Baltic Dry Index. 634 +04 Brent Crude 67.12
“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after
you.”
Catch-22
As we get closer to March one, President Trump’s resolve continues to weaken. Apparently trade wars aren’t so easy to win after all. Below yesterday’s walk back by President Trump. Even a bad deal seems better than no deal at all.
Trump says he's inclined to extend China trade deadline and meet Xi soon
February 22, 2019 / 4:58 PM
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald
Trump said on Friday there was “a very good chance” the United States would
strike a deal with China to end their trade war and that he was inclined to
extend his March 1 tariff deadline and meet soon with Chinese President Xi
Jinping.
U.S. and
Chinese negotiators had made progress and will extend this week’s round of
negotiations by two days through Sunday, Trump told reporters at the White
House as he met with his top negotiators and their counterpart, Chinese Vice
Premier Liu He.
“I think
that we both feel there’s a very good chance a deal will happen,” Trump said.
Liu agreed
there had been “great progress”.
“From China,
we believe that (it) is very likely that it will happen and we hope that
ultimately we’ll have a deal. And the Chinese side is ready to make our utmost
effort,” he said at the White House.
The
Republican president said he probably would meet with Xi in March in Florida to
decide on the most important terms of a trade deal.
Extending
the deadline would put on hold Trump’s threatened tariff increase to 25 percent
from 10 percent on $200 billion (153 billion pounds) of Chinese imports into
the United States. That would prevent a further escalation in a trade war that
already has disrupted commerce in goods worth hundreds of billions of dollars,
slowed global economic growth and roiled markets.
Optimism
that the two sides will find a way to end the trade war lifted stocks,
especially technology shares. The S&P 500 stock index reached its highest closing
level since Nov. 8. Oil prices rose to their highest since mid-November, with
Brent crude reaching a high of $67.73 a barrel.
More
Trump says could include Huawei and ZTE in trade deal
February 22, 2019 / 8:22 PM
WASHINGTON
(Reuters) - U.S. President Donald trump said on Friday he may or may not
include Chinese telecommunications companies Huawei Technologies and ZTE Corp
in the trade deal being negotiated between the United States and China.
The Justice
Department has charged Huawei and its chief financial officer with conspiring
to violate U.S. sanctions on Iran by doing business through a subsidiary it
tried to hide. The United States is seeking her extradition.
In a
separate case, the Justice Department charged the telecommunications equipment
maker with stealing robotic technology from T-Mobile US Inc. Huawei has said
the companies settled their dispute in 2017.
Trump told
reporters at the White House that U.S. officials are not talking about dropping
charges against Huawei.
Huawei will
be raised with U.S. attorneys and the attorney general in the coming weeks,
Trump said, but “right now it’s not something that we’re discussing.”
More
EU Ready to Target Caterpillar, Xerox If Trump Hits Cars, Official Says
By Jonathan Stearns and Irina Vilcu
Updated on 22 February 2019, 16:06 GMT
·
Tariff threat made in paralel to push for
free-trade accord
Finally, this weekend, while we await a China v USA trade deal, how to go invisible online, by Kevin Mitnick. A long and complicated read on how to go invisible just like Edward Snowden, James Bond, Christopher Steele.
Just one thought though, if any of this really worked, why would the deep state tell you? Could this be how that want you to go “invisible” online? The first rule of spooks worldwide is trust no one, especially not your own side.
It’s a pretty good rule in trade wars too. Who really benefits from a trade war in the end? Who loses? Who decided? Cui bono?
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? "Who watches the watchers?"
Juvenal.
Famed Hacker Kevin Mitnick Shows You How to Go Invisible Online
If you’re like me, one of the first things
you do in the morning is check your email. And, if you’re like me, you also
wonder who else has read your email. That’s not a paranoid concern. If you use
a web-based email service such as Gmail or Outlook 365, the answer is kind of
obvious and frightening.
Even if you delete an email the moment you
read it on your computer or mobile phone, that doesn’t necessarily erase the
content. There’s still a copy of it somewhere. Web mail is cloud-based, so in
order to be able to access it from any device anywhere, at any time, there have
to be redundant copies. If you use Gmail, for example, a copy of every email
sent and received through your Gmail account is retained on various servers
worldwide at Google. This is also true if you use email systems provided by
Yahoo, Apple, AT&T, Comcast, Microsoft, or even your workplace. Any emails
you send can also be inspected, at any time, by the hosting company. Allegedly
this is to filter out malware, but the reality is that third parties can and do
access our emails for other, more sinister and self-serving, reasons.
While most of us may tolerate having our emails scanned for
malware, and perhaps some of us tolerate scanning for advertising purposes, the
idea of third parties reading our correspondence and acting on specific
contents found within specific emails is downright disturbing.
The least you can do is make it much harder for them to do so.
Start With Encryption
Most web-based email services use encryption when the email is
in transit. However, when some services transmit mail between Mail Transfer
Agents (MTAs), they may not be using encryption, thus your message is in the
open. To become invisible you will need to encrypt your messages.
----When Edward Snowden first decided to disclose the
sensitive data he’d copied from the NSA, he needed the assistance of
like-minded people scattered around the world. Privacy advocate and filmmaker
Laura Poitras had recently finished a documentary about the lives of
whistle-blowers. Snowden wanted to establish an encrypted exchange with Poitras,
except only a few people knew her public key.
Snowden reached out to Micah Lee of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation. Lee’s public key was available online and, according to the account
published on the Intercept, he had Poitras’s public
key. Lee checked to see if Poitras would permit him to share it. She would.
----Picking an Encryption Service
Both the strength of the mathematical operation and the length
of the encryption key determine how easy it is for someone without a key to
crack your code.
Encryption algorithms in use today are public. You want that.
Public algorithms have been vetted for weakness—meaning people have been
purposely trying to break them. Whenever one of the public algorithms becomes
weak or is cracked, it is retired, and newer, stronger algorithms are used
instead.
----When you encrypt a message—an e‑mail, text, or phone
call—use end‑to‑end encryption. That means your message stays unreadable until
it reaches its intended recipient. With end‑to‑end encryption, only you and
your recipient have the keys to decode the message. Not the telecommunications
carrier, website owner, or app developer—the parties that law enforcement or
government will ask to turn over information about you. Do a Google search for
“end‑to‑end encryption voice call.” If the app or service doesn’t use
end-to-end encryption, then choose another.
If all this sounds complicated, that’s because it is. But
there are PGP plug-ins for the Chrome and Firefox Internet browsers that make
encryption easier. One is Mailvelope, which neatly handles the public and
private encryption keys of PGP. Simply type in a passphrase, which will be used
to generate the public and private keys. Then whenever you write a web-based
email, select a recipient, and if the recipient has a public key available, you
will then have the option to send that person an encrypted message.
----Beyond Encryption: Metadata
Even if you encrypt your e‑mail messages with PGP, a small but
information-rich part of your message is still readable by just about anyone.
In defending itself from the Snowden revelations, the US government stated
repeatedly that it doesn’t capture the actual contents of our emails, which in
this case would be unreadable with PGP encryption. Instead, the government said
it collects only the email’s metadata.
What is email metadata? It is the information in the To and
From fields as well as the IP addresses of the various servers that handle the
email from origin to recipient. It also includes the subject line, which can
sometimes be very revealing as to the encrypted contents of the message.
Metadata, a legacy from the early days of the internet, is still included on
every email sent and received, but modern email readers hide this information
from display.
That might sound okay, since the third parties are not
actually reading the content, and you probably don’t care about the mechanics
of how those emails traveled—the various server addresses and the time
stamps—but you’d be surprised by how much can be learned from the email path
and the frequency of emails alone.
----Remove your true IP address:
This is your point of connection to the Internet, your fingerprint. It can show
where you are (down to your physical address) and what provider you use.
Obscure your hardware and software:
When you connect to a website online, a snapshot of the
hardware and software
you’re using may be collected by the site.
Defend your anonymity:
Attribution online is hard. Proving that you were at the keyboard when an event
occurred is difficult. However, if you walk in front of a camera before going
online at Starbucks, or if you just bought a latte at Starbucks with your
credit card, these actions can be linked to your online presence a few moments
later.
----IP addresses in emails can of course be forged. Someone
might use a proxy address—not his or her real IP address but someone
else’s—that an email appears to originate from another location. A proxy is
like a foreign-language translator—you speak to the translator, and the
translator speaks to the foreign-language speaker—only the message remains
exactly the same. The point here is that someone might use a proxy from China
or even Germany to evade detection on an email that really comes from North
Korea.
Instead of hosting your own proxy, you can use a service known
as an anonymous remailer, which will mask your email’s IP address for you. An
anonymous remailer simply changes the email address of the sender before
sending the message to its intended recipient. The recipient can respond via
the remailer. That’s the simplest version.
One way to mask your IP address is to use the onion router (Tor),
which is what Snowden and Poitras did. Tor is designed to be used by people
living in harsh regimes as a way to avoid censorship of popular media and
services and to prevent anyone from tracking what search terms they use. Tor
remains free and can be used by anyone, anywhere—even you.
----Create a new (invisible) account
Legacy email accounts might be connected in various ways to
other parts of your life—friends, hobbies, work. To communicate in secrecy, you
will need to create new email accounts using Tor so that the IP address setting
up the account is not associated with your real identity in any way.
Creating anonymous email addresses is challenging but
possible.
----Since you will leave a trail if you pay for private email
services, you’re actually better off using a free web service. A minor hassle:
Gmail, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others require you to supply a phone number to
verify your identify. Obviously you can’t use your real cellphone number, since
it may be connected to your real name and real address. You might be able to
set up a Skype phone number if it supports voice authentication instead of SMS
authentication; however, you will still need an existing email account and a
prepaid gift card to set it up.
Some people think of burner phones
as devices used only by terrorists, pimps, and drug dealers, but there are
plenty of perfectly legitimate uses for them. Burner phones mostly provide
voice, text, and e‑mail service, and that’s about all some people need.
More
“Show me the
man and I’ll show you the crime”
Lavrentiy Beria, the most ruthless and longest-serving
secret police chief in Joseph Stalin’s reign of terror in Russia and Eastern
Europe.
Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime
----However, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s appointment and subsequent investigation into alleged collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign appear to follow the Beria model, not the U.S. Constitution model.
To call the Mueller
probe a “witch hunt” is an insult to witches.
Lifelong
Democrat Alan Dershowitz, Felix Frankfurter Professor Emeritus at Harvard Law
School, voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. He says Mueller, like other Special
Counsel before him, is engaging in the “criminalization of politics.”
Dershowitz states unequivocally that there was no probable cause to believe any
crime was committed by Trump or his campaign. In fact, “collusion” in a
political campaign is not a crime.
Moreover,
constitutional law scholar Dershowitz says it is impossible for a sitting
President to obstruct justice in the carrying out of his Article II powers,
including the absolute right to fire former FBI Chief James Comey. But don’t
take Professor Dershowitz’s word for it. Take a look at the articles written in
the past year by former Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District
of New York Andrew McCarthy, and historian and Hoover Institute scholar Victor
Davis Hanson.
There are
many facets of the Mueller investigation that should trouble every citizen: the
Comey memo describing how James Clapper wanted Comey to mention the Russia
Ritz-Carlton episode in Comey’s meeting with Trump to give CNN the “hook” it
needed to publish the nasty details; the fact that Assistant Attorney General
Rod Rosenstein is in the middle of everything—Sessions’ recusal, Comey’s
firing, Mueller’s appointment, the apparent enlargement of Mueller’s charge in
the “scope” memo, which Rosenstein has refused to produce to Congress; the bias
against Trump reflected in the tweets and actions of the bureaucrats and
special agents at the top of the DOJ and FBI; DOJ’s consistent refusal to turn
over documents to Congress; the Gestapo-like tactics used by Mueller, including
the pre-dawn, no-knock raid on Paul Manafort’s home; the seizure of documents
covered by attorney-client privilege in the search of Trump Attorney Michael
Cohen’s office; and the shameful destruction of General Mike Flynn’s career for
a “lie” the investigating FBI agents said did not occur.
More
The Criminalization of Almost Everything
January/February 2010When laws grow so voluminous and vague that they oppress those who live under them, society can become as unlivable as if it were lawless. Subject to the arbitrary scrutiny of prosecutors overcome by ambition for their own 15 minutes of fame, ordinary citizens face the horrors of becoming criminal defendants. At a Cato Book Forum in October, Harvey Silverglate, author of Three Felonies a Day, and Tim Lynch, editor of In the Name of Justice and director of Cato’s Project on Criminal Justice, discussed the growing threat of federal criminal law.
HARVEY SILVERGLATE: An average, busy professional gets up in the morning, gets the kids to school, goes to work, uses the telephone or e-mail, has meetings, works on a prospectus or bank loan, goes home, puts the kids to bed, has dinner, reads the newspaper, goes to sleep, and has no idea that, in the course of that day, he or she has very likely committed three felonies. Three felonies that some ambitious, creative prosecutor can pick out from that day’s activities and put into an indictment.
More
https://www.cato.org/policy-report/januaryfebruary-2010/criminalization-almost-everything
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