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Comment: Unnamed intelligence sources are back at it again with the Russia hysteria. They should charge Russia rent for all the space it takes up in their heads. The reality is that, in this article, the main evidence for what they uncovered being garden variety espionage is the 3 years they sat on it - and throughout Russiagate at that. If there truly was some incendiary evidence, it would have been revealed way before now.

The dastardly doings of the Russians is rather common or garden variety spying. The Russians are probably doing it mainly to sow suspicion and doubt among the US intel types as can be seen by this statement:
"We came to the conclusion that they were trying to get into our heads," the former senior official said.
Messing with American intel is pretty easy to do; just have some diplomatic plate cars hang around outside Langley and the FBI HQ. That whole "tech" to intercept FBI communications and collect data from non-networked computers is stuff that the US intel types have been using for quite a while! Yet the article portrays it as some kind of awesome new tech that the Russians developed.

The references in the article to "interference in the elections" is complete horsehockey, as most people with two firing neurons know. The thing is, at this point (again as we know) the US NEEDS Russia to be "spying all over the USA", because the US intel community is a hungry insatiable beast that wants ever more money. How they gonna get that without a boogey man? As it says in the article:
"Revelations about the Russian compromise of the radio systems, recalled a former senior intelligence official, "kick-started the money flowing" to upgrade security."
While the US intel types willfully clutch their pearls about delusional Russian interference in order to bilk ever more money from taxpayers and keep ever tighter control over them, Russia is busy remaking the most important part of the world (Eurasia) in their own image.


On Dec. 29, 2016, the Obama administration announced that it was giving nearly three dozen Russian diplomats just 72 hours to leave the United States and was seizing two rural East Coast estates owned by the Russian government. As the Russians burned papers and scrambled to pack their bags, the Kremlin protested the treatment of its diplomats, and denied that those compounds — sometimes known as the "dachas" — were anything more than vacation spots for their personnel.

The Obama administration's public rationale for the expulsions and closures — the harshest U.S. diplomatic reprisals taken against Russia in several decades — was to retaliate for Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. But there was another critical, and secret, reason why those locations and diplomats were targeted.

Both compounds, and at least some of the expelled diplomats, played key roles in a brazen Russian counterintelligence operation that stretched from the Bay Area to the heart of the nation's capital, according to former U.S. officials. The operation, which targeted FBI communications, hampered the bureau's ability to track Russian spies on U.S. soil at a time of increasing tension with Moscow, forced the FBI and CIA to cease contact with some of their Russian assets, and prompted tighter security procedures at key U.S. national security facilities in the Washington area and elsewhere, according to former U.S. officials. It even raised concerns among some U.S. officials about a Russian mole within the U.S. intelligence community.

"It was a very broad effort to try and penetrate our most sensitive operations," said a former senior CIA official.

American officials discovered that the Russians had dramatically improved their ability to decrypt certain types of secure communications and had successfully tracked devices used by elite FBI surveillance teams. Officials also feared that the Russians may have devised other ways to monitor U.S. intelligence communications, including hacking into computers not connected to the internet. Senior FBI and CIA officials briefed congressional leaders on these issues as part of a wide-ranging examination on Capitol Hill of U.S. counterintelligence vulnerabilities.

These compromises, the full gravity of which became clear to U.S. officials in 2012, gave Russian spies in American cities including Washington, New York and San Francisco key insights into the location of undercover FBI surveillance teams, and likely the actual substance of FBI communications, according to former officials. They provided the Russians opportunities to potentially shake off FBI surveillance and communicate with sensitive human sources, check on remote recording devices and even gather intelligence on their FBI pursuers, the former officials said.

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