Experts say the nation’s cybersecurity could be deeply impacted with federal government workers on furlough and private contractors going without pay.

SUNDAY READER –
By Glynn Wilson —

Celebrity President Donald J. Trump the propaganda master and magician is using his slight of hand again to command all the attention of the national news media and the American public by fighting the Democrats over a fake threat to national security from illegal immigrants crossing the southern border of the United States. He’s demanding $5.7 billion for a wall that no real expert thinks will make an iota of a difference in alleged threats from terrorism or drug trafficking.

The Trump government shutdown, on the other hand, is clearly creating a major threat to national security — cybersecurity.

As long as a large percentage of the federal government work force, about 800,000 employees, is furloughed and not at their computers — and the private contractors who manage much of the cybersecurity apparatus of the country are not working or getting paid — there are major holes in the system. This leaves the digital infrastructure of the nation open to hackers from Russia, North Korea and elsewhere.

Of course Trump is not worried about threats from his good friends in Russia and North Korea. He has everything under control, he says on Twitter. On Saturday he was tweeting about being all alone in the White House. Knowledgable sources tell me the Secret Service is still on the job there. They are just working without pay.

I was wondering if he shares his McDonald’s cheeseburgers with the Secret Service agents protecting him, and I was told they have to pay for their own meals at the White House Mess Hall run by the Navy.

Trump is About Winning, Not Finding Solutions

In a rare journey to the Capitol last week, according to the Washington Post, Trump was “expected to strategize about how to end the government shutdown he instigated.” Instead, he spent the first 20 minutes delivering a monologue about “winning.”

“We’re winning” on North Korea, the president told Republican senators Wednesday in a closed-door luncheon. Was that a Freudian slip of the tongue no one caught? Not even the Post?

Why would he mention North Korea? There’s not much going on along that war front at the moment since Trump broke protocol last year and met with the dictator running that broken country. It was so odd not one single news organization could figure out why he did it. Maybe because about the only thing North Korea has going for it is an ongoing nuclear weapons program — and the most active team of ratfucking hackers outside China and Russia.

Of course even the Post can’t take its eyes off the wall for a minute, even going to the trouble to quote anonymous Trump advisers who say they are scrambling to build an exit ramp for the shutdown, while also bracing for it to last for weeks, months or “years,” as he said on TV.

Did anyone stop for a second to let that sink in and register? Years? It’s 2019, the presidential race for 2020 is already underway, and he’s talking about shutting the government down for years? Keep reading.

“Current and former aides said there is little strategy in the White House; people are frustrated and, in the words of one, ‘freaking out’.”

Perhaps they should be freaking out about the real threat to national security going on right under their noses.

Trump came back and attacked the Post story, saying there was a plan behind his decision to shut down the government. He didn’t admit what it was. We are working to find out. Could it have to do with the IRS, his tax returns and what they would reveal about his financial ties to Russia? The Muller investigation? Cybersecurity? Or all of above, in a related plot to survive as president and either get re-elected in 2020 or manufacture a crisis to cancel the election and take over as dictator?

Keep reading and feel free to add your favorite theory in the comments.

Are Democrats Winning?

The Democrats seem to think they are winning on this issue against Trump, once again tweeting themselves into an adrenaline and dopamine lather and sharing links on Facebook about the wall, trying to make hay with their constituents with the government shutdown story. It remains to be seen if they will win anything in this fight, legally, legislatively or politically. They might raise some money for their campaigns.

They didn’t exactly come out ahead last summer fighting over the Trump-Jeff Sessions administration policy on separating families at the border, or in the Supreme Court fight over the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy.

True, they took over a majority in the House, but lost two seats in the Senate and lost ground in many statehouses, including five seats to Republicans in Alabama.

Educated Democrats still think Trump is a crazy dumbass, ignoring all the evidence that there is a method to his madness. They talk about this and spread memes about it on Facebook all day long every day, not realizing what Trump learned about playing the media and the people in his early days of being a TV star promoting professional wrestling.

“The day I realized it can be smart to be shallow was, for me, a deep experience,” Trump said back in the 1980s, long before he ran for president in 2016 and got the help of Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer to perfect his method of using key words and phrases to appeal to the disgruntled masses on television and taking the propaganda game up to a whole new level of sophistication on Facebook and Twitter.

How Wrestle­ Mania Trumped Intelligence in U.S. Politics

There’s now a burgeoning industry in the field of Psychology with Ph.D.s spending all their time tying to figure out the Trump voter phenomenon.

A Complete Psychological Analysis of Trump’s Popular Support

Security Breach

Somehow it didn’t feel like victory was at hand on Friday night and Saturday morning, when we spent hours dealing with a security breach on the server that houses the New American Journal. It actually resulted in the site being down for a short time Saturday morning, although working with programmers in India and the U.S., we had it back up by about noon.

The incident prompted me to begin thinking about the cybersecurity of the press and news media, Trump’s “enemies of the people,” and the government as well as companies that work with federal agencies.

You are not going to see this story being batted back and forth in the partisan divide of cable news talk. Pretty much everything there is about the wall and the government shutdown and whether it’s a “Trump shutdown” or the Democrats are to blame for not giving Trump the money he wants for the wall.

This plays right into Trump’s hands, politically and otherwise. This is the narrative Trump wants. This is the narrative Trump gets — from almost every news outlet in the land, save this one. Everyone even reported that Cher told Nancy Pelosi to give Trump the money. See how Trump wins?

Nevermind that Trump could have had the tax money to pay for it, before he pushed to cut taxes for corporations and the rich, again. Is anybody talking about that? Nope.

Ongoing Real Cybersecurity Threat

To find out what’s going on with cybersecurity, one has to turn to such websites as Government Technology magazine or GT, owned by a big chain news outlet called the Tribune Content Agency, LLC, which also happens to now own Congressional Quarterly, Roll Call, the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, the Baltimore Sun, the Annapolis Maryland Capital Gazette where reporters were targeted, shot and killed by a domestic terrorist last year, etc.

Federal Government Shutdown Threatens Cybersecurity Strength

In a story no one is seeing on the Facebook home page news feed, because of the FB popular engagement algorithm, they are reporting that the government shutdown means contracted cybersecurity employees are not being paid, and thus not working, which has implications for the safety of government information. Even sources with the House Homeland Security Committee, which oversees the Department of Homeland Security, say it remains in the dark about how the shutdown has affected the department’s mission to safeguard critical infrastructure from cyberattacks.

“With so many cyber activities reliant on highly skilled contractors required to augment government personnel, government shutdowns significantly degrade the ability of the government function to meet all of their cyber mission requirements,” said Greg Touhill, president of Cyxtera Federal, a company that provides cybersecurity services to the federal government. He cited security operations, software patching and penetration testing as “essential functions” deferred because of the shutdown.

Agencies affected by the shutdown include the Internal Revenue Service, which is supposed to be auditing Trump’s tax returns, and the Department of Homeland Security, which is in charge of keeping us all safe. The Environmental Protection Agency is shut down, so no one is watching polluting industries. The National Park Service is shut down, along with the departments of Agriculture, Housing and Urban Development. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, part of the Department of Commerce, is not working.

A notice is posted on the National Institute of Standards and Technology website warning that due to the shutdown, no one is manning the important computer and internet systems there.

“NOTICE: Due to a lapse in government funding, this and almost all NIST-affiliated websites will be unavailable until further notice.”

These agencies and departments are on the “hit-list for hackers, organizations that specialize in high-end security intrusions and nation-state actors,” said Tom Gann, chief of public policy at security research firm McAfee.

Absent employees could mean that agency computers go without needed security updates and lack the ability to detect network intrusions in a timely manner.

“The first 24 hours between a hack and detection is vital,” Gann said. The sooner a hack is discovered, the easier it is to prevent damage from spreading, whereas “the longer a hack persists, the deeper it can infect,” he said.

“Skilled people qualified to respond to the alerts/alarms may not be in place or even available due to the shutdown,” Touhill said.

Trump Cybersecurity Strategy

The New York Times did run an op-ed column recently from a professor who called Trump’s changes to the national cybersecurity strategy “reckless.”

“The administration’s new policy of striking first at online attackers might invite cyberattacks, not deter them,” said Josephine Wolff, an assistant professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Taking the time to read through the linked document called the “NATIONAL CYBER STRATEGY of the United States of America,” I could not help but replay in my head all the times Trump called the press the “enemy of the people.” Could one of his agents be whispering in the ear of Kim Jong-un and Valdamir Putin telling them these enemies of Trump — not the nation or its people — should be the subjects of a “first strike” cyber attack, while the government is shutdown?

Take the time to scan this and you will see a blatant pro-Trump slant. It could have been written by Steve Bannon, formerly of Breitbart News. You just have to substitute the word “Trump” for “America” and it all becomes very clear. This is not about protecting America, democracy or even capitalism. It’s about protecting Trump.

Mueller Investigation

Don’t forget that Trump has dogged-cussed the FBI and the IRS since before he was elected. That drum beat has been unrelenting. Why would anyone doubt that the government shutdown might have something to do with hampering the IRS and the investigation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who may be coming out in the next month or so with some part of a report showing that Trump colluded with Russia during the 2016 election and then obstructed justice to cover it up?

There is a pretty big story going around from the New York Times claiming that in the days after President Trump fired James Comey as FBI director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president’s behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests.

“Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s influence,” the Times reported. “The investigation the F.B.I. opened into Mr. Trump also had a criminal aspect, which has long been publicly known: whether his firing of Mr. Comey constituted obstruction of justice.”

While the Times story is a little fuzzy in its framing of the critical problem here, one of the lawyers who was a source on the story posted a piece on a law blog that made the key point more explicit and clear.

“Observers of the Russia investigation have generally understood Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s work as focusing on at least two separate tracks: collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign, on the one hand, and potential obstruction of justice by the president, on the other. But what if the obstruction was the collusion — or at least a part of it?” wrote Benjamin Wittes, who says he consulted with New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt.

This seemed to divert the press and the public’s attention away from another controversial story from days earlier, indicating that Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein has told people close to him that he expects to leave the Justice Department soon, which could threaten the Mueller investigation.

Remember also, Trump also told Democrats back in December there would be hell to pay if they start coming after him with investigations once they take control of the House in January. This is just the beginning of Trump’s version of hell. Threatening to use executive emergency powers to fund the wall from the Pentagon budget is just a trial balloon of what is to come — if Trump is not stopped, by indictment, impeachment, or forced resignation.

Another Brick in The Wall

Meanwhile back to the wall, everyone is reporting Trump’s tweets as he sits alone in the White House on Saturday, doing his magician slight of hand tricks to keep everyone’s attention focused on him and the diversionary story he wants everybody to pay attention to.

“We have a massive Humanitarian Crisis at our Southern Border,” Trump tweeted. “We will be out for a long time unless the Democrats come back from their ‘vacations’ and get back to work. I am in the White House ready to sign!”

There is no doubt that once the government does get back up and running, stories will begin to trickle out about security breaches during the shutdown as they are discovered.

Even when federal departments designate security operations centers as critical during a shutdown, “they still have gaps covering mission-essential tasks, and many of the smaller agencies affected by the shutdown are unable to maintain the full 24×7 watch coverage,” said Greg Touhill, a retired U.S. Air Force officer who served as the first U.S. federal chief information security officer in 2016.

Government Shutdown: Experts Fear Deep Cybersecurity Impact

Here they are reporting that the shutdown is affecting agencies that have a key hand in the nation’s cybersecurity readiness, and that the situation “is generating anxiety over whether it could impact the U.S.’s defenses and whether opportunistic adversaries may seize the moment.”

“I am not sleeping well,” says Tom Kellermann, chief cybersecurity officer for the vendor Carbon Black. “The U.S. is under siege by Chinese, Russian and North Korean cyber spies, and now we do not have sufficient watchers on the wall. We have never been this vulnerable to asymmetrical warfare.”

Kellermann says that when the government returns to normal, the “first order of business will be to immediately conduct compromise assessments and suppress the adversaries who have infiltrated government systems.”

So watch for those stories when the federal government reopens. Remember, you probably heard about it here first.

Critical Infrastructure

While everyone is paying attention to the wall diversion, the nation’s critical infrastructure is vulnerable to attack.

Operators of the key critical infrastructure sectors of the economy, including financial institutions and systems, water and sewer systems, health care and transportation networks rely on information from the Department of Homeland Security to protect their computer networks, and “we don’t know if these activities have been suspended or slowed because of the shutdown,” an aide to the House Homeland Security Committee told the CQ-Roll Call reporter.

When I posted a notice about our security breach on Facebook Saturday, I heard from an authoritative source with direct knowledge of the operation of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Browns Ferry nuclear plant in Athens, Alabama. I was told that just last week, a cybersecurity breach shut down the security operations of the plant, leaving the security turnstiles guarding the plant’s entrance “wide open.”

“Anyone could have walked right in,” this knowledgeable person told me on the phone Saturday night. When plant security caught it, the plant was “locked down.”

None of this made the news in the Alabama news desert. Remember, this plant was the subject of the second worst nuclear accident in U.S. history back in the 1970s, when a fire in the wall nearly led to a meltdown at the plant..

“If people only knew how close it came to melting down,” my source said, “they would be scared to death.”

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Add: While TVA’s funding mostly comes from the revenue generated by electricity bills, not directly from government tax money, and the plant is not technically part of the government shutdown, it is supposed to receive notices about risks and threats from Homeland Security personnel. This is just one example of the types of threats we could be facing right now that we may never find out about.

[In fact, after this story was published and we asked the company for comment, the public relations staff lied about the breach to me in an email message, denying that it ever occurred. This is an example of industry being allowed to report on itself without government regulators on the job watchdogging what’s going on. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission under Trump is probably not doing much regulating. Also keep in mind, billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money went into building the plant. Due to problems that kept units shut down for years, it’s questionable the taxpayers ever got any of their money back. It was supposed to save people money on their power bills. Ask TVA customers if they feel like they ever saved any money by putting themselves at risk from a problematic nuclear power plant.]

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According to other reporting, the U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team, which operates under Homeland Security, is charged with sending out cybersecurity warnings to key people at the top levels in charge of critical infrastructure facilities such as power plants. While the system appeared to be functioning and was sending out security alerts this week, “emails to DHS officials seeking comment bounced back with automated responses saying they were not working because of the shutdown.”

More Coverage

Just do a search for the terms “cybersecurity threat and government shutdown” and you will find all kinds of stories, like this.

The Politico cybersecurity team is also reporting about all the threats.

How the government shutdown is affecting cybersecurity

The Hill news site is also touting an opinion piece on this by Suzanne Spaulding, former Under Secretary for the National Protection and Programs Directorate at Homeland Security.

What the government shutdown means for our nation’s cybersecurity

“The shutdown has impacted government employees, contractors and organizations, as well as everyday citizens,” she wrote. “The full breadth of its ramifications is not well understood — particularly its impact on the cybersecurity of our nation’s critical infrastructure.”

People are reporting other weird computer and internet glitches on Facebook and Twitter. Some people are reporting that the Google Chrome web browser has been compromised by a virus. I also experienced this problem, and no one from Google responded to multiple reports and all efforts to purge the application of the problem failed. I had to stop using it.

Academic Literature

If you really still have any doubts about Trump caring about America or democracy, or the negative impact he is having on our country and system of government, you might want to wade into the academic literature on how Trumpism is affecting American democracy. There’s plenty to read on that subject as well.

Trumpism and American Democracy: History, Comparison, and the Predicament of Liberal Democracy in the United States

“In the eyes of many citizens, activists, pundits, and scholars, American democracy appears under threat,” according to the study’s abstract. “Concern about President Trump and the future of American politics may be found among both conservatives and progressives; among voters, activists, and elites; and among many scholars and analysts of American and comparative politics. What is the nature of the Trumpism as a political phenomenon? And how much confidence should we have at present in the capacity of American institutions to withstand this threat?”

It is assumed to be a threat by researchers. But according to the mainstream media, obsessed with telling “both sides of the story,” it could be a threat. Or Trump could be the best president to lead America since Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln.

“We just report,” they say. “You decide.”

When will they decide that Trump is a threat? Maybe if the U.S. government ever opens again and we find out that our national security has been compromised by hackers during the #TrumpShutdown?

There may be a critical emergency underway right now. How would we even know? There’s nobody on the job to warn us.

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NOTE to Readers: Good luck avoiding all those hackers, bots and trolls on social media. Please don’t be sharing hoaxes with people you don’t know in FB Messenger. Chances are you are just contributing to the spread of bugs and meme viruses. Be smart. Play smart. And support the real news web press every chance you get. If we had a million dollars, a fraction of the $11 million Robert Mercer gave Steve Bannon at Breitbart News to help Trump get elected, we might just make the difference. You can help support this worthy cause. Just click on the picture of the bull dog chasing Trump and make your contribution today.