International
Is the US intelligence apparatus preparing the public for future election interference?
From LifeSiteNews
Is the warning perhaps not what it seems? Is it an attempt to provide camouflage — a strategy known as ‘pre-bunking’ — for future election interference sanctioned by the Washington political machine?
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) together with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released a joint statement ostensibly intended to assure U.S. voters in advance that the 2024 election that, despite anticipated attacks on the country’s voting systems that might make getting election information hard for citizens to obtain, election results would nonetheless be unaffected and election integrity would be maintained.
The FBI is responsible for investigating and prosecuting election crimes and malicious cyber activity targeting election infrastructure. The CISA plays a role in securing election infrastructure from physical and cyber threats.
The joint statement, however, has been met with skepticism based on the earlier roles of both agencies in past elections and their participation in massive suppression of conservative voices in social media.
As such, is the warning perhaps not what it seems? Is it an attempt to provide camouflage — a strategy known as “pre-bunking” — for future election interference sanctioned by the Democrat-powered Washington political machine — a.k.a., the Deep State — that wants to maintain control of the White House and Congress at any cost?
“CISA & FBI issue bulletin that upcoming cyberattacks may ‘prevent the public from receiving timely information’ about the 2024 election,” conservative commentator Emerald Robinson wrote on X.
“These same agencies told you: America’s voting machines were never connected to the Internet,” Robinson noted.
BREAKING: CISA & FBI issue bulletin that upcoming cyberattacks may "prevent the public from receiving timely information" about the 2024 election.
These same agencies told you: America's voting machines were never connected to the Internet.
— Emerald Robinson ✝️ (@EmeraldRobinson) August 2, 2024
Jeanette Manfra, Acting Under Secretary for Cybersecurity and Communications at the Department of Homeland Security, told Congress in 2017 that America’s voting machines “are not connected to the internet.”
Manfra was responsible for the security of the nation’s voting system. Yet according to a 2020 report by NBC News, a team of 10 cybersecurity experts who specialize in voting systems and elections found nearly three dozen U.S. voting systems connected to the internet.
“We found over 35 (voting systems) had been left online and we’re still continuing to find more,” Kevin Skoglund, a senior technical adviser at the election security advocacy group National Election Defense Coalition, told NBC News at the time.
“We kept hearing from election officials that voting machines were never on the internet,” Skoglund said. “And we knew that wasn’t true. And so we set out to try and find the voting machines to see if we could find them on the internet, and especially the back-end systems that voting machines in the precinct were connecting to report their results.”
Can CISA be trusted?
“CISA has worked with Big Tech corporations to silence Americans since 2020,” noted Logan Washburn, writing at The Federalist last month. “A congressional report from last fall found it had become a “domestic intelligence and speech-police agency” whose behavior was ‘unconstitutional.’”
Last year, the Biden administration blocked the release of documents “revealing the extent to which deep state actors and their third-party allies interfered in the 2020 presidential election by pushing social media censorship,” according to a Breitbart report.
“The government seems particularly eager to stop the release of documents pertaining to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the closely linked Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), both of which are under intense scrutiny for their 2020 interference efforts,” Breitbart’s Allum Bokhari wrote.
Bokhari reported in May 2023 on the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee’s hearing on the government’s “laundering” of censorship through NGOs and private entities:
In the runup to the 2020 election, the consortium created a system whereby state actors including the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department could file “tickets” alongside news stories, flagging them so that Big Tech platforms could subsequently suppress or attach warning labels to them.
Beyond this blatant case of a private-public censorship coalition, the EIP also engaged in partisan politics, allowing the Democratic National Committee to file tickets through the system, as well as the Democrat-aligned groups Common Cause and the NAACP.
News outlets targeted by the EIP included Breitbart News, Fox News, the New York Post, and the Epoch Times, as well as the social media accounts of prominent conservatives Charlie Kirk, Tom Fitton, Jack Posobiec, Mark Levin, James O’Keefe, and Sean Hannity, amongst others.
President Donald Trump was also frequently flagged by the consortium, as well as his sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.
In April, The Washington Examiner noted the connection of CISA and the suppression of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story just weeks before the election, which no doubt had a big impact on the election’s outcome, in favor of leftist Joe Biden and against incumbent Republican Donald Trump:
On Oct. 14, 2020, hours after the New York Post published a story based on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop that Twitter blocked from being shared online, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center reached out to “misinformation” researchers behind the Election Integrity Partnership, a collaboration between universities, left-wing think tanks, social media companies, and the U.S. government to thwart alleged falsehoods online in the lead-up to the presidential election. That outreach from the GEC, a foreign-focused office Republican lawmakers are investigating for its ties to anti-speech projects in the United States, was apparently thanks to guidance from the DHS and its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, according to internal documents.
The newly unearthed coordination underscores the major role that CISA, an agency under scrutiny from the House GOP for allegedly colluding “with Big Tech and ‘disinformation’ partners to censor Americans” in 2020, played in the Election Integrity Partnership, or EIP. Both CISA and Alex Stamos, who directed the Stanford Internet Observatory, a Stanford University office behind the EIP, have appeared to downplay CISA’s role in the partnership despite some since-released records indicating a closer relationship than previously known, the Washington Examiner reported.
CISA and the FBI: paving the way for domestic election interference?
“With Election Day less than 100 days away, it is important to help put into context some of the incidents the American public may see during the election cycle that, while potentially causing some minor disruptions, will not fundamentally impact the security or integrity of the democratic process,” CISA senior advisor Cait Conley said.
“DDoS attacks are one example of a tactic that we have seen used against election infrastructure in the past and will likely see again in the future, but they will NOT affect the security or integrity of the actual election. They may cause some minor disruptions or prevent the public from receiving timely information,” Conley suggested.
“It is important to talk about these potential issues now, because nefarious actors, like our foreign adversaries or cybercriminals, could use DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) incidents to cast doubt on the election systems or processes,” Conley said.
“Congress is still exposing the extent of the detailed coordination platform between Big Tech platforms and the Censorship Industrial Complex,” noted Republican Rep. Darrell Issa of California, who sits on the House Judiciary Committee, in April. “Rather than promote free speech and free expression, this partnership was dedicated to denying it to those it did not favor.”
Questions remain: Did government agencies facilitate cheating and lie to the American people in 2020 in order to drag Biden across the finish line? Are they preparing to unconstitutionally install Kamala Harris in 2024?
Energy
Trump Has A Plan To Fix The Electricity Grid — Increase Supply
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Bonner Cohen
Trump vowed in a second term to issue a “national emergency declaration to achieve a massive increase in domestic energy supply.”
Citing the need for more electricity to continue growing the artificial intelligence (AI) sector and keep the U.S. tech industry ahead of China, former President Donald Trump on Sept. 5 vowed in a second term to issue a “national emergency declaration to achieve a massive increase in domestic energy supply.”
But standing in the way of ramped up domestic energy production is a federal permitting process notorious for its foot-dragging. Some in Congress acknowledge the problem, but their latest effort to rectify the situation risks being overtaken by surging energy demand and troubling geopolitical realities.
Hoping to unravel the reams of red tape that have tied up transportation, energy, and mining projects for years, and in some cases killed them altogether, Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) and Sen. John Barasso (R-Wyo.) want their colleagues to approve their “Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024.” Centralizing decision-making on power transmission nationwide is the centerpiece of their legislation. Accordingly, it would bolster the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) authority to approve interstate transmission lines and require interregional transmission planning.
In a bid to satisfy as many conflicting interests as possible, the bill establishes deadlines for filing lawsuits over energy and mining projects, and sets requirements for onshore and offshore oil, gas, coal and renewable energy leasing and permitting. It also includes provisions on hard-rock mining and sets a 90-day deadline for the secretary of Energy to grant or deny liquified natural gas (LNG) export applications, according to a summary of the legislation.
The bill is generally supported by such groups as the American Clean Power Association, the Solar Energy Industries Association, the American Council on Renewable Energy, Advanced Energy United, and Americans for a Clean Energy Grid, UtilityDive reported.
Many of the wind, solar and transmission-line projects favored by these groups have encountered the same permitting and litigation delays that have bedeviled fossil-fuel producers. On the other hand, the Sierra Club opposes the measure, finding it insufficiently hostile to fossil fuels and saying it “would open up federal lands and waters to more leasing and drilling and unnecessarily rush reviews of natural gas export projects…”
Aside from all the problems inherent in vesting so much authority in one federal bureaucracy, FERC, to handle the nation’s power transmission challenges, such conventional approaches are no match for the transformative developments already roiling America’s electricity supply. While politicians, along with some less-than-savvy investors, have been content to pour wads of public and private cash into the green energy transition, artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly upending the world elites thought they knew.
Energy-hungry data centers — there are currently over 2,700 in the United States with hundreds more planned — need electricity 24/7/365 if they are to meet the extraordinary demands of AI. The amount of electricity AI-driven data centers require cannot be produced by intermittent solar and wind power transmitted hundreds if not thousands of miles from the sunny Southwest or the gusty plains of the Upper Midwest. Big Tech’s demands on an already shaky grid far outstrip anything politically fashionable solar panels and wind turbines can ever deliver. To their chagrin, the Big Four data center developers — Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and Beta — now find themselves increasingly dependent on the very fossil fuels and — where available — nuclear power they have been so quick to dismiss over the years.
But given the choice of meeting their lofty Net-Zero carbon emissions goals or cashing in on AI’s financial promise, Big Tech will choose the second option. And the stakes go well beyond the companies’ respective bottom lines. Data centers are essential to AI, and AI is essential to national security. If the U.S. is not the global leader in AI, China (along with its junior partner, Russia) will be.
“AI can be the foundation of a new industrial base it would be wise for our country to embrace,” Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, recently wrote in the Washington Post.
Ceding the United States’ current lead in AI to China would be a blow from which America’s industrial base, and thus its military preparedness, would be hard pressed to recover. Data centers, powered by a steady flow of reliable energy, are now key assets in the perilous world of 21st century geopolitics.
As neighbors in the communities in which they are located, data centers are a mixed blessing. They generate enormous revenues to local governments but can be seen by nearby residents as disruptive to their community. The non-descript but noisy buildings comprising data centers house thousands of computer servers processing the data that make the internet, cloud computing and AI possible. They not only require gobs of power but also plenty of water used to lower temperatures.
Together with government-driven efforts to put more EVs on the road, data centers further complicate the challenges facing the already stressed electric grid. These developments are beyond the reach of the horse-trading that goes into Capitol Hill legislation. What is clear, however, is that the vaunted green-energy transformation will never be equal to the task before us.
Bonner Russell Cohen, Ph. D., is a senior policy analyst with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).
Crime
Mother Of Georgia Shooting Suspect Called School Warning Of ‘Extreme Emergency’: REPORT
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
The mother of the 14-year-old alleged Apalachee High School shooter called the school minutes before the shooting to warn of an “extreme emergency” involving her son, according to The Washington Post.
Marcee Gray, mother of suspect Colt Gray, texted her sister that she had notified the school counselor that “it was an extreme emergency and for them to go immediately and find [her son] to check on him,” according to text messages obtained by then Post. The outlet also obtained a call log from the family’s phone plan showing a 10-minute phone call placed at 9:50 a.m. from the mother’s phone to the school, 30 minutes before the Sept. 4 shooting started.
A school counselor told Marcee during the call that her son was talking about a school shooting, according to Annie Brown, Marcee’s sister.
Text messages obtained by the Post from Brown show that the family was in contact with the school about Colt’s mental health a week before the shooting. Brown also told a family member that Colt was having “homicidal and suicidal thoughts,” according to the outlet.
Brown also told the Post that Colt was “begging for help from everybody around him” and that “the adults around him failed him.” Colt allegedly had a difficult home life, with his mother pleading guilty to a family violence charge in December 2023 and ordered to have limited contact with her husband.
The FBI received a tip in May 2023 that Colt allegedly made threats, and he was questioned by local authorities. However, officials claimed they did not have probable cause for an arrest, and Gray denied making the threats.
Colt allegedly opened fire with an AR-15 pattern rifle at Apalachee High School, killing four and injuring nine. Colt surrendered when a school resource officer confronted the teen.
Colt stands charged with four counts of felony murder, and his father, Colin Gray, is charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children. The gun Colt used was reportedly gifted to him by Colin.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation told the Daily Caller News Foundation that they do not plan to reveal investigative details at this time and directed all inquiries to the Piedmont Judicial Circuit District Attorney’s Office.
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