Pacific Highway Upgrade 2018: the saga of the unwanted Woombah asphalt batching plant continues

In its latest letterbox drop to Woombah and Iluka communities on 30 July 2018 NSW Road and Maritime Services (RMS) has admitted that, despite a commitment to review the proposed site of the Woombah temporary asphalt plant servicing the Iluka to Devil’s Pulpit section of the Pacific Highway upgrade, it still intends to place 4,000 tons of asphalt on this site by Christmas 2018.

As if from these photographs below locals could not already tell that the plan to use the site for asphalt batching remains active - despite strong community opposition based on road safety, air quality, health and environmental concerns.

Photographs supplied anonymously

On 24 July 2018 “three cars collided at the Iluka Road turnoff at Mororo at around 1:30pm, closing down one lane of the Pacific Highway heading north. It is not known about the condition of those involved in the incident, however emergency services were again quick to restore the heavy flow of traffic”.

This turnoff is the temporary Pacific Highway-Garrets Lane intersection created in March 2018 by NSW Roads and Maritime Services and Pacific Complete as the highway upgrade proceeds along a 27 kilometre stretch. 

It is also the intersection now used by heavy vehicles accessing the proposed site of the temporary asphalt batching plant.

It is an intersection and road Pacific Complete is assuring local residents has been designed and built in accordance with the design criteria.

As the Iluka and Woombah communities were not supplied with a detailed traffic audit for the road design or the change to road design which is set to occur in 2019, they have to take the consortium's word that this is so.

If the complaints by some local residents of being harried by impatient construction truck drivers as they attempt to negotiate the Pacific Highway-Garrets Lane turnoff are any indication, between now and Christmas there may be another collision there.

RMS and Pacific Complete have promised to hold information sessions with the two communities again - one version states sessions commence on 30 July 2018 and another rather obscure document states they commence on 30 August 2018.

July 30 has come and gone without that particular information session taking place.

The deadline for submissions on the temporary asphalt batching plant is 10 August 2018.

Given that deadline, either RMS and Pacific Complete are the most appalling managers of the community consultation process or they are trying to limit the ability to submit fully informed written responses by10 August.

The suspicion that National Party cronyism has played a part in the choice of site is starting to be quietly muttered under the breath as well. It seems Lower Clarence River folk have long memories.

This botched Iluka to Devil's Pulpit highway construction planning and community consultation is likely to be on the minds of quite a few Woombah and Iluka residents as they cast their votes at the NSW state election in March next year.

A trio of Great Barrier Reef Foundation directors decline to appear before a senate committee inquiry

On 19 June 2018, the Senate referred the 2018-19 Budget measure Great Barrier Reef 2050 Partnership Program to the Environment and Communications References Committee for inquiry and report on 15 August 2018.

The Great Barrier Reef Foundation made a written submission on 2 July 2018.

Yesterday it sent one of it newest directors (who apparently joined the board in the second half of 2017) and its managing director to give evidence before the inquiry.

However, three directors are seeking to avoid attending this inquiry  - John M Schubert (Chair), Grant King and Paul Greenfield.

This unwillingness is likely to be less about scheduling problems and more about close associations with petroleum, gas, mining* and finance industries, the foundation's membership list as well as the identity of donors who gave over $1.4 million to the foundation in 2017.

The Sydney Morning Herald, 27 July 2018:

Three directors of a Great Barrier Reef charity entrusted with almost half a billion dollars in public money have refused to give evidence to a Senate inquiry scrutinising the controversial deal, raising the prospect they will be forced to appear.

Confidential Senate committee documents seen by Fairfax Media show that despite being offered five dates at which to attend the inquiry, the directors of the Great Barrier Reef Foundation say they are unavailable for questioning, variously citing overseas travel commitments, medical appointments, board meetings and other unspecified engagements.

The inquiry was launched following the Turnbull government’s decision to grant the small, business-focused charity $443 million to help rescue the reef.  The foundation has previously said it would “fully co-operate” with the probe.

The contentious Great Barrier Reef Foundation grant is to be spent on projects such as water quality improvements.

The Senate committee had specifically requested their attendance. The trio comprises the organisation’s chair John Schubert and board members Grant King and Paul Greenfield. Mr King is president of the Business Council of Australia and Dr Greenfield chairs the foundation’s scientific committee.

The foundation has advised that managing director Anna Marsden and another director, John Gunn, will give evidence.

The grant was awarded without a tender process and the government’s own expert agencies were not invited to apply.

The foundation plans to use the grant to leverage additional funds from the private sector.….

Fairfax Media understands the committee will ask the directors to find suitable dates to give evidence and advise them that the committee has the power to summon witnesses. According to the Parliament website, Senate committees rarely need to exercise such powers as witnesses are “normally very willing to place their views and the information they possess before the Senate to assist in an understanding of issues”…..

details of the deal show the foundation will receive almost $45 million to cover administration costs incurred by disbursing the funds. Fairfax Media previously reported the foundation would receive an upfront payment of $22.5 million plus interest. The recently published grant agreement shows the interest will be capped at $22 million, and any additional interest will be spent on reef projects.

The agreement also shows many aspects of the deal will remain confidential, including the strategy used by the foundation to attract private sector funds.

Greens oceans spokesman Peter Whish-Wilson criticised the secrecy and questioned the influence businesses would exert over how the grant was spent.

“How much of it is going to be used to promote the companies and essentially greenwash some of these businesses that are key polluters?” he said.

Businesses involved in the foundation include heavy polluters such as AGL, Peabody Energy, Shell, Rio Tinto and Qantas.

In a statement, the department said it accepted that the foundation “does not wish information about who it might approach or the strategies it might employ in its fundraising to be made public”.

The administration costs were “ reasonable given the scale of the grant” and any entity, including a government agency, would need adequate funds for such purposes, it said.

The department said the attendance at Senate hearings "is a matter for the foundation".

* The Great Barrier Reef Foundation classes Rio Tinto's RTFM Wakmatha (a Post Panamax bulk carrier on the Weipa to Gladstone run) as the foundation's research vessel in its so-called mission to save the reef.

UPDATE

As of 7.35pm 31 July 2018 the transcript of yesterday's public hearing has not been published.

However, mainstream media is reporting that Ms. Marsden gave evidence that in April 2018 Prime Minister Malcolm Bligh Turnbull and Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg met privately with the Chair of the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, John Schubert.

At this meeting an unsolicited and unscrutinised offer of over $45 million as a lump sum grant was made to Schubert as chair of the foundation.

This private meeting goes a long way towards explaining Schubert's reluctance to be questioned during this Senate inquiry.

Three former bankers meeting to carve out a large chunk of taxpayer dollars, probably felt comfortable enough to speak freely on a number of subjects.

July 2018 was not a good month for Zuckerberg and Facebook Inc - Channel 4 undercover investigation, a lawsuit, falling user numbers, sudden 19% drop in company value & US$12 billion hit to personal fortune

As the fall-out from manipulated US presidential campaign and UK Brexit national referendum continues try at it might Facebook Inc just can't give a cursory apology for its part in these events and mover on - users and mainstream media won't cease scutiny of its business practices.

News.com.au, 27 July 2018:

Shares in Facebook plummeted 19 per cent to $US176.26 at the end of trading on Thursday, wiping out some $US120 billion ($A160 billion) — believed to be the worst single-day evaporation of market value for any company....

Founder Mark Zuckerberg, who has a 13 percent stake in Facebook, saw his fortune dropped by more than $US12 billion ($A16 billion) in less than 24 hours, to around $74 billion ($A100 billion).

The fall came after the social media giant revealed three million European users had closed their accounts since the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. The record decline pushed the tech-heavy Nasdaq more than one per cent lower.

CNet, 27 July 2018:

It began Wednesday with Facebook, which announced that daily active user counts had fallen in Europe, to 279 million from 282 million earlier this year. Facebook also indicated it was no longer growing in the US and Canada, two of the most lucrative advertising markets. Just as Facebook was working through its second year of nearly nonstop scandals over unchecked political meddling and data misuse, it was becoming clear that the days of consistent and relatively easy growth were fading.

Reuters, 28 July 2018:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Facebook Inc (FB.O) and its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg were sued on Friday in what could be the first of many lawsuits over a disappointing earnings announcement by the social media company that wiped out about $120 billion of shareholder wealth.

The complaint filed by shareholder James Kacouris in Manhattan federal court accused Facebook, Zuckerberg and Chief Financial Officer David Wehner of making misleading statements about or failing to disclose slowing revenue growth, falling operating margins, and declines in active users.

Chanel4.com, news release, 17 July 2018:

Dispatches investigation reveals how Facebook moderates content

An undercover investigation by Firecrest Films for Channel 4 Dispatches has revealed for the first time how Facebook decides what users can and can’t see on the platform. (Inside Facebook: Secrets of the Social Network, Channel 4 Dispatches, 9pm, 17 July). 

Dispatches’ investigation reveals:

       *Violent content such as graphic images and videos of assaults on children, remaining on the site, despite being flagged by users as inappropriate and requests to have it removed.

·         *Thousands of reported posts remained unmoderated and on the site while we were filming, beyond Facebook’s stated aim of a 24-hour turnaround, including potentially posts relating to suicide threats and self-harm.

·        * Moderators told not to take any action if content shows a child who is visibly below Facebook’s 13-year-old age limit, rather than report it as posted by underage users, even if the content includes self-harming.

·         *Allegations from an early Facebook investor and mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, that Facebook’s business model benefits from extreme content which engages viewers for longer, generating higher advertising revenue.

·         *Pages belonging to far-right groups, with large numbers of followers, allowed to exceed deletion threshold, and subject to different treatment in the same category as pages belonging to governments and news organisations.

·       *  Policies allowing hate speech towards ethnic and religious immigrants, and trainers instructing moderators to ignore racist content in accordance with Facebook’s policies.

      Dispatches sent an undercover reporter to work as a content moderator in Facebook’s largest centre for UK content moderation. The work is outsourced to a company called Cpl Resources plc in Dublin which has worked with Facebook since 2010. The investigation reveals the training given to content moderators to demonstrate how to decide whether content reported to them by users, such as graphic images and videos of child abuse, self-harming, and violence should be allowed to remain on the site or be deleted. Dispatches also films day-to-day moderation of content on the site, revealing:

      Violent content:

      One of the most sensitive areas of Facebook’s content rulebook is about graphic    violence. When dealing with graphic violence content, moderators have three options – ignore, delete, or mark as disturbing which places restrictions on who can see the content.

      Dispatches’ undercover reporter is seen moderating a video showing two teenage schoolgirls fighting. Both girls are clearly identifiable and the video has been shared more than a thousand times. He’s told that Facebook’s rules say that because the video has been posted with a caption condemning the violence and warning people to be careful about visiting the location where it was filmed, it should not be deleted and instead should be left on the site and marked as disturbing content. Dispatches speaks to the mother of the girl involved who tells the programme the distress and impact the video had on her daughter. She struggles to understand the decision to leave the video up on the site. “To wake up the next day and find out that literally the whole world is watching must have been horrifying. It was humiliating for her, it was devastating for her. You see the images and it’s horrible, it’s disgusting. That’s someone’s child fighting in the park. It’s not Facebook entertainment.”

      Facebook told Dispatches that the child or parent of a child featured in videos like this can ask them to be removed. Richard Allan, VP of Public Policy at Facebook said, “Where people are highlighting an issue and condemning the issue, even if the issue is painful, there are a lot of circumstances where people will say to us, look Facebook, you should not interfere with my ability to highlight a problem that’s occurred.

      Online anti-child abuse campaigner Nicci Astin tells Dispatches about another violent video which shows a man punching and stamping on a toddler. She says she reported the video to Facebook in 2012 and received a message back saying it didn’t violate its terms and conditions. The video is used during the undercover reporter’s training period as an example of what would be left up on the site, and marked as disturbing, unless posted with a celebratory caption. The video is still up on the site, without a graphic warning, nearly six years later. Facebook told Dispatches they do escalate these issues and contact law enforcement, and the video should have been removed.

      One moderator tells the Dispatches undercover reporter that “if you start censoring too much then people lose interest in the platform…. It’s all about making money at the end of the day.”

      Venture Capitalist Roger McNamee was one of Facebook’s earliest investors, a mentor to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and the man who brought Sheryl Sandberg to the company. He tells Dispatches that Facebook’s business model relies on extreme content:

      “From Facebook’s point of view this is, this is just essentially, you know, the crack cocaine of their product right. It’s the really extreme, really dangerous form of content that attracts the most highly engaged people on the platform. Facebook understood that it was desirable to have people spend more time on site if you’re going to have an advertising based business, you need them to see the ads so you want them to spend more time on the site. Facebook has learned that the people on the extremes are the really valuable ones because one person on either extreme can often provoke 50 or 100 other people and so they want as much extreme content as they can get.”

      Richard Allan told Dispatches: Shocking content does not make us more money, that’s just a misunderstanding of how the system works …. People come to Facebook for a safe secure experience to share content with their family and friends. The vast majority of those 2 billion people would never dream of sharing content that, like that, to shock and offend people. And the vast majority of people don’t want to see it. There is a minority who are prepared to abuse our systems and other internet platforms to share the most offensive kind of material. But I just don’t agree that that is the experience that most people want and that’s not the experience we’re trying to deliver.

      Underage users:

      No child under 13 can have a Facebook account. However, a trainer tells the undercover reporter not to proactively take any action regarding their age if the report contains an image of a user who is visibly underage, unless the user admits to being underage: “We have to have an admission that the person is underage. If not, we just like pretend that we are blind and we don’t know what underage looks like.” Even if the content contains images for self-harm for example, and the image is of someone who looks underage the user is treated like an adult and sent information about organisations which help with self-harming issues, rather than being reported for being underage: “If this person was a kid, like a 10-year-old kid we don’t care, we still action the ticket as if they were an adult.” Facebook confirmed to Dispatches that its policy is not to take action about content posted by users who appear to be underage, unless the user admits to being underage.

Hate speech:

       Dispatches’ undercover reporter is told that, while content which racially abuses protected ethnic or religious groups violates Facebook’s guidelines, if the posts racially abuse immigrants from these groups, then the content is permitted. Facebook’s training for moderators also includes a post including a cartoon comment which describes drowning a girl if her first boyfriend is a negro, as content which is permitted. Facebook confirmed to Dispatches that the picture violates their hate speech standards and they are reviewing what went wrong to prevent it from happening again.

     “Shielded Review” – Popular pages kept up despite violations:
Our undercover reporter is told that if any page is found to have five or more pieces of content that violate Facebook’s rules, then the entire page should be taken down, in accordance with the company’s policies. But we have discovered that posts on Facebook’s most popular pages, with the highest numbers of followers, cannot be deleted by ordinary content moderators at Cpl. Instead, they are referred to the Shielded Review Queue where they can be directly assessed by Facebook rather than Cpl staff. These pages include those belonging to jailed former English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson, who has over 900,000 followers, and who has been given the same protected status as Governments and news organisations. A moderator tells the undercover reporter that the far-right group Britain First’s pages were left up despite repeatedly featuring content that breached Facebook’s guidelines because, “they have a lot of followers so they’re generating a lot of revenue for Facebook. The Britain First Facebook page was finally deleted in March 2018 following the arrest of deputy leader Jayda Fransen.

      Facebook confirmed to Dispatches that they do have special procedures for popular and high profile pages, which includes Tommy Robinson and included Britain First.

      They say Shielded Review has been renamed ‘Cross Check’. Lord Allen told Dispatches: “if the content is indeed violating it will go….I want to be clear this is not a discussion about money, this is a discussion about political speech. People are debating very sensitive issues on Facebook, including issues like immigration. And that political debate can be entirely legitimate. I do think having extra reviewers on that when the debate is taking place absolutely makes sense and I think people would expect us to be careful and cautious before we take down their political speech.”

      Delays in moderating content:

      Facebook’s publicly stated aim is to assess all reported content within 24 hours. However, during the period of the undercover filming, Dispatches found a significant backlog. Moderators told the undercover reporter that due to the volume of reports, or tickets, they are supposed to moderate, they are unable to check up to 7,000 reported comments on a daily basis. At one point there is a backlog of 15,000 reports which have not been assessed, with some tickets are still waiting for moderation up to five days after being reported. Facebook told Dispatches that the backlog filmed in the programme was cleared by 6 April.

…/ends

[my yellow highlighting]

Trump World this week

When it comes to My Heath Record the words horse, stable, door, spring to mind

In January 2016 the Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) became a corporate Commonwealth established under the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability (Establishing the Australian Digital Health Agency) Rule.

It has a board appointed by the Minister for Health in whose portfolio it is situated and the board is the accountable body of the ADHA.

Currently Mr Jim Birch AM, Chair. Mr Rob Bransby, Dr Eleanor Chew, Dr Elizabeth Deven, Ms Lyn McGrath, Ms Stephanie Newell, Dr Bennie Ng,  Professor Johanna Westbrook and Michael Walsh sit on this board.

The executive team is headed by Tim Kelsey as CEO, with Professor Meredith Makeham as Chief Medical Adviser and Bettina McMahon, Ronan O’Connor, Terrance Seymour & Dr. Monica Trujillo as the four executive managers.

ADHA is also the designated Systems Operator for My Health Record which currently holds the personal health information of 5.98 million people across the country and will add the remaining 19 million after 15 October 2018 unless they opt out of being included in this national database.

Given the potential size of this database the question of cyber security springs to mind.

It seems that the Australian Digital Health Agency has not been independently audited for cyber resilience by the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) ahead of beginning the mammoth task of collecting and collating the personal heath information of those19 million people.

Australian National Audit Office, Potential audit: 2018-19:

Management of cyber security risks in My Health Record

The audit would examine the effectiveness of the Australian Digital Health Agency’s management of cyber security risks associated with the implementation and ongoing maintenance of the My Health Record system.

My Health Record creates a record of Australians’ interactions with healthcare providers, and more than 5.5 million Australians have a My Health Record. The audit would focus on whether adequate controls are in place to protect the privacy and integrity of individual records.

It seems that the Australian general public still only has the honeypot's dubious word that it cannot be raided by unauthorised third parties.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has reacted to growing community concern about the number of agencies which can access My Health Records with a vague promise of "refinements" and with this outright lie; "The fact is that there have been no privacy complaints or breaches with My Health Record in six years and there are over 6 million people with My Health Records".

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner has recorded complaints and at least 242 individual My Health Records have been part of mandatory data breach reports in 2015-16 to 2016-17, with nine of the 51 reported breach events involving "the unauthorised access of a healthcare recipient’s My Health Record by a third party".

BACKGROUND

Intermedium, 8 May 2018:

Re-platforming options for the My Health Record (MHR) system will soon be up for consideration, with an Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) spokesperson confirming that a request for information will be released in the next few months to inform plans to modernise the infrastructure underpinning Australia’s mammoth patient health database.

An open-source, cloud-based environment has already been flagged as a possibility for the MHR by Department of Health (DoH) Special Adviser for Strategic trategic Health Systems and Information Management Paul Madden at Senate Estimates in May last year. He also said that the re-platforming decision was one of many “variables” that needed to be squared away to accurately gauge how much the MHR system will cost beyond 2019-20.

“The variables in there include the re-platforming of the system to an open source environment, using cloud technology… which will be something we will not know the cost of until we hit the market to get a view on that”, Madden said last year. “Our commitment is to come back to the budget in 2019 to paint out those costs for the four years beyond.”

ADHA is scoping out MHR re-platforming options early, with the existing contract with the Accenture-led consortium not set to expire until 2020. As the “National Infrastructure Operator”, Accenture is tasked with running and maintaining MHR’s infrastructure. The prime contractor works with Oracle and Orion Health to provide the core systems and portals behind MHR.

Accenture was awarded the contract to design, build, integrate and test the then-personally controlled electronic health record system (PCEHR) back in 2011, and has signed 13 contracts worth a total of $709.53 million with DoH in relation to the MHR in that time. With the original infrastructure now over seven years old, ADHA recognise the importance of modernising the environment supporting the MHR....

The Sydney Morning Herald, Letter to the Editor, 26 July 2018. p20:

What happens to medical records when opting out?

Dr Kerryn Phelps reminds us that, if people don't opt out, the My Health Records Act allows disclosure of patients' health information to police, courts and the ATO without a warrant ("My Health Record backlash builds", July 25). This would be in addition to "health information such as allergies, medicines and immunisations" available for emergency staff.

How can the access be restricted to emergency staff? How can only certain categories of information be released when allergies and medication are part of general medical notes? I was not reassured by "serious penalties relating to the misuse of information do not apply to accidental misuse" on the website. I opted out.

My GP has told me that, nonetheless, she will be obliged to upload my records - which sounds credible since I have formally opted out with the government, not with my doctor's practice. So what happens - does my health record get kicked off "the cloud"? What exactly did I opt out of?

Denise De Vreeze [my yellow highlighting]

Super Saturday By-elections, 28 July 2018 - counting is underway

Click on the Australian Electoral Commission links to see names of the 48 candidates standing for election and their declarations of eligibility under s44 of the Australian Constitution.

Longman, Queensland

Mayo, South Australia

Braddon, Tasmania

Fremantle, Western Australia

Perth, Western Australia

Progressive voting results will be posted on AEC Virtual Tally Room at https://tallyroom.aec.gov.au/ from 6pm onwards.

Political Cartoons of the Week

These cartoonists can be found at:
Kasia Babis https://thenib.com/kasia-babis
Ed Hall @halltoons
Cathy Wilcox http://cathywilcox.com.au/
Glen LeLievre https://www.lelievrecartoons.com/

Turnbull invites Trump to Australia - expected to arrive in November 2018

This unstable individual is a threat to the US-Australia alliance, a serious security risk, as well as danger to world peace and international trade - an erratic politician Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Bligh Turnbull insists on publicly supporting as an "American patriot", who he is prepared to follow into a war of Trump's own making and, who he will be hosting on a proposed visit to Australia.

The New York Times, 18 July 2018:

WASHINGTON — Two weeks before his inauguration, Donald J. Trump was shown highly classified intelligence indicating that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had personally ordered complex cyberattacks to sway the 2016 American election.

The evidence included texts and emails from Russian military officers and information gleaned from a top-secret source close to Mr. Putin, who had described to the C.I.A. how the Kremlin decided to execute its campaign of hacking and disinformation.

Mr. Trump sounded grudgingly convinced, according to several people who attended the intelligence briefing. But ever since, Mr. Trump has tried to cloud the very clear findings that he received on Jan. 6, 2017, which his own intelligence leaders have unanimously endorsed.

The shifting narrative underscores the degree to which Mr. Trump regularly picks and chooses intelligence to suit his political purposes. That has never been more clear than this week.

On Monday, standing next to the Russian president in Helsinki, Finland, Mr. Trump said he accepted Mr. Putin’s denial of Russian election intrusions. By Tuesday, faced with a bipartisan political outcry, Mr. Trump sought to walk back his words and sided with his intelligence agencies.

On Wednesday, when a reporter asked, “Is Russia still targeting the U.S.?” Mr. Trump shot back, “No” — directly contradicting statements made only days earlier by his director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, who was sitting a few chairs away in the Cabinet Room. (The White House later said he was responding to a different question.)

Hours later, in a CBS News interview, Mr. Trump seemed to reverse course again. He blamed Mr. Putin personally, but only indirectly, for the election interference by Russia, “because he’s in charge of the country.”

In the run-up to this week’s ducking and weaving, Mr. Trump has done all he can to suggest other possible explanations for the hacks into the American political system. His fear, according to one of his closest aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity, is that any admission of even an unsuccessful Russian attempt to influence the 2016 vote raises questions about the legitimacy of his presidency.

The Jan. 6, 2017, meeting, held at Trump Tower, was a prime example. He was briefed that day by John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director; James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence; and Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency and the commander of United States Cyber Command.

The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, was also there; after the formal briefing, he privately told Mr. Trump about the “Steele dossier.” That report, by a former British intelligence officer, included uncorroborated salacious stories of Mr. Trump’s activities during a visit to Moscow, which he denied.

According to nearly a dozen people who either attended the meeting with the president-elect or were later briefed on it, the four primary intelligence officials described the streams of intelligence that convinced them of Mr. Putin’s role in the election interference.

They included stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee that had been seen in Russian military intelligence networks by the British, Dutch and American intelligence services. Officers of the Russian intelligence agency formerly known as the G.R.U. had plotted with groups like WikiLeaks on how to release the email stash.

And ultimately, several human sources had confirmed Mr. Putin’s own role.

That included one particularly valuable source, who was considered so sensitive that Mr. Brennan had declined to refer to it in any way in the Presidential Daily Brief during the final months of the Obama administration, as the Russia investigation intensified.

Instead, to keep the information from being shared widely, Mr. Brennan sent reports from the source to Mr. Obama and a small group of top national security aides in a separate, white envelope to assure its security.

Mr. Trump and his aides were also given other reasons during the briefing to believe that Russia was behind the D.N.C. hacks.

The same Russian groups had been involved in cyberattacks on the State Department and White House unclassified email systems in 2014 and 2015, and in an attack on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They had aggressively fought the N.S.A. against being ejected from the White House system, engaging in what the deputy director of the agency later called “hand-to-hand combat” to dig in…..

Read the full article here.

Reuters, 4 July 20118:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House on Monday threatened to strike back at critics of President Donald Trump’s contacts with Russia by revoking the security clearances of six former U.S. officials, drawing accusations that he was abusing his power and aiming to stifle dissent.

HuffPost, 245 July 2018:

Donald Trump is doing anything he can to hold on to his base ― even employing propaganda tricks straight out of 1984.

On Tuesday, the President spoke at a Veterans of Foreign Wars gathering in Kansas City and told his followers to forget about anything else other than what he tells them.

“Just remember, what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening,” he said.

 …ThinkProgress chillingly notes that Trump’s demand directly correlates to the “final, most essential command” of the ruling totalitarian regime in George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984: “to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.”

Trump decided to jump headfirst into that belief by telling the crowd, “We don’t apologize for America anymore. We stand up for America. We stand up for the patriots who defend America.”

Jake Tapper noted on Twitter that those comments came eight days after he blamed the U.S. for poor relations with Russia.