Trump's 'one last score'.

hanimmal said:

It sucks people are so easily absorbed into cults.

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — President Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign was powered by a cell phone app that allowed staff to monitor the movements of his millions of supporters, and offered intimate access to their social networks.

While the campaign may be winding down, the data strategy is very much alive, and the digital details the app collected can be put to multiple other uses — to fundraise for the president’s future political ventures, stoke Trump’s base, or even build an audience for a new media empire.

The app lets Trump’s team communicate directly with the 2.8 million people who downloaded it — more than any other app in a U.S. presidential campaign — and if they gave permission, with their entire contact list as well.

Once installed, it can track their behavior on the app and in the physical world, push out headlines, sync with mass texting operations, sell MAGA merchandise, fundraise and log attendance at the president’s rallies, according to the app’s privacy policy and user interface.

Yet the enterprise software company that built a tool to propel Trump’s mass movement is in financial distress and has been sustained at key points by the administration and the president’s campaign, according to interviews with former employees, financial filings and court documents.

Austin-based Phunware Inc., whose stock is trading for pennies, recently agreed to pay Uber $4.5 million as part of a settlement over claims of fraudulent advertising and earlier this year risked being delisted from the Nasdaq. In April, the company got a $2.9 million loan under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act as it was building the Trump campaign app.

Campaign watchdogs and former employees alike marvel at how a struggling startup known more for building apps for hospitals and a Manhattan-based astrologer became a juggernaut in Trump’s reelection bid, facilitating an ongoing data and fundraising effort that threw the company a financial lifeline.

Even after major media outlets called the election for his Democratic opponent Joe Biden, the app kept pushing out content supporting Trump’s bid.

“We all know why Joe Biden is rushing to falsely pose as the winner, and why his media allies are trying so hard to help him: they don’t want the truth to be exposed,” read a statement attributed to Trump posted earlier this month. “I will not rest until the American People have the honest vote count they deserve.”

On Monday, the app pushed out fresh content defending the campaign’s vote-counting litigation in Pennsylvania. Last week, the app posted a fundraising appeal asking for donations to Trump’s newly formed Election Defense Fund, which will send most of the money raised to a new political action committee Trump formed called Save America. That PAC has few spending restrictions and could pay for lavish personal expenses or give money to other candidates.

While activity on the app has slowed recently, the enriched data it gathered on the president’s supporters — which can include everything from their contacts to their IP address to their location data — can serve many purposes going forward, said Adav Noti, a former Federal Election Commission attorney who works for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.

Congress and the FEC have not set rules governing how campaigns can use people’s personal data and or limits on the number of entities to whom the campaign can sell its list, he added.

“I’m assuming that what he is going to do is transfer the assets of the campaign,” Noti said. “You can definitely buy the data and the campaign can sell it to you, the trickier question is how much do you have to pay for it.”

Phunware declined to respond to questions about the app, the company’s financial status, its internal culture and its relationship to the campaign.

“Phunware has absolutely no role in the constitutional processes tied to US elections at any level ... and also has no role in the content created or used by our customers specific to our mobile software or enterprise cloud platform for mobile,” CEO Alan Knitowski said in an email.

A senior Trump campaign official declined to answer questions about possible future uses for the rich supporter data the campaign collected via digital platforms, including the Phunware app.

“The data is owned by the campaign and limited whatever hit their servers,” said the official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss campaign specifics.

As Phunware has hit challenging financial times in recent years, it has shed employees, clients and investors, 10 of whom agreed to speak with The Associated Press, some on condition of anonymity because they signed non-disclosure agreements or feared retaliation.

Phunware sued its client Uber in 2017, accusing the ride-sharing company of failing to pay its invoices, according to court records.

But after Uber filed suit against Phunware, alleging the software company committed fraud by among other things, allowing ads for the ride-sharing app to show up on porn sites, former employees said the startup looked for new ways to diversify its revenue stream.

Into the picture stepped Karl Rove, former advisor and Republican strategist for President George W. Bush.

Long before reaching the White House, Rove made his name in Texas politics as a specialist in direct mail, a form of political advertising he once said was effective because it was largely “immune from press coverage,” or near invisible to the public.

In an interview with the AP, Rove said a lobbyist who was friendly with his wife introduced him to Phunware executives, who told him the company had built apps for sports teams and Fortune 100 companies that integrated geofencing technology, which can track people’s movements through their cell phones.

Ex-Phunware employees and the lobbyist’s staff gave Rove a presentation, showing off how the company could use cell phone data to send out customized political ads that also were hard to trace.

“His mind was blown. He was like ‘this is extremely powerful data,’” a former employee recalled.

Rove said he brokered a relationship for Phunware with Trump’s 2016 campaign digital director Brad Parscale.

“I thought it had lots of implications for politics so in a subsequent conversation I mentioned it to Brad Parscale,” Rove. “He said ‘interesting’ and that was it, he never told me he had hired them.”

Knitowski said in an email that he built the relationship with the Trump campaign.

“Phunware met the Trump Campaign through me directly after a 1:1 introduction from a Silicon Valley CEO who requested our consideration and participation in an RFP that also had Salesforce as a finalist,” Knitowski said.

Stung by the Cambridge Analytica controversy -- the company was accused of using data improperly obtained from Facebook to predict voter behavior in the 2016 election -- and perceived bias from social media platforms, Parscale wanted to bypass Big Tech and reorient the reelection campaign to connect directly with supporters.

After Trump’s 2016 victory, Parscale worked with consultants and an ex-Cambridge Analytica data scientist to build out a data storehouse that could better microtarget audiences with specialized ads, former collaborators said.

Phunware, meanwhile, started marketing its tools to campaigns, saying it could reach likely voters through geofencing, by drawing virtual boundaries around areas of interest “such as event appearances, polling centers, sporting events – even an opponent’s campaign rally,” a blog post said.

Two former employees said Knitowski told engineers to embed invisible tracking software to follow users’ behavior inside each app they built to boost Phunware’s offerings to campaigns.

“We were told they needed to be in every app to collect information for whatever we did, and the political vertical was one of those reasons,” an ex-employee said. “It would still go in even if the customer said they didn’t want it.”

Knitowski declined to comment on the allegation. A former manager said he worked to keep the software out of apps whose clients didn’t want it.

At monthly meetings, Knitowski would brief staff on the startup’s prospects for getting bought by another company or attracting angel investors, another former manager recalled.

The Republican National Committee, in turn, had hired a private company to build a centralized hub for voter data for right-leaning campaigns called Data Trust, and Parscale joined its board. All the while, his team kept amassing mobile phone numbers, and offering Trump supporters MAGA swag in exchange for their digits.

“This is how Donald Trump stays president for four more years,” Parscale said, holding up his iPhone on stage at a 2018 rally supporting Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s reelection. “Now this phone is how we connect with you. It’s how we turn you into the army of Trump.”

By early 2019, after Phunware had gone public, former colleagues said Knitowski started talking about his efforts to court the Trump campaign. In April, 15 percent of the staff was laid off due to “organizational restructuring and cost reductions,” according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.



“We never had a relationship with Phunware, we don’t have any formalized partnership with them,” said spokesman Adam Bauer. “We didn’t authorize them to issue that press release and we asked them to take it down.”

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A company owned by a major donor to President Trump that operates auto-title loan stores with names such as LoanStar and Moneymax secured a $25 million low-interest loan from a government pandemic aid program, using what consumer advocates describe as a loophole to a rule designed to prevent most lenders from getting this federal help.

The cash infusion to Wellshire Financial Services — part of a multi-state title loan empire run by Atlanta businessman Rod Aycox — came from the Federal Reserve’s $600 billion Main Street Lending program for small- and medium-size businesses. It’s the same program that is among the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending facilities that will be allowed to expire at year’s end after Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced last week the unspent funds will be redirected to more distressed parts of the U.S. economy. The decision does not affect loans that already have been made, such as the one to Wellshire.

Wellshire’s government-backed, five-year loan came with a 3.15 percent interest rate, Fed records show.

Loans to consumers at Wellshire’s auto-title loan stores can carry a 350 percent annual rate, thanks to high fees and interest supercharging the cost of borrowing, according to corporate disclosure documents.

One of Aycox’s stores, LoanStar, which has dozens of branches in Texas, notes that someone taking out a $1,200 loan, secured by a vehicle as collateral, needs to pay back $1,589.97 within one month or potentially lose their vehicle. That works out to a 352.24 percent annual credit cost.

“That doesn’t look good at all,” said Marcus Stanley, policy director for the nonpartisan advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform. “This is not about keeping a local restaurant open.”

Payday lenders that charge 400 percent interest want access to small-business loans

Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable, a government watchdog group tracking pandemic spending, said the government should not be helping companies such as Wellshire.

“If the Trump administration thinks the high-cost lending industry deserves a taxpayer-backed loan,” Herrig said, “it should come with the same 300 percent interest rate they charge consumers.”

Aycox and representatives of Wellshire did not respond to multiple phone calls and emails requesting comment.

A trade association that represents the owners of more than 8,000 payday and auto-title loan stores — but not Wellshire Financial — has argued that consumer finance companies should be allowed to receive pandemic stimulus loans. The industry has been “extending essential financial services during the coronavirus pandemic,” Ed D’Alessio, executive director of the Infin Financial Services Alliance, said in a statement to The Washington Post.

Aycox is one of the auto-title lending industry’s biggest players, building up stores across the country after years of success with a controversial business model that consumer advocates say exploits low-income people and can trap them in an unyielding cycle of debt.

Aycox and his wife, Leslie Aycox, are major Trump donors, contributing $746,000 to Trump’s presidential campaigns and political action committees and $1 million to Trump’s 2017 inauguration.

Last year, the auto-title lending industry — along with payday lenders — scored a major victory when the Trump administration’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposed delaying a rule that would force these lenders to scrutinize whether borrowers can actually afford to pay back the loans.

Now, one of Aycox’s companies has turned to the government for help with a loan.

The Main Street Lending program has made loans to just 420 companies worth a total of $4.1 billion through the end of October, leading to criticism that it has been slow to help businesses — and, along with the other stimulus programs passed by Congress, has failed to provide enough help to people hurt economically by the pandemic.

In ongoing debate over Fed’s Main Street program, lawmakers reach little consensus

The five-year loans have terms favorable to borrowers, including no principal payments for two years and no interest payments for one year.

The loans begin with a private bank before the Fed buys 95 percent of the obligation.
And the Main Street Lending program makes it clear that the Fed leaves it up to banks and borrowers to judge whether a company qualifies.

“Each borrower is required to certify that it is eligible to participate in the program,” Fed spokesman Darren Gersh said, describing what happens with all Main Street loans and declining to discuss Wellshire’s case. “If we find that a borrower has not properly certified their eligibility, we take appropriate remedial action.”

Wellshire got its $25 million loan in September, Fed data shows. The determination that Wellshire qualified was done by Fieldpoint Private Bank & Trust in Greenwich, Conn.

“It’s one we researched heavily throughout the process,” said Kevin O’Hanlon, who is director of business development at Fieldpoint and served as the commercial loan officer on the deal.

Wellshire plans to use the money to expand its auto-title lending business, according to Fieldpoint.

At first glance, Wellshire’s ownership of title loan stores appears to disqualify it. The Main Street Lending Program rules, based on Small Business Administration guidelines, prohibits companies that are primarily engaged in lending.

“The federal government doesn’t want to be subsidizing companies that are just going to jack up the interest,” said Lauren Saunders, associate director of the National Consumer Law Center.

There is an exception for some lenders, such as pawnshops, if less than half their revenue comes from interest.

Wellshire appears to base its case for loan qualification on how it lends money — thanks to changes adopted by short-term lenders in Texas several years ago to avoid that state’s cap on interest rates.

Wellshire, despite operating title loan stores, does not actually earn money from loan interest payments, according to Fieldpoint.
While the company’s storefronts have names such as LoanStar Title Loans and websites promoting “Cash loans on car titles,” the stores are organized in Texas as “credit access businesses,” not auto-title lenders, Texas regulatory records show.

It wasn’t always that way. Texas originally created the category of credit access businesses to keep track of companies that help consumers repair their credit. But, according to consumer advocates, then the state capped interest rates on consumer finance loans at 10 percent.

So most auto-title lenders and payday lenders became credit access businesses — operating just as they always did, except the loans were financed by outside lenders who took the interest payments, according to consumer advocacy groups.

Interest charges were still capped at 10 percent. But the auto-title lenders were free to charge whatever fees they wanted.
“It was a workaround on state usury laws,” said Ann Baddour, director of the Fair Financial Services Project at the nonprofit Texas Appleseed.

So LoanStar Title Loans does not technically earn interest on loans. It markets and arranges the loan with an outside lender who profits from interest payments. But LoanStar does profit from the fees it charges for the loans — fees that make up the bulk of the loan’s cost.

On that $1,200 loan from LoanStar, the outside lender earns $12.96 in interest after one month, according to the title lender’s disclosure. But LoanStar earns $377.01 in fees on the loan in that same time.

The relationship between the title loan store and the outside lender is extremely close, blurring the distinction between the two, Baddour said. Usually the borrower has no idea. After all, the auto-title store is required by state law to be a party to the loan. The auto-title store also guarantees the loan, so if the consumer fails to make payments, the title store pays off the outside financing company and takes over collection on the loan. The borrower can lose their car or truck.

An auto-title lender acts just like any other lender, Baddour said.

So the idea that a title lender qualifies for government aid during a pandemic, she said, “that’s deeply troubling.”

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hanimmal said:

2.8 million and all their contacts data sucked into Trump's cult data manipulated reality.
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-coronavirus-pandemic-elections-campaigns-124d914bb082575aeec8042629aa932c
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The Trump administration remains on course to complete a controversial $23 billion arms sale to the United Arab Emirates after bipartisan Senate efforts to block the deal failed to gain enough support to clear a critical procedural hurdle Wednesday.

A majority of senators voted against two motions to block the sale of F-35 fighter jets, Reaper drones and other military equipment, stymying the effort to stop — or at least slow — the sale of cutting-edge weaponry to a country with which the United States has an exceptionally tense alliance.

Senators backing the legislation have raised alarms about the speed with which the Trump administration has tried to complete the sale, which was announced in the wake of the Emiratis signing a peace deal with Israel. They have also warned that the administration’s end-run around Congress sets a dangerous precedent of cutting lawmakers out of national security deliberations.

“Why the rush?” said Senate Foreign Relations Committee ranking Democrat Robert Menendez (N.J.), who sponsored the resolutions along with panel senators Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.). “Are they trying to lock in the sale before President-elect Biden is inaugurated, regardless of the possible cost to U.S. and Israeli national security?”

Peace deal or arms race? Proposed sale of F-35 to UAE raises fears in Israel.

Advocates of the arms deal have argued that selling the attack aircraft and munitions to the Emirates will improve Israel’s regional security and is a necessary reward to Abu Dhabi for signing the peace deal.

“The UAE is worthy of this sale because it is strongly aligned with the United States in the Middle East,” Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) said Tuesday. “Voting down this sale would signal to our partners that even when they do everything we ask . . . the U.S. won’t have their backs.”

But the senators who tried to block the deal aren’t convinced that the UAE is yet a reliable enough ally to handle the United States’ most sensitive military equipment. They pointed out that the UAE has a troubling record when it comes to addressing the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, fomented for years by the Saudi-led bombing campaign there.

Citing evidence that the weapons sold to the UAE previously ended up in the hands of al-Qaeda-linked militias inside Yemen, they also questioned whether the UAE had proved itself capable of protecting some of the most sensitive American military technology. And they noted that the UAE’s defense relationships with Russia and China make the stakes of the UAE’s trustworthiness particularly steep.

“They are still a barrier to peace,” Murphy said of the UAE on Wednesday, questioning whether the United States “can be absolutely certain that the technology on board those fighter jets, those drones, are going to stay in the right hands.”

Last year, the Senate and House voted to block several arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, but Trump vetoed the measures and lawmakers could not muster enough support for an override. During those votes, a handful of Republicans joined all Democrats in voting to block the arms deals; during Wednesday’s votes, two Democrats — Arizona Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly — joined all Republicans but Paul in voting to sustain them.

The latest attempt to protest Trump’s arms sales comes as Democrats begin to examine how a Biden administration will approach arms sales to the Middle East. Such concerns were punctuated by the president-elect’s decision this week to nominate Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III as his defense secretary. Austin sits on the board of Raytheon, a defense contracting giant that stands to profit from the latest UAE arms deals and produced the precision-guided munitions that were used to target civilians in Yemen.

Austin is expected to face questioning about his Raytheon ties when he testifies before the Senate and House, both of which must approve a waiver to clear the way for his confirmation. Last month, Reps. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) and Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) sent a letter to Biden, asking him not to appoint a defense secretary with ties to defense contractors.

But at least one of Congress’s key voices advocating against arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE has dismissed the notion that Austin’s Raytheon affiliation will be cause for concern.

“There have been past cases of high-profile people who have served in positions where they have extensive financial holdings, or extensive ties in industry,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said in an interview. “The key to that is to have clear recusal and conflicts of interest disclosure standards, and to have the high ethical standards.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — A congressional monitor of federal pandemic aid is raising the possibility of a link between President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and a $700 million relief loan to a struggling trucking company.

Bharat Ramamurti, a Democratic member of the four-person Congressional Oversight Commission, raised the possible Kushner connection at a hearing Thursday, as panel members from both parties challenged the Treasury Department’s decision to award the loan to YRC Worldwide. The taxpayer-funded loan was made on the grounds that the company’s operations are critical for maintaining national security.

The panel members questioned the decision to deem YRC’s business vital to national security. It was the first and by far the largest loan made under the national security portion of the Treasury Department’s corporate aid program, which has loaned billions to major airlines and smaller air carriers.

YRC received a separate $600 million loan last year from Apollo Global Management and several other lenders that was arranged by Apollo, a big private equity firm that is YRC’s biggest creditor, according to the oversight panel. Apollo co-founder Joshua Harris advised the Trump administration on infrastructure policy in early 2017 and met with Kushner, who is an adviser to the president. Later that year Apollo lent $184 million to Kushner’s family real estate company to help refinance its mortgage on a Chicago building, according to a New York Times report cited by Ramamurti.

Ramamurti asked Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin whether he had had contacts with Kushner or his staff regarding the YRC loan. Mnuchin said he had not. Ramamurti then broadened the question to a request for correspondence with anyone in the White House.

“This warrants further investigation,” Ramamurti said. He called the loan to YRC “a fast-tracked, extremely generous loan that just so happened to help” Apollo as YRC’s creditor.

There was no immediate comment on the matter to The Associated Press from Kushner or his staff.

“Apollo was not involved at all in (YRC’s) decision to seek the Treasury funds,” Apollo spokesperson Joanna Rose said Thursday. “We are a capital provider for thousands of companies. We are one of many lenders to YRC. This is not a company that our funds own or control.”

The congressional monitors found that taxpayers could be at risk of losing money on the $700 million investment. YRC has had financial problems for years, well before the onset of the pandemic, and has been at risk of bankruptcy.

Mnuchin defended the loan, saying that YRC meets the criteria for companies deemed essential for national security as the Treasury Department had worked out with the Defense Department and the Office of Director of National Intelligence.

He acknowledged that taxpayers could end up losing the money if YRC fails and doesn’t pay it back. “This was a risky loan,” Mnuchin said, but he added, “We’ve been fortunate that the economy recovered. ... Ultimately Treasury and the taxpayers will be very well compensated.”

Mnuchin noted that, before the loan was approved this summer, several lawmakers had asked the Treasury Department to help YRC in order to save jobs.

Rep. French Hill, R-Ark., a member of the panel who is a former banker, told Mnuchin, “Were I still in finance, I would not have made this loan.”

YRC, based in Overland Park, Kansas, provides transportation and logistics services, such as delivering food, electronics and other supplies to military locations around the country. The Defense Department is a major YRC client, and it’s the leading transportation provider to the Department of Homeland Security.

The national security portion of Treasury’s corporate aid program, with an available pot of up to $17 billion, had been expected earlier this year to be earmarked for hard-pressed aircraft maker Boeing or for General Electric. They were able to tap the private credit markets and didn’t seek government aid.

To qualify for the national security aid, companies should be performing under defense contracts of the highest national priority or operating under top-secret security clearance. YRC apparently didn’t meet either of the criteria but qualified under a “catchall” provision allowing a recommendation and certification from the secretary of defense or the director of national intelligence to be sufficient.

The four-member oversight commission was appointed by congressional leaders of both parties to monitor the spending of some $2 trillion in economic aid enacted by Congress last spring and directed by the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve.

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President Trump rescinded an executive order early Wednesday morning that had limited federal administration officials from lobbying the government or working for foreign countries after they leave their posts, undoing one of the few measures he had instituted to fulfill his 2016 campaign promise to “drain the swamp.”

Trump had signed the now-reversed executive order with much fanfare in an Oval Office ceremony in January 2017.

“Most of the people standing behind me will not be able to go to work” after they leave government, Trump said at the time, flanked by senior aides.

The order required executive branch appointees to sign a pledge that they would never work as registered foreign lobbyists, and it banned them from lobbying the federal agencies where they worked for five years after leaving the government.

How Trump abandoned his pledge to ‘drain the swamp’

Ethics experts at the time noted the order had loopholes — but still offered cautious praise for Trump’s attempt at halting the revolving door that allows government employees to use their positions to land lucrative jobs in the private sector.

No explanation was given for why Trump chose to rescind the order. The White House released the directive at 1:08 a.m. on the day he will leave office. It had been signed Tuesday.

Trump largely failed to fulfill the pledges he made to change Washington’s culture, including the specific promises he made to curtail moneyed interests in a 2016 campaign speech in Green Bay, Wis.

He promised he would push Congress to pass a five-year lobbying ban into law so it could not be lifted by a future president. But he never proposed such legislation. Nor did he ask Congress to impose a similar five-year lobbying ban on its members, as he had promised he would do in the speech.

He also never tried to seek to “close all the loopholes” used by former government officials who get around registering as lobbyists by calling themselves “consultants” and “advisers.” And he never acted on his pledge to stop foreign lobbyists from campaign fundraising — and in fact, benefited from their financial support.

Among the five pledges Trump made to “drain the swamp” and curtail the influence of lobbyists, a Washington Post review last year found that he sought to address only two — through the executive order in January 2017 that he has now reversed.

Meanwhile, Trump gave wealthy donors ample access to him and his top aides, holding pricey fundraisers where supporters personally pitched him on their ideas.

He also forced the government to spend money at his private hotels as he and his family traveled around the globe. And he sidestepped rules that had been designed to prevent nepotism, allowing his son-in-law to serve in a top government role.

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hanimmal said:

The timeline is pretty interesting to when Trump started his check box donation grift. Starts around the time that the Pandemic is starting to get out of hand, intensified right as Trump starts having his federal goons beat up peaceful protestors.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/03/us/politics/trump-donations.html
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The boxes that you had to uncheck after making a donation to not get pilfered by Trump.

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hanimmal said:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/trump-uae-weapons-sales-senate/2020/12/09/ae9abca6-3a59-11eb-98c4-25dc9f4987e8_story.html
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I wonder why Trump is working so hard to pay off the UAE?
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captainmorgan said:

At one point Stinky accounted for 3% of all credit card fraud in the US, maga.

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How scammers targeted Colorado’s unemployment system -- and what the state is doing about it

Like many victims of unemployment fraud, Duane Thomas only learned that someone had used his identity to file for jobless benefits when a strange 1099-G tax document arrived in his mailbox last month. He reported the mistake in an online form provided by the state Department of Labor and...

coloradosun.com

1 Million Sketchy Claims But No Arrests (Yet) As Colorado Launches New Fight Against Unemployment Fraud

Attorney General Phil Weiser is partnering with law enforcement, unemployment officials and district attorneys around Colorado to investigate the fraud attempts.

www.cpr.org

hanimmal said:

The timeline is pretty interesting to when Trump started his check box donation grift. Starts around the time that the Pandemic is starting to get out of hand, intensified right as Trump starts having his federal goons beat up peaceful protestors.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/03/us/politics/trump-donations.html
View attachment 4872193


The boxes that you had to uncheck after making a donation to not get pilfered by Trump.

View attachment 4872200

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While the world was distracted with President Donald Trump leaving office on Jan. 20, an obscure Florida company discreetly announced to the world’s computer networks a startling development: It now was managing a huge unused swath of the Internet that, for several decades, had been owned by the U.S. military.

What happened next was stranger still.

The company, Global Resource Systems LLC, kept adding to its zone of control. Soon it had claimed 56 million IP addresses owned by the Pentagon. Three months later, the total was nearly 175 million. That’s almost 6 percent of a coveted traditional section of Internet real estate — called IPv4 — where such large chunks are worth billions of dollars on the open market.

The entities controlling the largest swaths of the Internet generally are telecommunications giants whose names are familiar: AT&T, China Telecom, Verizon. But now at the top of the list was Global Resource Systems — a company founded only in September that has no publicly reported federal contracts and no obvious public-facing website.

As listed in records, the company’s address in Plantation, Fla., outside Fort Lauderdale, is a shared workspace in an office building that doesn’t show Global Resource Systems on its lobby directory. A receptionist at the shared workspace said Friday that she could provide no information about the company and asked a reporter to leave. The company did not respond to requests for comment.

The only announcement of Global Resources Systems’ management of Pentagon addresses happened in the obscure world of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) — the messaging system that tells Internet companies how to route traffic across the world. There, messages began to arrive telling network administrators that IP addresses assigned to the Pentagon but long dormant could now accept traffic — but it should be routed to Global Resource Systems.

Network administrators began speculating about perhaps the most dramatic shift in IP address space allotment since BGP was introduced in the 1980s.

“They are now announcing more address space than anything ever in the history of the Internet,” said Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis for Kentik, a network monitoring company, who was among those trying to figure out what was happening. He published a blog post on the mystery Saturday morning.

The long life of a quick ‘fix’: Internet protocol from 1989 leaves data vulnerable to hijackers

The theories were many. Did someone at the Defense Department sell off part of the military’s vast collection of sought-after IP addresses as Trump left office? Had the Pentagon finally acted on demands to unload the billions of dollars worth of IP address space the military has been sitting on, largely unused, for decades?

An answer, of sorts, came Friday.

The change is the handiwork of an elite Pentagon unit known as the Defense Digital Service, which reports directly to the secretary of defense. The DDS bills itself as a “SWAT team of nerds” tasked with solving emergency problems for the department and conducting experimental work to make big technological leaps for the military.

Created in 2015, the DDS operates a Silicon Valley-like office within the Pentagon. It has carried out a range of special projects in recent years, from developing a biometric app to help service members identify friendly and enemy forces on the battlefield to ensuring the encryption of emails Pentagon staff were exchanging about coronavirus vaccines with external parties.

Brett Goldstein, the DDS’s director, said in a statement that his unit had authorized a “pilot effort” publicizing the IP space owned by the Pentagon.

“This pilot will assess, evaluate and prevent unauthorized use of DoD IP address space,” Goldstein said. “Additionally, this pilot may identify potential vulnerabilities.”

Goldstein described the project as one of the Defense Department’s “many efforts focused on continually improving our cyber posture and defense in response to advanced persistent threats. We are partnering throughout DoD to ensure potential vulnerabilities are mitigated.”

The specifics of what the effort is trying to achieve remain unclear. The Defense Department declined to answer a number of questions about the project, and Pentagon officials declined to say why Goldstein’s unit had used a little-known Florida company to carry out the pilot effort rather than have the Defense Department itself “announce” the addresses through BGP messages — a far more routine approach.

What is clear, however, is the Global Resource Systems announcements directed a fire hose of Internet traffic toward the Defense Department addresses. Madory said his monitoring showed the broad movements of Internet traffic began immediately after the IP addresses were announced Jan. 20.

These hackers warned the Internet would become a security nightmare

Madory said such large amounts of data could provide several benefits for those in a position to collect and analyze it for threat intelligence and other purposes.

The data may provide information about how malicious actors operate online and could reveal exploitable weaknesses in computer systems. In addition, several Chinese companies use network numbering systems that resemble the U.S. military’s IP addresses in their internal systems, Madory said. By announcing the address space through Global Resource Systems, that could cause some of that information to be routed to systems controlled by the U.S. military.

The data could also include accidental misconfigurations that could be exploited or fixed, Madory said.
“If you have a very large amount of traffic, and someone knows how to go through it, you’ll find stuff,” Madory added.

The U.S. government spent billions on a system for detecting hacks. The Russians outsmarted it.

Russell Goemaere, a spokesman for the Defense Department, confirmed in a statement to The Washington Post that the Pentagon still owns all the IP address space and hadn’t sold any of it to a private party.

Dormant IP addresses can be hijacked and used for nefarious purposes, from disseminating spam to hacking into a computer system and downloading data, and the pilot program could allow the Defense Department to uncover if those activities are taking place using its addresses.

A person familiar with the pilot effort, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity because the program isn’t public, said it is important for the Defense Department to have “visibility and transparency” into its various cyber resources, including IP addresses, and manage the addresses properly so they will be available if and when the Pentagon wants to use them.

“If you can’t see it, you can’t defend it,” the person said.

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BOSTON (AP) — A very strange thing happened on the internet the day President Joe Biden was sworn in. A shadowy company residing at a shared workspace above a Florida bank announced to the world’s computer networks that it was now managing a colossal, previously idle chunk of the internet owned by the U.S. Department of Defense.

That real estate has since more than quadrupled to 175 million addresses — about 1/25th the size of the current internet.

”It is massive. That is the biggest thing in the history of the internet,” said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik, a network operating company. It’s also more than twice the size of the internet space actually used by the Pentagon.

After weeks of wonder by the networking community, the Pentagon has now provided a very terse explanation for what it’s doing. But it has not answered many basic questions, beginning with why it chose to entrust management of the address space to a company that seems not to have existed until September.

The military hopes to “assess, evaluate and prevent unauthorized use of DoD IP address space,” said a statement issued Friday by Brett Goldstein, chief of the Pentagon’s Defense Digital Service, which is running the project. It also hopes to “identify potential vulnerabilities” as part of efforts to defend against cyber-intrusions by global adversaries, who are consistently infiltrating U.S. networks, sometimes operating from unused internet address blocks.

The statement did not specify whether the “pilot project” would involve outside contractors.

The Pentagon periodically contends with unauthorized squatting on its space, in part because there has been a shortage of first-generation internet addresses since 2011; they now sell at auction for upwards of $25 each.

Madory said advertising the address space will make it easier to chase off squatters and allow the U.S. military to “collect a massive amount of background internet traffic for threat intelligence.”

Some cybersecurity experts have speculated that the Pentagon may be using the newly advertised space to create “honeypots,” machines set up with vulnerabilities to draw hackers. Or it could be looking to set up dedicated infrastructure — software and servers — to scour traffic for suspect activity.

“This greatly increases the space they could monitor,” said Madory, who published a blog post on the matter Saturday.

What a Pentagon spokesman could not explain Saturday is why the Defense Department chose Global Resource Systems LLC, a company with no record of government contracts, to manage the address space.

“As to why the DoD would have done that I’m a little mystified, same as you,” said Paul Vixie, an internet pioneer credited with designing its naming system and the CEO of Farsight Security.

The company did not return phone calls or emails from The Associated Press. It has no web presence, though it has the domain grscorp.com. Its name doesn’t appear on the directory of its Plantation, Florida, domicile, and a receptionist drew a blank when an AP reporter asked for a company representative at the office earlier this month. She found its name on a tenant list and suggested trying email. Records show the company has not obtained a business license in Plantation.

Incorporated in Delaware and registered by a Beverly Hills lawyer, Global Resource Systems LLC now manages more internet space than China Telecom, AT&T or Comcast.

The only name associated with it on the Florida business registry coincides with that of a man listed as recently as 2018 in Nevada corporate records as a managing member of a cybersecurity/internet surveillance equipment company called Packet Forensics. The company had nearly $40 million in publicly disclosed federal contracts over the past decade, with the FBI and the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency among its customers.

That man, Raymond Saulino, is also listed as a principal in a company called Tidewater Laskin Associates, which was incorporated in 2018 and obtained an FCC license in April 2020. It shares the same Virginia Beach, Virginia, address — a UPS store — in corporate records as Packet Forensics. The two have different mailbox numbers. Calls to the number listed on the Tidewater Laskin FCC filing are answered by an automated service that offers four different options but doesn’t connect callers with a single one, recycling all calls to the initial voice recording.

Saulino did not return phone calls seeking comment, and a longtime colleague at Packet Forensics, Rodney Joffe, said he believed Saulino was retired. Joffe, a cybersecurity luminary, declined further comment. Joffe is chief technical officer at Neustar Inc., which provides internet intelligence and services for major industries, including telecommunications and defense.

In 2011, Packet Forensics and Saulino, its spokesman, were featured in a Wired story because the company was selling an appliance to government agencies and law enforcement that let them spy on people’s web browsing using forged security certificates.

The company continues to sell “lawful intercept” equipment, according to its website. One of its current contracts with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is for “harnessing autonomy for countering cyber-adversary systems.” A contract description says it is investigating “technologies for conducting safe, nondisruptive, and effective active defense operations in cyberspace.” Contract language from 2019 says the program would “investigate the feasibility of creating safe and reliable autonomous software agencies that can effectively counter malicious botnet implants and similar large-scale malware.”

Deepening the mystery is Global Resource Systems’ name. It is identical to that of a firm that independent internet fraud researcher Ron Guilmette says was sending out email spam using the very same internet routing identifier. It shut down more than a decade ago. All that differs is the type of company. This one’s a limited liability corporation. The other was a corporation. Both used the same street address in Plantation, a suburb of Fort Lauderdale.

“It’s deeply suspicious,” said Guilmette, who unsuccessfully sued the previous incarnation of Global Resource Systems in 2006 for unfair business practices. Guilmette considers such masquerading, known as slip-streaming, a ham-handed tactic in this situation. “If they wanted to be more serious about hiding this they could have not used Ray Saulino and this suspicious name.”

Guilmette and Madory were alerted to the mystery when network operators began inquiring about it on an email list in mid-March. But almost everyone involved didn’t want to talk about it. Mike Leber, who owns Hurricane Electric, the internet backbone company handing the address blocks’ traffic, didn’t return emails or phone messages.

Despite an internet address crunch, the Pentagon — which created the internet — has shown no interest in selling any of its address space, and a Defense Department spokesman, Russell Goemaere, told the AP on Saturday that none of the newly announced space has been sold.

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hanimmal said:

https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-florida-government-and-politics-ap-top-news-politics-b26ab809d1e9fdb53314f56299399949
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