcing policies, and nobody tells the bosses that they can’t do something because [reason].
The U.S. spent years explaining to the world that nothing is extrajudicial that happens to non-Americans outside of the United States. So please explain how this activity of the MIVD broke any Dutch laws.
Kushner's behavior undermined the world far more than this phone hack.
Compare to courtly politics in post-Renaissance Europe. All sorts of intrigue and backstabbing, largely only governed by two cardinal rules. First, never conduct yourself in an unseemly manner. Second, don't get caught.
It's blanket surveillance, unauthorised surveillance that crosses the line.
Not conducive for trust though, which I assume had long vanished anyway.
Have the moral courage to do the right thing for the right reasons, regardless of everyone else doing the wrong thing. Take responsibility for your own actions, instead of offloading it to the actions of others. Act according to what you think is right instead of failing to think altogether.
Deciding your own version of what is right instead of adopting the beliefs of others, and acting according to what you believe instead of blindly following, is an expression of free will and dignity.
To whoever said that Jared Kushner is a bad person, so it's ok (double standard fallacy):
If you stop applying the law equally, your country is lawless. If you do not grant human rights to those who you justifiably hate, you no longer have human rights. When you bring before a court evidence obtained by crime, you are the criminal.
If you believe that arbitrary surveillance is wrong, as I do, you can either defend Jared Kushner's right to to privacy, or endorse arbitrary and unequal justice.
Would you accept anonymous men and women, secretly recording sexually explicit photos of you? If no, you have a double standard or some mental gymnastics to prove that Kushner is guilty of a crime without a trial. Or, you can assert that 'the ends justify the means', which is the death of civility.
In 2014, Christopher Brannan among others, leaked sexual photos of female celebrities from icloud. He was charged with unauthorized access and imprisoned for 38 months. Should he have been allowed to do the same thing because he was paid to do it? No, and the Dutch intelligence officers are his equal; equally disgusting people. If you hack someone's phone, you are repulsive, because the ends do not justify the means.
So I will defend Kushner's privacy, as I would my own, and demand that if someone wants to search his iphone, they can go to the judge and get a warrant instead of taking screenshots like a little creep.
Moreover, I defend without exception, Kushner's immunity to anything on his phone, because whatever derives from hacking the phone is illegitimate.
I don't see why the dutch have any obligation to avoid monitoring a compromised phone that the US lets happen. The dutch have every right to know what the russians are getting from that phone.
You are picking the wrong case for your cause.
Sorry, but the US threw this out of the window starting with the Patriot Act. Many tech companies were in the NSA PRISM program and the program probably still exists today. Common US E2E encrypted messengers can be read out by US services through weak defaults (e.g. iMessage in iCloud is encrypted at-rest unless ADP is enabled both sides of the chat, similarly, WhatsApp only encrypts backups at-rest by default).
there are branches of govt in the US system, not a single entity. Even the almighty secret police have been curtailed many times.
Believe me, not everyone is onboard with this approach to surveillance
It goes a lot deeper than that..
All the counter-arguments I've read to this comment so far have been along the lines of, "well they started it."
And well they did. But if your response to the U.S.'s brand of dehumanization is more dehumanization then you've actually helped them achieve their goal. The people who run the U.S. want a world where respect for privacy (among so many other things) is thrown away because they believe they have the guns and resources to gain the most from that kind of world.
It's part of why I'm getting out of the USA. Key norms of decency we had are broken now, and in our social system you can bet that the next powers who come in will do little more than make a show of repairing them. They now see what's possible and they'll use it for their own ends. It's a spiral.
Sort of how the police should keep tabs on violent criminals.
There is no "dehumanising".
First they came for the oligarchs, and I did not speak out -- because I was not an oligarch.
Then they came for the political cronies, and I did not speak out -- because I was not a political crony.
Then they came for the tech bros, and I did not speak out -- because I was not a tech bro.
Then they came for me -- and actually it was okay because now we live in a civil society, we were able to clear up the misunderstanding and everybody's doing fine.
:)
Also, what the Dutch did by following what the Russians did is exactly why government approved backdoors will not work. As soon as someone else finds out that there is a way, they will use it form themselves.
Have the moral courage to do the right thing for the right reasons, regardless of everyone else doing the wrong thing. Take responsibility for your own actions, instead of offloading it to the actions of others. Act according to what you think is right instead of failing to think altogether.
Deciding your own version of what is right instead of adopting the beliefs of others, and acting according to what you believe instead of blindly following, is an expression of free will and dignity.
To whoever said that Jared Kushner is a bad person, so it's ok (double standard fallacy):
If you stop applying the law equally, your country is lawless. If you do not grant human rights to those who you justifiably hate, you no longer have human rights. When you bring before a court evidence obtained by crime, you are the criminal.
If you believe that arbitrary surveillance is wrong, as I do, you can either defend Jared Kushner's right to to privacy, or endorse arbitrary and unequal justice.
Would you accept anonymous men and women, secretly recording sexually explicit photos of you? If no, you have a double standard or some mental gymnastics to prove that Kushner is guilty of a crime without a trial.
In 2014, Christopher Brannan among others, leaked sexual photos of female celebrities from icloud. He was charged with unauthorized access and imprisoned for 38 months. Should he have been allowed to do the same thing because he was paid to do it? No, and the Dutch intelligence officers are his equal.
So I will defend Kushner's privacy, as I would my own, and demand that if someone wants to search his iphone, they can go to the judge and get a warrant instead of taking screenshots like a little creep.
Moreover, I defend without exception, Kushner's immunity to anything on his phone, because whatever derives from hacking the phone is illegitimate.
Well, problem solved. He certainly used his new position to get rid of his debt.
Without commenting on the merits of Kushner, I don’t understand your comment about “professionals.” Security professionals, like lawyers or accountants or any other professional, are advisors, not final decision makers. Obviously the civilian government retains the final say.
I can’t imagine it’s any different in any European country. I’m fully willing to believe that in say the Netherlands, the civilian government is smart enough to listen to the advice of professionals. But surely there is no special legal status that makes professional judgments final decisions over that of elected or appointed officials?
But my point is: The one experience EVERYONE share (those that work there, or have worked), from the sanitary workers to the directors, is that they've gone through the security clearance process. A hefty enough credit card debt could jeopardize the clearance to any one of those.
we crossed that line like a decade ago. the entire administration is 100% compromised, and has been since the jump.
that Americans are not rioting in the streets a la the French is a sign that American democracy is over. all those guns and all that self-righteousness and for what?
Did you see the one* about Lindsay Graham today? Virulently anti-LGBT 5-time republican senator having sex with multiple male escorts. Some of it on tape (allegedly). Some of it involving minors. He had to be compromised by foreign and domestic intelligence agencies (It sounds quite odd for a South-Carolina Senator to make biweekly trips to Israel). He was the biggest war hawk in Washington serving at the highest levels and with the highest clearance - At his funeral, his buddy Trump said that Lindsay "never saw a war he didn't like". Yet he served more than 20 years as a senator - Never impeached, never indicted, never investigated. Not by his democrats, the media, journalists, the agencies, nobody. Everyone already heard the rumours already, it had become an internet meme. Hunter Biden casually mentioned alluded to him and the 'closetocracy' that secretly ruled washington. Why didn't anyone speak out before he died? He was staunch supporter of NATO so i guess Europeans weren't too interested to look to deeply.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9VHT5OJlO0
I recall they helped the UK during the Falklands War with SIGINT/cryptanalytic stuff
In 2019, it was reported that an Iranian mole working for Dutch intelligence at the behest of Israel and the CIA inserted the Stuxnet virus with a USB flash drive or convinced another person working at the Natanz facility to do so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_van_Sabben
Of course there will be no justice served, they're above that. But there may be a sliver of hope for the public, that the richest biggest criminals are visibly falling apart from generations of coddled degeneracy, all the power in the world cannot save them from their own idiocy. How do you become such losers that badly when you run a rigged game.
https://wallhop.io/https://www.vanityfair.com/story/jared-ku...
every president since regean has been pushed to bomb iran. but only this one did.
they ain't invaded cuba
In my (probably naive) humble opinion, the entire population of the USA should benefit from knowing their leadership are corrupt and only interested in enriching themselves and their peers.
But having seen the huge amount of American citizens that spend their days justifying the actions of these corrupt politicians and bi/trillionaires where they apparently can do no wrong, I'm thinking that nobody will really benefit from this and it will be filed under "business as usual".
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50201259
My understanding is that the current crop of politicians is terrified of FOIA requests, and so pushes as much to their phones as possible. You can't FOIA many of the apps on there.
This is a cowardly practice. These officials are either overtly cowards, or they are too stupid to understand that their phones are targets for foreign intelligence agencies.
Europeans should not trust any of that team: it is a compromised government.
The irony is that Yuri explained this already in the 1980s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5It1zarINv0
It was a literal prediction of the KGB seizing power. Putin is from the KGB clique. Gorbachev really should have neutered the KGB totally.
But they need kompromat to make them Krasnovs.