I love the book Rich Dad Poor Dad. It was my fav growing up. Since then, I've founded several startups, was employee #3 at a $65m VC firm in SF, and realized that there is a similar phenomenon to what Robert Kiyosaki is talking about in Rich Dad Poor Dad currently occurring in Silicon Valley.
Let's tastefully call this phenomenon:
Rich Founder Poor Founder. The point of entrepreneurship is freedom. Yes it’s to build cool shit and innovate and all that, but at the end of the day the sort of person who becomes an entrepreneur is usually doing it because they want freedom to control their day and work on the things they care about.
A lot of people go out and start their first business and try to make it a venture backed startup. That’s the wrong move. That’s like going to the gym and trying to bench 250 lbs on day one. It’s not that you can’t build up to that, it’s just not the right move today. I think the right move is to start a business that can make you $100k+ per year in profit. It doesn’t matter if it can’t scale past that, it’s about building that foundation to give you the freedom to try new things. Fail at those new things and it doesn’t matter as you have that financial foundation. It could be something as simple as a consulting or a services business, or a digital product like a course, newsletter or subscription podcast. Anything that is high margin, simple and enabled by the internet.
VC’s may shit on lifestyle businesses but at the end of the day they collect a 2% yearly management fee regardless of their success and typically have a great lifestyle (once their fund size is above $100m AUM).
Ask yourself what’s an easier path to wealth and freedom?
Path 1: Venture backed startup 90% chance of $0.
Small personal income until scale, IPO or liquidity event.
Massive dilution. Most founders end up owning 5%-20%. $500m market cap = $25m-$100m for founder(s).
OR
Path 2: Lifestyle business 50% - 75% chance of success.
Pay yourself whatever you want out of profits over time.
If you can bootstrap your way to $300k/yr in profit and invest half of that ($150k/yr) at 10%/yr for 20 years = $9.6m + $150k/yr salary to enjoy your life with your family and friends. After 20 years, you can choose to sell that business or automate it and let it ride but with $9.6m invested in a conservative portfolio paying out 5% annually = $480k/year in interest or $40k/mo for you to live off without ever touching the principal nor sacrificing quality of life.
The definition of rich is having passive income that’s greater than your burn. I’m pretty sure we can all comfortably live off $40k/mo without ever having to leave the house.
But wait this isn’t a fair analysis as venture backed startups typically reach scale or a liquidity event in 10 years and you did 20 years for the lifestyle business. Fair, I’m sure after 10 years most of us can comfortably live off $20k ish/mo without ever having to work or touch the principal investment.
Most entrepreneurs start with one goal in mind: freedom. If you value freedom, you should have one goal for your first company, and that’s to build a lifestyle business that can produce $100k+/yr of personal income. It can be boring and it doesn’t have to scale. It sets yourself up for the foreseeable future and then you can afford to take big swings. Forget startups. Forget venture capital. Build something that gets you in the game and makes you a living first.
I think VCs may underestimate the extent to which mainstream entrepreneurship is a key input to outliers and moonshots. So many successful billionaire founders had a “never worry about rent again” moment via an exit in a much more boring business before swinging for a home run.
Elon Musk — before sending rockets into space and revolutionizing the auto-industry, Elon Musk was broke building Zip2 (online city guides for newspapers) before he netted $22m on the sale.
Source Patrick & John Collison — built Auctimatic: auction management software for small Ebay sellers, and sold it for $5m before going on to found Stripe, valued at $36b.
Source Mark Cuban — Before building and selling
Broadcast.com for $5.7b and buying the Dallas Mavericks, Mark Cuban built a services business called MicroSolutions and sold it for $6m.
Source Mike Bloomberg — now worth $60b, Mike Bloomberg had a nice “never think about rent again” exit at 39 when Salomon was acquired by Phibro in 1981; he received $10 million. Bloomberg said “The Salomon Brothers did me the two greatest favours in my life. They hired me and they fired me.”
Source Daniel Ek — Spotify isn’t Ek’s first success. Daniel Ek became a self-made millionaire at age 23, before even putting a single thought into Spotify. At 23, Daniel Ek “retired” after he sold his online marketing company Advertigo to Swedish digital marketing firm TradeDoubler in a deal worth $1.25 million.
Alex Tew — started the
Million Dollar Homepage to raise money for his university education. He sold 1 million pixels on a 1000 x 1000 pixel grid on his website for $1 per pixel. He ended up making $1,037,100 USD before founding the billion dollar meditation app,
Calm.
Austin Allred — co-authored the growth hacking textbook
Secret Sauce, which became a best-seller and provided him the personal seed money to build Lambda School, valued over $150m.
And countless others: Ev Williams (Blogger), Pincus (freeloader,
support.com, tribe), Travis
Kalanick (Red Swoosh), Stewart Butterfield (Flickr), Jason Fried & DHH (37 Signals services business) etc.
All of these entrepreneurs built more of a lifestyle business or had a smaller liquidity event before they built a rocket (figuratively and literally for Elon). There is no greater security than knowing that no matter what risks you take, you have a business or enough cash in the bank to pay for your livelihood.
If you start by building a lifestyle business it will force you to build a product or offer a service that customers actually want. It forces you to create a monetization plan and it forces you to build a real business. By starting a lifestyle business it forces you to create something you’re passionate about and build an actual business that will actually help attract VC if that’s the path you choose to go down.
Renowned value investor and Warren Buffett mentor, Ben Graham, once said: “In the short-run, the stock market is a voting machine. But in the long-run, it is a weighing machine.”
AKA in the short term the market may value hype and narrative, but in the long term it always values real traction, revenue, earnings and margins.
We’re seeing this play out in the venture market today. In the last few years you may have heard startups raising at eyebrow lifting valuations and hiring large masses of employees. But behind the curtain their P&L is f*cked! They have little to f*ck all for revenue and huge expenses.
Founders often get attached to valuations and forget that when they sell the business, the weighing machine is the only thing that matters. The buyer has to have a way to pay themselves back, either via earnings, a future sale or strategic synergies.
Your venture valuation is irrelevant. Venture valuations aren’t backed by fundamentals and their funds have been compared to a
ponzi scheme. Build a lifestyle business where results, traction, revenue, margins and earnings are the things that matter because at the end of the day, the numbers have to work with the weighing machine.
Pro tip: If you’re bootstrapping, you can still take advantage of venture capital by using all the VC subsidized software available on the market.
The internet is the greatest leveler of access to entrepreneurship society has ever seen. There is far too much focus on raising venture capital and creating 100–1000x outcomes and not nearly enough on leveraging the internet to empower entrepreneurs to build profitable and sustainable software-enabled lifestyle businesses.
TL;DR 'Rich Founder' is someone who creates a sustainable 'lifestyle business' with a high probability of success. 'Poor Founder' is someone who thinks they need to raise venture capital, a fancy office, big staff and a bunch of resources to succeed. Rich Founder has a probability of success and enjoys his/her life. Poor Founder is miserable and might as well go to a Casino and put it all down on Red 5.
As for my shameless plug: Here's a FREE
community and
resource hub to help more people become 'Rich Founders'.
submitted by By:
Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies - May 30, 2020
Read the article here: https://www.nationofchange.org/2020/05/30/who-are-the-secret-puppet-masters-behind-trumps-war-on-iran/ On May 6th, President Trump vetoed a
war powers bill specifying that he must ask Congress for authorization to use military force against Iran. Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign of
deadly sanctions and threats of war against Iran has seen no let-up, even as the U.S., Iran and the whole world desperately need to set aside our conflicts to face down the common danger of the Covid-19 pandemic.
So what is it about Iran that makes it such a target of hostility for Trump and the neocons? There are many repressive regimes in the world, and many of them are close U.S. allies, so this policy is clearly not based on an objective assessment that Iran is more repressive than Egypt, Saudi Arabia or other monarchies in the Persian Gulf.
The Trump administration claims that its “maximum pressure” sanctions and threats of war against Iran are based on the danger that Iran will develop nuclear weapons. But after decades of inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and despite the U.S.’s
politicization of the IAEA, the Agency has repeatedly confirmed that Iran
does not have a nuclear weapons program.
If Iran ever did any preliminary research on nuclear weapons, it was probably during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, when the
U.S. and its allies helped Iraq to make and use chemical weapons that killed up to 100,000 Iranians. A 2007 U.S.
National Intelligence Estimate, the IAEA’s 2015 “
Final Assessment on Past and Present Outstanding Issues” and decades of IAEA inspections have examined and resolved every scrap of false evidence of a nuclear weapons program
presented or fabricated by the CIA and its allies.
If, despite all the evidence, U.S. policymakers still fear that Iran could develop nuclear weapons, then adhering to the Iran Nuclear Deal (JCPOA), keeping Iran inside the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and ensuring ongoing access by IAEA inspectors would provide greater security than abandoning the deal.
As with Bush’s false WMD claims about Iraq in 2003, Trump’s real goal is not nuclear non-proliferation but regime change. After 40 years of failed sanctions and hostility, Trump and a cabal of U.S. warhawks still cling to the vain hope that a tanking economy and widespread suffering in Iran will lead to a popular uprising or make it vulnerable to another U.S.-backed coup or invasion.
United against a Nuclear Iran and the Counter Extremism Project
One of the key organizations promoting and pushing hostility towards Iran is a shadowy group called United Against a Nuclear Iran (UANI). Founded in 2008, it was expanded and reorganized in 2014 under the umbrella of the Counter Extremism Project United (CEPU) to broaden its attacks on Iran and divert U.S. policymakers’ attention away from the role of Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other U.S. allies in spreading violence, extremism and chaos in the greater Middle East.
UANI acts as a private enforcer of U.S. sanctions by keeping a “
business registry” of hundreds of companies all over the world—from Adidas to Zurich Financial Services—that trade with or are considering trading with Iran. UANI hounds these companies by naming and shaming them, issuing reports for the media, and urging the Office of Foreign Assets Control to impose fines and sanctions. It also keeps a
checklist of companies that have signed a declaration certifying they do not conduct business in or with Iran. Proving how little they care about the Iranian people, UANI even targets pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical-device corporations—
includingBayer,
Merck,
Pfizer,
Eli Lilly, and
Abbott Laboratories—that have been granted special U.S. humanitarian aid licenses.
Where does UANI get its funds?
UANI was founded by three former U.S. officials, Dennis Ross, Richard Holbrooke and Mark Wallace. In 2013, it still had a modest budget of $1.7 million, nearly 80% coming from two Jewish-American billionaires with strong ties to Israel and the Republican Party: $843,000 from precious metals investor
Thomas Kaplan and $500,000 from casino owner
Sheldon Adelson. Wallace and other UANI staff have
also worked for Kaplan’s investment firms, and he remains a key funder and advocate for UANI and its affiliated groups.
In 2014, UANI split into two entities: the original UANI and the Green Light Project, which does business as the Counter Extremism Project. Both entities are under the umbrella of and funded by a third, Counter Extremism Project United (CEPU). This permits the organization to brand its fundraising as being for the Counter Extremism Project, even though it still regrants a third of its funds to UANI.
CEO Mark Wallace, Executive Director David Ibsen and other staff work for all three groups in their
shared offices in Grand Central Tower in New York. In 2018, Wallace drew a combined salary of $750,000 from all three entities, while Ibsen’s combined salary was $512,126.
In recent years, the revenues for the umbrella group, CEPU, have mushroomed, reaching $22 million in 2017. CEPU is secretive about the sources of this money. But investigative journalist
Eli Clifton, who starting looking into UANI in 2014 when it was sued for defamation by a Greek ship owner it accused of violating sanctions on Iran, has found evidence suggesting financial ties with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
That is certainly what
hacked emails between CEPU staff, an Emirati official and a Saudi lobbyist imply. In September 2014, CEPU’s president Frances Townsend emailed the UAE Ambassador to the U.S. to
solicit the UAE’s support and propose that it host and fund a CEPU forum in Abu Dhabi. Four months later, Townsend emailed again to
thank him, writing, “And many thanks for your and Richard Mintz’ (UAE lobbyist) ongoing support of the CEP effort!” UANI fundraiser Thomas Kaplan has formed a
close relationship with Emirati ruler Bin Zayed, and visited the UAE at least 24 times. In 2019, he gushed to an interviewer that the UAE and its
despotic rulers “are my closest partners in more parts of my life than anyone else other than my wife.”
Another email from Saudi lobbyist and former Senator Norm Coleman to the Emirati Ambassador about CEPU’s tax status implied that the Saudis and Emiratis were both involved in its funding, which would mean that CEPU may be violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act by failing to register as a Saudi or Emirati agent in the U.S.
Ben Freeman of the Center for International Policy
has documented the dangerously unaccountable and covert expansion of the influence of foreign governments and military-industrial interests over U.S. foreign policy in recent years, in which registered lobbyists are only the “tip of the iceberg” when it comes to foreign influence. Eli Clifton calls UANI, “a fantastic case study and maybe a microcosm of the ways in which American foreign policy is actually influenced and implemented.”
CEPU and
UANI’s staff and advisory boards are stocked with Republicans, neoconservatives and warhawks, many of whom earn lavish salaries and consulting fees. In the two years before President Trump appointed John Bolton as his National Security Advisor, CEPU paid Bolton
$240,000 in consulting fees. Bolton, who
openly advocates war with Iran, was instrumental in getting the Trump administration to withdraw from the nuclear deal.
UANI also enlists Democrats to try to give the group broader, bipartisan credibility. The chair of UANI’s board is former Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman, who was known as the most pro-Zionist member of the Senate. A more moderate Democrat on UANI’s board is former New Mexico governor and UN ambassador Bill Richardson.
Norman Roule, a CIA veteran who was the National Intelligence Manager for Iran throughout the Obama administration was paid
$366,000 in consulting fees by CEPU in 2018. Soon after the brutal Saudi assassination of journalist Jamal Khassoghi, Roule and UANI fundraiser Thomas Kaplan met with Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, and Roule then played a
leading role in articles and on the talk-show circuit whitewashing Bin Salman’s repression and talking up his superficial “reforms” of Saudi society.
More recently, amid a growing outcry from Congress, the UN and the European Union to ease U.S. sanctions on Iran during the pandemic, UANI chairman Joe Lieberman, CEPU president Frances Townsend and CEO Mark Wallace signed
a letter to Trump that falsely claimed, “U.S. sanctions neither prevent nor target the supply of food, medicine or medical devices to Iran,” and begged him not to relax his murderous sanctions because of COVID-19.
This was too much for Norman Roule, who tossed out his UANI script and told
the Nation, “the international community should do everything it can to enable the Iranian people to obtain access to medical supplies and equipment.”
Two Israeli shell companies to whom CEPU and UANI have paid millions of dollars in “consulting fees” raise even more troubling questions. CEPU has paid over $500,000 to Darlink, located near Tel Aviv, while UANI paid at least $1.5 million to Grove Business Consulting in Hod Hasharon, about 10% of its revenues from 2016 to 2018. Neither firm seems to really exist, but Grove’s address on UANI’s IRS filings appears in the
Panama Papers as that of Dr. Gideon Ginossar, an officer of an offshore company registered in the British Virgin Islands that defaulted on its creditors in 2010.
Selling a corrupted picture to U.S. policymakers
UANI’s parent group, Counter Extremism Project United, presents itself as dedicated to countering all forms of extremism. But in practice, it is predictably selective in its targets, demonizing Iran and its allies while turning a blind eye to other countries with more credible links to extremism and terrorism.
UANI supports
accusations by Trump and U.S. warhawks that Iran is “the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism,” based mainly on its support for the Lebanese Shiite political party Hezbollah, whose militia
defends southern Lebanon against Israel and fights in Syria as an ally of the government.
But Iran placed UANI on its own list of terrorist groups in 2019 after Mark Wallace and UANI hosted a meeting at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York that was mainly attended by supporters of the
Mujahedin-e-Kalqh (MEK). The MEK is a group that the U.S. government itself listed as a terrorist organization until 2012 and which is still committed to the violent overthrow of the government in Iran – preferably by persuading the U.S. and its allies to do it for them. UANI tried to distance itself from the meeting after the fact, but the published program listed UANI as the event organizer.
On the other hand, there are two countries where CEPU and UANI seem strangely unable to find any links to extremism or terrorism at all, and they are the very countries that appear to be funding their operations, lavish salaries and shadowy “consulting fees”: Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Many Americans are still demanding a public investigation into Saudi Arabia’s role in the crimes of September 11th. In a court case against Saudi Arabia brought by 9/11 victims’ families, the FBI recently revealed that a
Saudi Embassy official, Mussaed Ahmed al-Jarrah, provided crucial support to two of the hijackers. Brett Eagleson, a spokesman for the families whose father was killed on September 11th, told
Yahoo News, “(This) demonstrates there was a hierarchy of command that’s coming from the Saudi Embassy to the Ministry of Islamic Affairs [in Los Angeles] to the hijackers.”
The global spread of the Wahhabi version of Islam that unleashed and fueled Al Qaeda, ISIS and other violent Muslim extremist groups has been driven primarily by Saudi Arabia, which has built and funded Wahhabi schools and mosques all over the world. That includes the King Fahd Mosque in Los Angeles that the two 9/11 hijackers attended.
It is also
well documented that Saudi Arabia has been the largest funder and arms supplier for the Al Qaeda-led forces that have destroyed Syria since 2011, including CIA-brokered shipments of thousands of tons of weapons from Benghazi in Libya and at least eight countries in Eastern Europe.
The UAE also supplied arms funding to Al Qaeda-allied rebels in Syria between 2012 and 2016, and the Saudi and UAE roles have now been reversed in Libya, where the UAE is the
main supplier) of thousands of tons of weapons to General Haftar’s rebel forces. In Yemen, both the Saudis and Emiratis have committed
war crimes. The Saudi and Emirati air forces have bombed schools, clinics, weddings and school buses, while the Emiratis
tortured detainees in 18 secret prisons in Yemen.
But United Against a Nuclear Iran and Counter Extremism Project have redacted all of this from the one-sided worldview they offer to U.S. policymakers and the American corporate media. While they demonize Iran, Qatar, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood as extremists and terrorists, they depict Saudi Arabia and the UAE exclusively as victims of terrorism and allies in U.S.-led “counterterrorism” campaigns, never as sponsors of extremism and terrorism or perpetrators of war crimes.
The message of these groups dedicated to “countering extremism” is clear and none too subtle: Saudi Arabia and the UAE are always U.S. allies and victims of extremism, never a problem or a source of danger, violence or chaos. The country we should all be worrying about is – you guessed it – Iran. You couldn’t pay for propaganda like this! But on the other hand, if you’re Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates and you have greedy, corrupt Americans knocking on your door eager to sell their loyalty, maybe you can.
submitted by Source Dear Mr. Putin, Let’s Play Chess
JANUARY 17, 2017 ~ PATRIBOTICS
PART ONE: PAWN TAKES QUEEN
I have an overarching theory of Russia’s attack on America and the West. Here it is.
There have not been a series of attacks on America and Europe by Vladimir Putin. There has been one single operation; it is the same operation.
By 2008, possibly even earlier, according to John Schindler, a National Security expert formerly at the NSA, Russia had placed moles in the highest levels of US counter-intelligence. I take this as my starting-point, because all the subsequent facts bear it out.
Mr. Putin always wanted to use the strength of the West as a lever to attack it, because Russia is weak and poor. So he did, and he used a very old-fashioned and effective method. Spies inside the IC. He also believes in propaganda and mind-games. He uses them on the West, he uses them on Russians, in Russia.
Hillary Clinton correctly noted that Putin rigged his own election in 2011. This, apparently, is when he started to hate her.
By the 2012 election, Russia’s desire to interfere with American democracy was already there, but it as yet didn’t have the tools to succeed in that aim. I deliberately omit some of the timeline here in order to get to the bigger points in the story, but I will return to it later.
Russian moles placed inside the NSA recruited Edward Snowden. A letter between the FSB in Cuba and SENAIN in Quito held in a file marked ‘Assange’ in London, dated 4th April 2013, the day before Snowden sent his only email on legalities, April 5th 2013, and before Snowden took his uppermost level documents during the rest of the month of April, proves conclusively that Mr. Snowden is a Russian agent who acted on instructions from Moscow. After Snowden fled to Hong Kong, he escaped from there by an Ecuadorean travel document arranged by Julian Assange, and tried to get to Cuba.
Snowden is a low-level IT idiot. He had help taking what he took from the NSA. I recommend the NSA review their case files and pick up the Russian moles within their agency. Snowden used stolen credentials, but it is almost certain that he received a piece of removable media like a memory card from his Russian handlers. He took military secrets. And by “he” I mean the FSB.
In 2013, after the Russians received all of the Snowden files, and China some of them, most press coverage concentrated on the traps that terrorists and Russian spies were able to avoid. They missed that Russian hackers would now proceed to use the NSA’s tech offensively.
In 2013, the Russians briefed their army of hackers.
In 2012/13, a young Russian hacker called Yvegeny Nikulin, then 26, was using Snowden’s NSA techniques – stolen credentials – to hack LinkedIn, Dropbox and Formspring.
Formspring, which shut down late 2013, was the app that Anthony Wiener used for his sexting.
According to John Schindler, “a hacker”(Nikulin) was picked up in Prague, October 5th, on suspicion of interfering with the DNC and the Democrats in America’s election. He had been sought on an FBI red warrant.
He is being extradited to the United States (if Jeff Sessions, a Russia partisan who recruited the spy Carter Page into Team Trump, does not try to stop it) over strong protests from Russia. The DoJ announcement on his indictment mentioned not only Formspring, but ‘a count of conspiracy’ and ‘sending a code to a computer’.
It was three years later. Nikulin was now 29.
On Oct 26, Rudy Giuliani joked on television about a big surprise coming in the election that would turn things around for Trump.
On Oct 28, Director James Comey of the FBI announced that more as yet unexamined emails had been found on an old laptop of Mr. Wiener’s.
Mr. Putin, it is my surmise that some of the Russian moles inside US counter-intelligence work within the FBI’s criminal division, and particularly, within the New York field office.
It is my surmise that your hacker, Nikulin, sent a command buried in a virus earlier transmitted by Formspring to ‘wake up’ that old computer and either find, or place, emails from Huma Abedin on to it, and that you then contacted your moles inside the NYPD/ FBI NY and told them to “suddenly find” emails that, the expectation was, could not possibly be combed through in time before the election.
Your agents within the FBI Field Office then did a number of additional things.
Firstly, they illegally spoke to any friendly press and the Trump campaign about putative ongoing criminal investigations into the Clinton Foundation and the matter of her email server.
They told Fox News’s Brett Baier that Hillary Clinton “Would soon be indicted” and this was reported on TV, and then retracted after the damage was done.
They told your agents of influence, Rudy Giuliani and X Kallstrom, that ‘a group of active FBI agents’ had demanded Comey release his letter. Both of them stated as much, Mr. Giuliani specifying ‘active’ FBI agents.
They used your agent General Flynn – I scorn to use ‘of influence’ in this case, Flynn knew what he was doing – to say on live television that active FBI agents were talking to him about an going ‘criminal investigation’
And they told the New York Times that the FBI ’Saw No Clear Ties to Russia’ in the matter of the Russian bank servers. And the New York Times printed it, even though they, the Times, knew it was false.
Before the election, only I reported, correctly, that the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence division in Connecticut had obtained a FISA warrant for ‘any US persons’ relating to the two banks involved in the Trump Tower server; Alfa Bank and SVB Bank.
So your moles in the NSA recruited Ed Snowden in 2012/2013.
You got to work using NSA hacking techniques. Stealing legit credentials features often. You hacked Wiener in 2013 via Formspring. You waited.
You used your moles in the FBI Field Office and, in 2016 at the right moment, you woke up Wiener’s laptop via the ’Snowden Virus’, found or planted old emails on it, and suddenly had the FBI Field Office “find it” and then lean, hard, on Comey to produce the letter he did.
Your RIS moles in the FBI then engaged in some agitprop with Giuliani, Flynn, an innocent Fox News, a not-innocent New York Times who deliberately used its prior authority to rubbish Franklin Foer and David Corn’s Alfa Bank server reporting, to make absolutely certain that “Trump-Russia” was suppressed and Clinton was defeated.
Your agents in the FBI Field Office in New York did, however, make one incredibly stupid mistake. A coder named Dustin Giebel caught it and he flagged it up to me.
The trouble with hiring young and foolish men to flood twitter and Facebook, to act as your hackers and so forth, is that they are young and foolish. Trolls gonna troll.
In this case, the Twitter account @FBIRecordsVault ceased being dormant for the first time in two years. It went on a little tweet storm. The last tweets were attacks on Hillary Clinton with a chaser of an attack on Eric Holder, the former AG. The first tweet, however, was a tweet praising Fred C. Trump. (Donald Trump has often said that his father is his only hero). It used language about Mr. Trump senior that was not only unlike any FBI descriptors ever used before, but had been lifted from Donald Trump’s commercial, company website.
When I saw that, I was overwhelmed with joy. It was not the severity of the offense, it was its traceability. Somebody sat at a keyboard and typed those tweets. Identifiable people. An FBI statement wrongly said that these were automated responses to three FOIA requests. Not true. Some identifiable person ordered and gave that statement. When I filed a private FOIA lawsuit with Mark S Zaid and Bradley Moss, we wrote the questions in ways that would be difficult to avoid answering. Who wrote those tweets? How many agents knew of them? What records exist of FBI agents or staff visiting the Trump commercial website to lift the descriptor of Fred Trump? What internal investigations exist into FBI agents leaking criminal investigations to Flynn and Giuliani? Do they feature any of the same agents who composed, knew of or authorized the FBI Records Vault tweets?
Days after our FOIA requests landed, Mr. Giuliani abruptly withdrew from his application to be Secretary of State. A week after our lawsuit was announced over non-response, the Department of Justice announced an investigation into more or less every matter named in our lawsuit, including the FBI Records Vault’s beautifully traceable tweets.
Even little pawns, like Twitter accounts, can become Queens, if you let them reach the 8th square, Mr. Putin.
So there you have it. Part One:
Russia has moles inside the IC, several of whom are not yet caught.
The NSA moles recruit Snowden.
Assange Ecuador and Russia give Snowden orders, and removable media to scrape intel and military secrets.
Ecuador exfiltrates Snowden to Moscow.
2012-2013, Russian hackers are given all of the NSA techniques. Nikulin hacks Formspring and Wiener. He plants a virus in his laptop. He waits and wakes it up in October.
Russia’s FBI Field Office moles “suddenly find” the emails, perhaps even placed on that computer, at a crucial juncture.
Russia’s FBI Field Office moles pressure Comey into releasing his letter, and thereby spin the election to Trump.
How am doing so far, Mr. Putin? You know, for a woman. And an amateur.
PART TWO – FBI: WHITE KNIGHT VS BLACK KNIGHT
Or, James Comey’s Counterintelligence FBI vs Rudy Giuliani’s NY Criminal FBI
There are three parts to this theory, like a good play, and narratively, the next section ought to be about your spy ring in the University of Cambridge, your hacking of Facebook and Twitter and your propaganda wars across Europe, but as I have learned from you one must play to the audience, and I think American readers are mostly terrified that Director Comey will throw America under the bus and cover up your coup.
I don’t agree. Here is my take.
Before the BBC and the Guardian confirmed my HeatStreet exclusive on the FISA warrant issued in October, I was a lone voice in the wilderness on its existence.(And may history record that our conservative-leaning website had that scoop). When the writer Jason Leopold of Vice asked if Trump had been under investigation in September he got a GLOMAR response: ‘We can neither confirm nor deny the existence of any such records’.
GLOMAR responses are named for a submarine and can only be given if a matter of national security is at stake. Mr. Leopold announced he would sue, for why should a concluded investigation be a matter of national security? I told him, with little credibility then and tons now, that the GLOMAR response made sense because there is an ongoing investigation into Mr. Trump and his associates on a matter of national security.
Democrats, including Democrats in Obama’s government who ought to know better, have asked if James Comey had ‘a double standard’ over the investigations into Clinton and Trump. Yes; he did, and he does. He may talk about a criminal investigation. He may not talk about a current, ongoing investigation into espionage, bribery, money laundering and so forth that affects US national security.
Over the summer and early autumn Democrats wrongly stated that the FBI / Comey had said they were not looking into Roger Stone and had declined to investigate Roger Stone, who announced his links to Wikileaks. This came from a Senate hearing and Mr. Comey’s testimony to Democrat Rep. Nadler. Rep. Nadler asked if Stone’s boasts constituted special circumstances, Comey said “I don’t think so.” It must have been frustrating for Comey. He was GLOMAR-ing Congress right to their face and they did not understand what was going on.
Subsequently, the heads of NSA, CIA and FBI “Glomar”ed, in no particular order, two Congressional open Russian hack hearings, one closed briefing to the House of Representatives, and in the case of the CIA’s Director Brennan, Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday.
Furthermore, although Comey is a natural Republican he appeared to have played it straight. In the summer he cleared Clinton of a criminal standard of negligence. In the fall, he had been sandbagged by Russian moles inside the FBI Field Office in New York. But I do not believe Mr. Comey surrendered wrongly to ‘pressure’. He knew the moles had effective kompromat – the emails your hacker Nikulin planted or woke – and that were he not to revise his testimony in the light of new evidence, his far more important natsec investigation into the traitor, Donald Trump, would be discredited. He then worked around the clock to clear Mrs. Clinton.
All evidence shows that James Comey is pursuing your assault on America, Mr. Putin, with the fearless I expect from a counter-intelligence patriot. In June, he named Donald Trump to a FISA court as an agent of Russian influence. In July, he did the same. Both times, the court turned him down. In April, Mr. Comey received audio of Russian money financing Trump – that’s the same time that Paul Manafort joined the campaign to run it. He formed a joint CIA/FBI /Treasury task force to look at the money.
Over the summer, US counter-intelligence met with Chris Steele because they had already got their own independent information that he was correct. On October 5th, your hacker Nikulin was picked up on an FBI ‘Red Warrant’ in Prague which means Director Comey had put a top priority on getting him some time before. Armed with whatever Nikulin spilled – and, Mr. Putin, he fainted when they caught him – Director Comey went back again, to a new FISA judge, on October 15, and he got his warrant.
Every indication is that Director Comey is not only independent but plays better chess than both you or I, Mr. Putin. (Can I call you VVP? I feel like I know you). For in September, the FBI did not join the ODNI statement about Russia’s intent being to aid Trump. Why not? Because while the NSA and CIA had heard the tapes of Americans in Trump’s camp working with your officials, taking your bribes, disseminating your information, Director Comey had not yet received his warrant. In order not to give Trump’s defense and the defense of his camps anything to go on, the FBI was Caesar’s wife. It did not act on surveillance of US persons abroad offered by the UK, Estonia, BIS, and Lithuania until it got the warrant. Director Comey does not want any ‘fruit of the poisoned tree’ defenses (no pun intended, Mr. Putin, and may I remind you sir that it is bad form to kill one’s opponents in chess. It’s cheating).
The FBI ‘changed’ its stance on the final Russian hacking report because they had, by then, listened to the tapes. Legally. Under a warrant.
The FBI has, fortunately, always employed the principle of compartmentalization. The FBI Counter-Intelligence division in New York kept their dealings secret from the criminal field office in New York.
But, some readers will say, Russian moles in the NSA – OK, it’s a worthy target. Why would the Russians have sleeper moles in a mere FBI criminal field office, even if it is New York?
And the answer to that is simple; a corrupt FBI NY Field Office guards the interest of Russian mobsters, allows them to launder their money through Trump’s “failing” casinos and building projects, makes sure that Trump being paid double for a Florida house doesn’t get investigated, allows paedophile Jeffrey Epstein to keep a mansion in New York City, ensures that Trump’s criminal taxes don’t get investigated, and sits hard enough on the NYPD that Trump can commit crime after crime in plain sight, socializing with the FBI’s most wanted mobsters, and never get charged with a damn thing. It ensures that Manafort and Stone can live in Trump tower, that Cohen’s trips on Russian-Registered private jets get washed. It allows the “FBI” to be next to the media, including the New York Times and Fox news, and act as un-named law enforcement sources. The FBI Field Office in New York wasn’t just infiltrated by your agents to scupper Hillary Clinton, Mr. Putin. It was there to guard the money of your billionaires and to cover the tracks of your handlers in the Russian embassy and consulates. That’s why the dead security guard at the Russian consulate never got investigated. You have a lot of people in New York, and they are very affable, pleasant folks, too. I’ve met a couple.
But let’s get back to the game. Your trouble is that Mr. Comey is not for sale. You have nothing on him. Let’s remember your hacker Nikulin, whom Comey was chasing since who knows when. A few days ago Comey picked up another of your hackers in Spain as he was about to board a plane to France with his wife. You yourself, through your propaganda sites, connected this to the DNC hack. You had the identical reaction that you did to Nikulin being picked up. You threw a rather beta male hissy fit. Stanislav Lisov had coded a bank virus. But there’s rather more to it than that. Lisov fits the hacker narrative in the Steele dossier. He needed paying. He has Gazprom connections, and he has a scary interest in satellites, which you, Mr. Putin, would like to weaponize against the United States.
But you know, the FBI caught him, none the less. Comey caught him. They know about the US company he formed, how it transferred to Oregon from Florida, and how money was funneled through a failed ‘secretive startup’.
The white knight is outplaying the black knight and all his moves indicate that.
PART THREE: ENDGAME – THE ‘IAGO GAMBIT’
Is it really worth chronicling the rest of the match? You, Mr. Putin, have relied on big data and on propaganda, including an army of trolls. It is plain to UK intelligence that you have a Russian spy ring at Cambridge University; that you may have combed through and stolen, illegally in the EU, the Facebook data of hundreds of millions of Americans; that you use propagandists SCR and combined GSR and SCR to form Cambridge Analytica; and that you used Twitter’s database to create a bot army.
It’s plain from both money and propaganda that Steve Bannon is your tool, your agent of influence; that you work through Nigel Farage and so on; that RT and Sputnik are not merely spy centers, but money-laundering tools; and that you have used ‘Big data’ of Cambridge Analytica (personality types plus propaganda from SCR) to poison the minds of Americans and indeed voters across the West. You have your hackers sitting on 4 Chan, where the ‘prank’ on the Brexit petition involved Russian server addresses.
But you are a careless player, Mr. Putin. Scrubbing archive.is of tweets wherein @GenFlynn pushes your hideous propaganda is pretty dumb. Scrubbing Michael Cohen’s phone data is also dumb, when we have him and his daughter waltzing around Europe and the Caribbean in Russian-owned private jets. You live by the troll, sir, then you die by the troll. Your propaganda and how you pay for it is all traceable. America has its hackers, too.
The DoJ inquiry has fired the first shots. It’s named Erik Prince. It knows you have the Mercers, it knows about Bannon, it knows about your moles in the NYPD. You see sir it all goes back to Nikulin. The NYPD ‘found’ that laptop on October 3rd. And on October 5th, Nikulin comes to Prague for payment.
But Mr. Putin, James Comey’s friends were waiting there to turn your black pawn into our white queen. And whenever Flynn tweeted Russian agitprop, the FBI and the NSA had a URL.
You sir, are like a chess player in possession of all his many, many pieces, but boxed in, in the back row, and despite having them all arrayed on the board – Jeff Sessions as Attorney General even though he recruited the spy Carter Page into your team – despite all of that, none of it will matter. White has you trapped. You and your ally Iran. Checkmate came from the Persian phrase, “Shah Mat”.
The King is dead. And I didn’t even have to bother with Sessions, Page, Manafort, Stone, Flynn, and all the SIGINT that we have on them, the deals they made with Wikileaks to receive intel that you hacked and phished and planted with your viruses.
Impeachment of Mr. Trump is on the way.
What you should ask yourself is if it is in Russia’s and your own best interest for you to keep deceiving an angry America? For when the trials do start, the back-covering, the rage, the scrambling, the desperate need to seem harder on your oligarch friends than the next politician – this could harm not only you and your allies but the next generation of Russian kleptocrats too.
It would surely be better to give it up now, release some of that kompromat now, push Trump out, and face the anger of a relieved United States after Trump resigns.
But perhaps you cannot.
Perhaps Mr. Putin, you have played yourself right into a corner. After all, those who know what komprat you hold on them also know that you hold it. And they can collaborate with the FBI.
Chess is a good game, sir.
But the reason Russians are so poor is that you can’t stop playing it.
submitted by When Sima Vaknin-Gil took over as director-general of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs at the start of 2016, a crucial fact went largely unnoticed.
For years, she had been a high-ranking officer with an Israeli spy agency.
This means that for the last two years a former intelligence officer has been running Israel’s global war against BDS, the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.
Her ministerial boss is Gilad Erdan, a key ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
They were last month revealed to have spent huge sums creating anti-BDS propaganda targeting social media and news media.
It should be a big wake up call to all defenders of free speech and human rights when a peaceful civil society campaign is targeted by spy agencies responsible for hacking, torture, kidnapping and murder in Palestine and around the world.
Military intelligence
While hardly a secret, Vaknin-Gil’s background was barely remarked upon in the media coverage following her appointment, which focused on her previous role as Israel’s chief censor.
An extensive search turned up just one article – a December 2015 interview with arms industry magazine Israel Defense – discussing her career in intelligence.
That interview was on the eve of her appointment as the top civil servant in what is effectively Israel’s anti-BDS ministry. It revealed she had spent more than 20 years as a spy in Israeli air force intelligence, rising to the rank of brigadier general – a position she still holds as a reservist.
During that time, the magazine stated, she worked “closely with US officials and the highest ranking officers of Israeli intelligence.”
In 2005, she started her decade-long run as chief military censor, a role that required regular coordination with Israel’s top spies and military leaders, including the head of military intelligence, the chief of Mossad and the chief of the army’s general staff.
“Flood the internet”
“I want to create a community of fighters,” Vaknin-Gil said soon after her appointment to the strategic affairs ministry.
She said she planned to “flood the internet” with Israeli propaganda that would be publicly distanced from the government.
More recently, at a Jerusalem Post conference, she announced in passing that she came “from the intelligence in the IDF,” the Israeli military.
Streamed live on YouTube, the December 2017 panel was a debate on how best to combat BDS.
Vaknin-Gil conceded that BDS activists’ human rights arguments are so compelling at the grassroots in Europe and the US that “over there, unless we will do something, we will lose.”
She credited supporters of Palestinian rights with “acting very, very smartly.”
Palestine solidarity activists “are fighting for the hearts and minds of grassroots,” she said, and asserted, “we just woke up [to BDS] and we have to do it very fast.”
BDS movement co-founder Omar Barghouti told The Electronic Intifada that Israel had failed to win “the battle for hearts and minds at the grassroots level.”
According to Barghouti, Israel is “desperately trying to suppress the enormous growth of the BDS movement for Palestinian rights into the mainstream by passing draconian measures of repression and exporting them through its lobby groups to Western governments.”
Ministry’s deep spy links
Strategic affairs minister Gilad Erdan’s official diary for 2016, obtained by Israeli activists and translated by The Electronic Intifada, confirms his department’s intimate links with the country’s spy agencies.
The diary lists a 17 January meeting with the head of the Shin Bet – Israel’s domestic secret police. The agency has a long history of harassing, kidnapping, torturing and murdering Palestinian activists.
The diary also shows that on 16 February 2016, Erdan had lunch with the head of Mossad, Israel’s overseas agency for spying and assassination.
And on 20 March, Erdan apparently met with the “head of 8200” – a reference to Unit 8200, the Israeli spies responsible for leading cyberwarfare efforts.
According to veterans of Unit 8200, its activities include eavesdropping on the communications of Palestinian civilians living under Israeli occupation for political persecution or to find embarrassing personal or sexual information that could be used to blackmail them into collaborating. Buying-off the press Vaknin-Gil’s plan to “flood the internet” mirrors previous covert efforts to spread pro-Israel propaganda.
In 2014, The Electronic Intifada uncovered a plot by tech site Israel21c to plant its puff pieces online and in media using deceptive methods.
Under Vaknin-Gil – an expert in censoring the press – the ministry is instead trying to buy off editors.
Israeli media watchdog The Seventh Eye reported last month that the ministry she runs paid the publisher of Israel’s best-selling daily newspaper $100,000 to publish articles and videos attacking BDS as “anti-Semitic.”
Published in both Hebrew and English by Yediot Ahronot and its website Ynet, the articles did not explicitly disclose that they were paid content.
One English article vaguely stated it was the result of the ministry and the publisher “joining forces,” while two such Hebrew articles stated they were “in collaboration” with the ministry.
Propaganda war
The Seventh Eye explained that this propaganda was “meant to influence readers to support a campaign Israel is waging against its critics.”
As well as Yediot, the ministry also bought faux journalism aiming to enlist support from a global audience, including from the Times of Israel and The Jerusalem Post.
The 2016 Erdan diary aligns with this, listing an 18 July “meeting with the editor of The Jerusalem Post newspaper, Yaakov Katz.” The entry does not record the subject of the meeting.
The paid articles were part of a wider strategic affairs ministry campaign, which included a $740,000 budget “to promote content on social media and search engines, including Google, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram,” The Seventh Eye reported.
Another $570,000 was spent on building Act.il, an anti-BDS app, and producing videos supporters were encouraged to spread online.
One of the “missions” assigned to Israel’s propaganda foot soldiers using the Act.il app last November, according to The Jewish Daily Forward, “was to comment on a specific post on the Facebook page of the pro-Palestinian website Electronic Intifada.”
Israel’s PR operatives wanted to counter the impact of The Electronic Intifada’s reporting on the Dutch government’s support for a promotion by settlement-profiteering Israeli supermarket chain Shufersal.
The Act.il app was funded largely by casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson – a major donor to anti-Palestinian causes and to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
The strategic affairs ministry was forced to disclose the funding information to The Seventh Eye under Israeli freedom of information laws.
But the revelation could be one of the last such disclosures if the ministry gets its way.
Secretive ministry
Israel’s parliament in July gave preliminary approval to a bill exempting the strategic affairs ministry from the freedom of information law.
Erdan argued for the bill, which his ministry drafted, claiming that BDS was a “battlefront like any other” and there was a need to keep “our methods of action secret.”
A 7 November entry in the 2016 Erdan diary suggests that former spy Vaknin-Gil was directly involved in drafting Israeli laws against BDS.
With the subject “BDS law,” the entry reads, “A meeting with Liat and Sima on legislation amendments to the Boycott Law.” (Erdan’s staff at the ministry are referred to throughout the diary by their first names.)
If the law is passed, it will put Erdan’s ministry in the same category as Mossad and Shin Bet, which are also exempt from freedom of information.
With Erdan’s ministry increasingly being run like a globally focused spy agency rather than a conventional government department, perhaps this should come as little surprise.
Haaretz has described the ministry as “a place whose internal terminology comes from the world of espionage and security; its leading figures appear to see themselves as the heads of a public affairs commando unit engaged in multiple fronts.”
As well as being led by one, the ministry is largely staffed by former spies.
Vaknin-Gil’s predecessor as director-general was Ram Ben Barak, formerly a deputy head of Mossad.
As The Electronic Intifada revealed last year, the director of the ministry’s “intelligence” section is Shai Har-Zvi, a lieutenant-colonel in the Israeli army and likely another former spook.
Without giving names, veteran Israeli intelligence journalist Yossi Melman had previously reported that the position was once held by “a former investigator in the security system.”
“Covert sources,” illegal activities
Melman – who confirmed The Electronic Intifada’s exposure of Har-Zvi’s name – wrote that his section’s role “is to collect information and data on BDS and its activists from both open and covert sources.”
Melman also wrote that the ministry hired 25 employees “mostly former officers in Israel’s intelligence community” whose names are classified.
What are these “covert sources” that Erdan’s network of spies are drawing on? Do they involve illegal activities? And are they breaking the laws of other countries they operate in?
“We want most of the ministry’s work to be classified,” Vaknin-Gil told Israel’s parliament in September 2016, when she acknowledged that “a major part of what we do stays under the radar.”
Erdan has also admitted his ministry’s use of international front groups – historically a tool of Israeli spy agencies. “Most of the ministry’s actions are not of the ministry, but through bodies around the world who do not want to expose their connection with the state,” he said last year.
A rival government ministry in 2016 accused Erdan and his fiefdom of “operating British Jewish organizations behind the [Israeli] embassy’s back in a way that could put them in violation of British law.”
And Melman revealed in 2016 that the ministry is involved in “black ops” against the movement for justice in Palestine.
It was also reported by Haaretz that the ministry was establishing a “tarnishing unit” to spread lies about BDS activists.
Death threats and hacking
In an article for the Hebrew newspaper Maariv, Melman pointed to attacks on the websites of Palestine’s BDS National Committee and other human rights groups, suggesting the attacks could be linked to Erdan’s ministry.
He also noted death threats targeting Nada Kiswanson, a lawyer with the human rights group Al-Haq, who had been working in The Hague to collect evidence of Israeli war crimes for the International Criminal Court.
The threats are being investigated by Dutch authorities. Melman implied these too could be tied to the ministry.
As well as harassment and sabotage, Palestinian groups have been attacked with smear campaigns aimed at undermining their political and financial support.
Al-Haq and Al Mezan, another Palestinian human rights group that has helped gather evidence of war crimes, have over the past two years faced a sustained campaign of defamation.
These have come both publicly by Israeli officials, and in whispering campaigns, fake statements put out in their names and death threats and other harassment against their staff.
Israel’s covert war also appears to be targeting solidarity activists from Western countries.
Dropping the mask
In July, members of an interfaith delegation to Palestine were barred from flights by Lufthansa staff acting on Israeli orders.
Jewish Voice for Peace’s Rabbi Alissa Wise told The Electronic Intifada that airline staff read out names of activists who were never publicly announced to go on the delegation and did not have tickets. She said this proved Lufthansa had been given a list of persons obtained by Israeli surveillance of activists’ communications.
While Israel’s covert campaign aims to suppress negative information about its violations of Palestinian rights, the campaign itself only further tarnishes its battered image.
With its repressive measures against Palestine solidarity, BDS cofounder Omar Barghouti said, Israel is “dropping the mask of democracy and liberalism and revealing its true face as a regime of occupation and apartheid.”
“Israel is allocating hundreds of millions of dollars, dedicating an entire government ministry, using its intelligence services and flexing its political muscle around the world to fight the movement,” Barghouti added. “But this is a steep uphill battle that Israel cannot but lose.”
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