Sleepless in Midland

Randy Ball's MIG 17 at AirSho 2017

AirSho 2017 at the Midland, Texas, airport featured Randy Ball and a genuine MIG 17, and he put on quite a show. Here are some pics from yesterday's performance:

Flying upside down.

Low flyby over runway.

The afterburners glow.

Click for a video taken at some other airfield.

Fairly or unfairly, Kaspersky Lab is hobbled by work of Russian spies

Reading this article -- Local governments keep using this software — but it might be a back door for Russia -- one comes away with a heavy suspicion that the Kaspersky Lab could be a participant in all this Russian spying that is supposed to be going on.

Maybe the company is being judged guilty by association. And maybe they are as independent from the Russian government as they claim to be.

But from the article, there's this:

The federal agency in charge of purchasing, the General Services Administration, this month removed Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab from its list of approved vendors. In doing so, the agency’s statement suggested a vulnerability exists in Kaspersky that could give the Russian government backdoor access to the systems it protects, though they offered no explanation or evidence of it. Kaspersky has strongly denied coordinating with the Russian government and has offered to cooperate with federal investigators.

Lack of evidence certainly hasn't diminished the claims that President Trump colluded with Russians to win the election. Maybe those making that claim are seeking consistency by applying the same standard to Kaspersky.

However, this seems relevant:

James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said “it's difficult, if not impossible” for a company like Kaspersky to be headquartered in Moscow “if you don't cooperate with the government and the intelligence services.”

In any event, for those of us out here in flyover country who are sufficiently frightened by the almost weekly headline about huge data breaches, it's better to be safe than sorry.

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1:23 PM 7/24/2017

Matt Taibbi digs up the skinny on the Natalia Veselnitskaya meeting with Junior

I'm not a regular reader of Rolling Stone, but one writer whose articles are published there is very much worthy of reading. Matt Taibbi appears from time to time on C-Span selling a book, and that's where he got my attention.

In his latest piece, Russiagate and the Magnitsky Affair, Linked Again, he compiles some background on Natalia Veselnitskaya and what she might have been up to.

I never met Veselnitskaya, but just months ago I did cross paths with one of her colleagues. Like Veselnitskaya, this person had been lobbying on behalf of a Russian-directed company called Prevezon to overturn the Magnitsky Act, a 2012 law which sanctions Russia for human rights abuses.

The interview was off the record, so I can't say much about it, except to say that my experience was weirdly similar to the account Trump Jr. offered about his meeting with Veselnitskaya.

I went into the meeting expecting a scoop on another topic, and instead found myself essentially being lobbied about the Magnitsky Act. I came away scratching my head about the Prevezon crew, unsure of whether they represented high-ranking Russian interests, or were instead just a bunch of provincial amateurs trying to get a sanctions regime lifted in order to unfreeze their assets.

The Magnitsky Act, named after Sergei Magnitsky who is alleged to have been beaten to death in a Russian prison following his exposure of fraud committed by Russian officials, put sanctions on certain Russians.  And they've been lobbying aggressively to get it repealed with the help of Veselnitskay, who is a lawyer apparently famous in Russian legal circles. So Trump Jr.'s story that that's what she wanted to talk with him about rings true.

Was anything the Trumps did illegal? If so, a lot of politicians, and not just Trump, et al., should be in trouble. Speaking of which, here's another interesting tidbit from Taibbi that got buried in the anti-Trump mania:

Hillary Clinton herself went so far as to oppose the Magnitsky rule at one point in time. Her opposition, as reported by the Wall Street Journal and others, coincided with a trip to Moscow by Bill Clinton in which he was paid $500,000 to give a speech by Renaissance Capital, a firm that Sergei Magnitsky himself had claimed was part of the tax fraud perpetuated against Browder.

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11:48 AM 7/15/2017

Have Democrats vindicated Joe McCarthy yet? Just wondering.

Joseph McCarthy was famous in the 1950s for his dogged efforts to ferret out communist collaborators in the U.S. The left vilified him. They even invented a phrase to help demonize him: McCarthyism.

But it turned out that he was more often right than wrong -- there were plenty of Soviet spies amongst us.

So it's ironic that Democrats have suddenly became so obsessed with the idea of Russian collusion, especially since Democrats have been doing exactly that for a very long time. It can't really be that Democrats dislike Russia or communism that much. More likely they are using "collusion" in an attempt to disillusion Donald Trump's supporters. Causing unrest and uncertainty in the host country -- hey, isn't that exactly what the Russians have been trying to do for decades?

In any event, Democrats made such a high speed u-turn on Russia that it would make any Formula One driver envious.

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9:46 AM 7/13/2017

old-school spycraft may be dead at the CIA but apparently it still works for Israel

Alex Finley bemoans the loss of human intel at U.S. spy agencies in How the CIA Forgot the Art of Spying at Politico.com.

Back in the heyday of spycraft -- the cold war -- both the Soviets and the U.S. were busying themselves with lots of clandestine activities. Watch a few episodes of "The Americans" on FX to get a flavor of what that might have been like, although those of us who weren't in on it have no idea how realistic that fictional TV show is. But one has to imagine that disguises, drop boxes, and blackmail were ordinary tools of the trade. Here are some excerpts from Finley's article:

Over the past 15 years, this “global war on terror” mindset has become the default at the CIA. After accusations that it was stuck in the Cold War, the agency began to trade concealment devices and human sources for military hardware. Under a directive from President George W. Bush, it expanded its ranks to fight terror. It bulked up its abilities to track and target a dispersed enemy fighting an asymmetrical war. Gone were the days, it seemed, of risky brush passes in a heart-pounding, adrenaline-filled four-second period when an officer was “black”—meaning free, just for a moment, from hostile surveillance and able to pass a message to an asset. The Cold War was over; we had a new enemy to defeat. ...

The end of the Cold War left the agency untethered. Without a well-defined enemy, the CIA couldn’t figure out its mission. ...

The attacks of September 11 gave the agency a clear new mission—but one that pulled officers even further from traditional tradecraft. The new enemy operated in the rough terrain of failed states scarred by years of war; the old way of doing things—hobnobbing with the international community to get information on a state actor—was no longer adequate. As a colleague once said to me, “Terrorists don’t go to cocktail parties.” The agency set about reforming itself.

The counter-terrorism game was afoot. And the tools of the trade consisted of satellites, drones and the communication intercepts. Meanwhile, the Russians are still spying on us the old way andthe new way.

But what's this? Apparently, old fashioned spycraft is alive after all -- practiced by the Israelis:

The spy provided intelligence involving an active ISIS plot to bring down a passenger jet en route to the United States, with a bomb hidden in a laptop that U.S. officials believe can get through airport screening machines undetected. The information was reliable enough that the U.S. is considering a ban on laptops on all flights from Europe to the United States.

Donald Trump is being accused by the msm of outing this human intel product. However, the msm itself is as much to blame if not more.

So if Russia's goal is to generate discontent and disrupt the foundation of America, they don't hold a candle to the Democrats and the msm.

One more thing: Watch an interview with Alex Finley on C-Span here

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2:58 PM 5/17/2017