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BRITISH TEEN ACCESSED TOP SECRET U.S. MIDDLE EAST OPS BY PRETENDING TO BE THE CIA DIRECTOR

BY JACK MOORE ON 1/20/18 AT 7:25 AM

A British teenager managed to obtain access to top secret U.S. plans about intelligence operations in different Middle East countries by acting as former CIA Director John Brennan, a court heard on Friday.

Kane Gamble, 18, researched Brennan and used the information he gathered to speak to an internet company and persuade call handlers to give him access to the spy chief's email inbox in 2015.

He pretended to be both a Verizon employee and Brennan to access Brennan's internet account.

Astonishingly, Gamble managed to gain access to Brennan's emails and his addressbook, as well as his iCloud storage. He even managed to remotely access the iPad of Brennan's wife.

Initially, he could not get into Brennan's accounts as he could not recall the name of the spy chief's first pet. But he managed to persuade a call handler to change the pin and security questions he needed to access the email account in question, Britain'sDaily Telegraph reported.

“He accessed some extremely sensitive accounts referring to, among other things, military operations and intelligence operations in Afghanistan and Iran,” prosecutor Lloyd-Jones QC said.

Former Director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) John Brennan testifies before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on Capitol Hill, May 23, 2017 in Washington, D.C.ALEX WONG/GETTY

Gamble, aged 15 at the time, also persuaded a helpdesk at the FBI that he was the then deputy director Mark Giuliano.

This all happened from his bedroom in the English Midlands. The breach will raise questions that if a teenager from Britain can breach the highest levels of U.S. intelligence then why can't an intelligence operative of a rival power?

Gamble's motive, the court heard, was that he hated the U.S. government for being, he perceived, "corrupt and cold-blooded."

He also targeted the online presence of then U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson and President Barack Obama's Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

In October 2017, Gamble pleaded guilty to 10 charges, including eight charges of “performing a function with intent to secure unauthorized access” to the computers and two of “unauthorized modification of computer material.”


(Newsweek)

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TRUMP CAMPAIGN ATTACK AD ACCUSES DEMOCRATS OF 'COMPLICITY' IN MURDERS BY IMMIGRANTS

U.S. President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign on Saturday issued a new attack ad tying Democrats to murders committed by illegal immigrants, hours into a government shutdown partly triggered by an impasse over immigration.

The Trump campaign released the 30 second ad, titled “Complicit,” on the anniversary of the Republican president’s inauguration.

U.S. President Donald Trump, flanked by U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Representative Steny Hoyer (D-MD), holds a bipartisan meeting with legislators on immigration reform at the White House in Washington, U.S. January 9, 2018.JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS

It focuses on an undocumented immigrant, Luis Bracamontes, charged in the 2014 killings of two police officers in Sacramento, California. The man’s lawyers had questioned his sanity but a judge found him mentally competent to stand trial, according to a report last week in the Sacramento Bee.

“Democrats who stand in our way will be complicit in every murder committed by illegal immigrants,” the ad says.

The new ad is likely to anger Democrats and immigration advocates and could inflame tensions over the issue on Capitol Hill, where Democrats and Republicans were working through the weekend to reach an agreement that would reopen the government.

A news release announcing the ad blamed Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer for the shutdown, accusing him and Democrats of “holding lawful citizens hostage over their demands for amnesty for illegal immigrants.”

In a statement to CNN, Michael Glassner, the executive director of Trump's re-election campaign committee, said the ad was intended to highlight "the stark contrast between 'complicit' Democrats and the President for his full commitment to build a wall and fix our border to protect Americans from drugs, murder and other atrocities."

Schumer’s spokesman said in an email, “This is a shameless attempt by the president to distract from the Trump shutdown. Rather than campaigning, he should do his job and negotiate a deal to open the government address the needs of the American people.”

“It’s a campaign ad, which tend to be extreme, but this is completely divorced from reality and full of fear and hate,” said Melanie Nezer, vice president of the refugee agency HIAS.

Trump has seized on crimes committed by undocumented migrants in the past to justify his hardline ant-immigration policies—in December decrying the acquittal of migrant Jose Ines Garcia Zarate for the killing of Kate Steinle.

Politifact noted last year that there is no national database of crimes committed by undocumented migrants, but while the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. tripled between the 1990s and 2013, violent crime declined 48% and property crime fell 41% over the same period. Several studies have concluded that immigrants, both undocumented and legal, commit fewer crimes than Americans born in the country. One study in criminology found that "violent crime rates tended to decrease as metropolitan areas experienced gains in their concentration of immigrants."

According to Pew Research, in 2015 there were 11 million undocumented migrants in the U.S.

Trump filed for re-election the day he took office, an unusual move that has allowed him to begin campaigning long before the November 2020 election. Historically, incumbent presidents have waited two years, until after the midterm elections, to file formally.

On Friday, most Senate Democrats opposed a bill that would have avoided the shutdown, because their efforts to include protections for hundreds of thousands of mostly young immigrants, known as Dreamers, were rejected by Trump and Republican leaders.

The Dreamers were brought illegally into the United States as children, and given temporary legal status under a program started by former President Barack Obama.

2017 is officially one of the hottest years on record, surprising no one

It’s official: 2017 was one of the hottest years ever recorded on Earth. On Thursday, NASA reported that only 2016 was warmer.

Every year, NASA collects data on the planet’s temperature record and releases a report that explains climate trends. On average, the planet’s surface temperaturehas risen about 2 degrees Fahrenheit during the last 100 years, a change that can be blamed on the increasing amount of human-made emissions, such as carbon dioxide. “[T]emperatures over the planet as a whole continue the rapid warming trend we’ve seen over the last 40 years,” Gavin Schmidt, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies that conducted the study, said in a press release.

Notably absent in 2017’s climbing temperatures was the presence of El Niño, a weather pattern that warms up the Pacific Ocean and contributed to 2016’s record-setting heat. Still, in 2017, the U.S. spent a record $306 billion on climate-fueled catastrophes, including 16 billion-dollar disasters such as the California wildfires and Hurricane Harvey in southeast Texas.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which also follows the Earth’s temperatures but uses a different method from NASA, concluded that 2017 was the third warmest year — after 2016 and 2015.

This new data means that 17 of the 18 hottest years on record have all occurred since 2001. “What we’re seeing is an increasing string of years of temperatures more than 1 degree above the pre-industrial era,” Schmidt told the New York Times, “and we’re not going to go back.”

(GRIST)