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Three Things: North by East by Northeast on January 6

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[NB: Check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

While Marcy has the prosecutions of January 6 perps admirably handled, there are a few things which have niggled at me as the investigations into the insurrection have progressed.

Maybe they’re something; maybe they’re nothing. What do you think?

~ 3 ~

In the early days after the insurrection, a few of the better pieces of reporting looked at the location and timing of the mob. I’d snapped screenshots from one report in particular but I should have done more since the original report no longer contains the key interactive feature without any note it was pulled/killed. I can’t pull up the video any longer from which I pulled this screenshot – here is the original as snapped and an enhanced version tweaked for color balance, gamma, and saturation.


In this snap from a representation of cell phone users moving toward the Capitol on January 6, note in particular at the northeast of the Capitol Building a dense cluster of cell phone signatures.

The cluster isn’t highlighted like the mass of rioters who moved from the Ellipse toward the Capitol, but the signatures are dense.

You’ll note the location is at/near Columbus Circle where people will catch transportation, but the cell phone traffic didn’t appear to move toward the circle after the speeches were done at the Ellipse; it was very focused on moving toward the Capitol.

Nor was there cell phone traffic moving toward the Capitol South Station for transportation though the area may have been closed to through traffic.

Who were these people and why were there so many in that one north-northeast location as the Capitol was assaulted? Is there a benign explanation like people waiting for rally/insurrection participants, or is there another explanation?

~ 2 ~

Dr. Jack Brown, who does body language analysis, performed an analysis of surveillance photos and video which captured the perp who left the improvised explosive devices near the Democratic National Committee building and the Capitol Hill Club on the evening of January 5. It’s worth your time to visit this threaded study.

I can’t help thinking after looking at images and video of the perp that this was a woman wearing shoes which may not have been hers, but perhaps my perception is off.

One really important detail came up in this analysis which I know I’d missed before and perhaps reporters did, too: earlier reporting by multiple media outlets said the second IED had been placed at the RNC building (located at 310 First St SE, Washington, DC), not the Capitol Hill Club (located at 300 First St SE, Washington, DC). What’s the story here? Is it important that the perp targeted the Capitol Hill Club and not the RNC?

One other detail which I don’t recall being reported before the Washington Post’s huge investigative spread was the existence of a third suspicious package which hasn’t been called an IED or bomb, located at the Supreme Court building which is located directly east of the Capitol Building.

The DNC offices are south of the Capitol while the Capitol Hill Club is to the southeast. Had the IEDs at these sites detonated, law enforcement (and National Guard if they were summoned) may have swarmed to the location of the IEDs. If the suspicious material at the Supreme Court building was an IED, that would also have drawn first response personnel away from the Capitol. All three combined would have left the east side of the Capitol even more lightly defended than it was.

Not to mention the chaos such blasts would have created among mob members who weren’t in on a possible conspiracy behind the bombs.

All of which makes the congregated cell phone signatures to the northeast of the Capitol Building off First Street more intriguing.

~ 1 ~

Long-time emptywheel community member harpie has done yeoman’s work pulling together timeline content related to January 6 events. In a comment last night she pointed to the parking place of Alabaman Lonnie Coffman who has accepted a plea agreement related to a 17-count indictment related to weapons and explosives found in his pickup truck on January 6.

You may recall the truck had guns and Molotov cocktails in it. Reporting mentioned that the truck was found during a search around the area where the IEDs had been found:

… According to charging papers, police spotted weapons in his red pickup while searching an area of Capitol Hill that had been sealed off because unexploded pipe bombs had been reported near the headquarters of the Republican and Democratic parties minutes before the mob assault began about 1 p.m. …

The curious thing about this truck which caught my eye was its parked location: 301 First Street SE. That’s between the DNC offices and the Capitol Hill Club as you’ll note on this map:

 

This parking address denoted by the red flag is next to the Capitol Hill Club.

It’s also directly south on First Street from whatever was going on with that cluster of cell phones to the northeast of the Capitol Building.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Coffman’s plea agreement was sealed, by the way:

… In a 24-page decision, Kollar-Kotelly found that sealed government filings and his cache of weapons “convincingly demonstrate[d]” his planned intentions to disrupt Congress in potential coordination with others. The judge did not say that coordination was realized. …

Coordination? Or conspiracy?

~ 0 ~

I can’t help wondering if there was a Quick Response Force waiting at Columbus Circle for some triggering event less than a mile south along First Street SE.

Were the Molotov cocktails not meant to be thrown but part of an in-place fiery signal in a sacrificed truck parked between the location of two IEDs? Or were they meant to be used on whomever responded to calls had the IEDs detonated?

It will be a long wait before we find out. Plenty of food for thought in the mean time.

Thanks to harpie for all the bits and pieces!

Three Things: Good, Better, Best News

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Let’s mix things up a bit and roll around in some good news for a change, hmm?

~ 3 ~

Arrests continue in wake of January 6 Capitol insurrection and they are both pleasurable and comic.

Mothertrucking racist who waved an enemy flag inside the capitol has been arrested.

Goddamned firefighter arrested for throwing a fire extinguisher at a Capitol Police officer’s head.

Chicago man stupid enough to think he wouldn’t be caught, was caught.

Gratifying to see they are chasing all of these perps to ground. These are only a few I’ve seen in my timeline, but among some of the more egregious insurrectionists. The firefighter is only lucky he didn’t throw that extinguisher hard enough to kill the Capitol Police Officer.

~ 2 ~

Flint may get some justice; former Michigan governor Rick Snyder was charged with two misdemeanor counts of willful neglect of duty in his handling of Flint’s water crisis. Six others were charged as well; the former director of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services and the state’s former chief medical executive were both charged with involuntary manslaughter related to the known dozen deaths of Michiganders who died from Legionnaire’s disease acquired from the city’s contaminated water.

Personally, I think Snyder’s charge is both too light and won’t stick; an entire city’s children were poisoned because he failed to execute his job faithfully, not to mention an increase in fetal deaths. Lead poisoning isn’t like getting the flu — the brain damage it causes may be permanent though the brain can be trained to compensate for some of the damage. Chances are good Snyder will weasel out of the charges because he relied on experts like the director of MDHHS and the chief medical executive.

One of my adult kids was poisoned during the period when Flint’s water was contaminated. They were fortunate their exposure was limited, but it took nearly five years to recover their health and we’re still not certain there won’t be sequelae which haven’t yet emerged. An entire city faces the same challenge, at a minimum; not all those who died of Legionnaire’s were Flint city residents, getting sick in Flint because they had to be in Flint for work or some other reason. There’s a possibility there were more Flint-related deaths which were masked by other chronic illness, but we may never know for sure.

At least these charges are the beginning of the end to the Flint water crisis. I do hope during the course of prosecution that all communications before and immediately following the cutover from Detroit’s water supply to the Flint River will be disclosed. I still suspect something happened the night of the cutover when Detroit made a last pitch to keep Flint on their water system.

~ 1 ~

A new day dawns at Democratic National Committee as Joe Biden gave Jaime Harrison the nod for DNC Chair. His experience will help change the party’s approach to southern states, complimenting the work Stacey Abrams did in Georgia.

There will be grousing from the far left about Harrison’s experience working for Podesta Group and the types of clients served. But Harrison has done what others with similar experience haven’t — organizing and getting out the vote in marginalized communities, zip code by zip code. Will he be more moderate as many Black Americans are across the south? Sure, but leave the policy and legislation to the Democratic majority in Congress; if they can pull off greater successes felt at home and in American’s wallets, the entire base will move more to the left.

We may have a chance to keep the majority and win more seats if Harrison can keep the energy high across the party. We don’t want another 2010 during which we lost an extremely narrow majority in the Senate, ushering in Mitch McConnell’s nightmarish decade of obstruction and social destruction.

~ 0 ~

What other good news is there? Apart from the fact we are now six days away from Biden’s inauguration. Share in comments.

Cloud Computing and the Single Server

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[NB: Check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while. Push came to shove with Marcy’s post this past week on Roger Stone and the Russian hack of the DNC’s emails as well as her post on Rick Gates’ status update which intersects with Roger Stone’s case.

First, an abbreviated primer about cloud computing. You’ve likely heard the term before even if you’re not an information technology professional because many of the services you use on the internet rely on cloud computing.

Blogging, for example, wouldn’t have taken off and become popular if it wasn’t for the concept of software and content storage hosted somewhere in a data center. The first blogging application I used required users to download the application and then transfer their blogpost using FTP (file transfer protocol) to a server. What a nuisance. Once platforms like Blogger provided a user application accessible by a browser as well as the blog application and hosting on a remote server, blogging exploded. This is just one example of cloud computing made commonplace.

Email is another example of cloud computing you probably don’t even think about, though some users still do use a local email client application like Microsoft’s proprietary application Outlook or Mozilla’s open source application Thunderbird. Even these client applications at a user’s fingertips rely on files received, sent, managed, and stored by software in a data center.

I won’t get into more technical terms like network attached storage or storage area network or other more challenging topics like virtualization. What the average American needs to know is that a lot of computing they come in contact every day isn’t done on desktop or laptop computers, or even servers located in a small business’s office.

A massive amount of computing and the related storage operates and resides in the cloud — a cutesy name for a remotely located data center.

This is a data center:

Located in Council Bluffs, Iowa, this is one of Google’s many data centers. In this photo you can see racks of servers and all the infrastructure supporting the servers, though some of it isn’t readily visible to the untrained eye.

This is another data center:

This is an Amazon data center, possibly one supporting Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the biggest cloud service providers. Many of the sites you visit on the internet every day purchase their hosting and other services from AWS. Some companies ‘rent’ hosting space for their email service from AWS.

Here’s a snapshot of a technician working in a Google data center:

Beneath those white tiles making up the ‘floor’ are miles and miles of network cables and wiring for power as well as ventilation systems. More cables, wires, and ventilation run overhead.

Note the red bubble I’ve added to the photo — that’s a single blade-type server inserted into a rack. It’s hard to say how much computing power and storage that one blade might have had on it because that information would have been (and remains) proprietary — made to AWS specifications, which change with technology’s improvements.

These blades are swapped out on a regular maintenance cycle, too, their load shifted to other blades as they are taken down and replaced with a new blade.

Now ask yourself which of these servers in this or some other data center might have hosted John Podesta’s emails, or those of 300 other people linked to the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party targeted by Russia in the same March 2016 bulk phishing attack?

Not a single one of them — probably many of them.

And the data and applications may not stay in one server, one rack, one site alone. It could be spread all over depending on what’s most efficient and available at any time, and the architecture of failover redundancy.

~ ~ ~
Some enterprises may not rely on software-as-a-service (SaaS), like email, hosted in a massive data center cloud. They might instead operate their own email server farm. Depending on the size of the organization, this can be a server that looks not unlike a desktop computer, or it can be a server farm in a small data center.

(The Fortune 100 company for which I once worked had multiple data centers located globally, as well as smaller server clusters located on site for specialized needs, ex. a cluster collecting real-time telemetry from customers. Their very specific needs as well as the realistic possibility that smaller businesses could be spun off required more flexibility than purchasing hosted services could provide at the time.)

And some enterprises may rely on a mix of cloud-based SaaS and self-maintained and -hosted applications.

In 2016 the DNC used Microsoft Exchange Server software for its email across different servers. Like the much larger Google-hosted Gmail service, users accessed their mail through browsers or client applications on their devices. The diagrams reflecting these two different email systems aren’t very different.

This is a representation of Google’s Gmail:

[source: MakeInJava(.)com]

This is a representation of Microsoft Exchange Server:

Users, through client/browser applications, access their email on a remote server via the internet. Same-same in general terms, except for scale and location.

If you’ve been following along with the Trump-Russia investigation, you know that there’s been considerable whining on the part of the pro-Trump faction about the DNC’s email server. They question why a victim of a hack would not have turned over their server to the FBI for forensic investigation and instead went to a well-known cybersecurity firm, Crowdstrike, to both stop the hack, remove whatever invasive tools had been used, and determine the entity/ies behind the hack.

A number of articles have been written explaining the hacking scenario and laying out a timeline. A couple pieces in particular noted that turning over the server to the FBI would have been disruptive — see Kevin Poulsen in The Daily Beast last July, quoting former FBI cybercrime agent James Harris:

“In most cases you don’t even ask, you just assume you’re going to make forensic copies…For example when the Google breach happened back in 2009, agents were sent out with express instructions that you image what they allow you to image, because they’re the victim, you don’t have a search warrant, and you don’t want to disrupt their business.”

Poulsen also quantified the affected computing equipment as “140 servers, most of them cloud-based” meaning some email and other communications services may have been hosted outside the DNC’s site. It would make sense to use contracted cloud computing based on the ability to serve widespread locations and scale up as the election season crunched on.

But what’s disturbing about the demands for the server — implying the DNC’s email was located on a single computer within DNC’s physical control — is not just ignorance about cloud computing and how it works.

It’s that demands for the DNC to turn over their single server went all the way to the top of the Republican Party when Trump himself complained — from Helsinki, under Putin’s watchful eye — about the DNC’s server:

“You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server. Why didn’t they take the server? Where is the server, I want to know, and what is the server saying?”

And the rest of the right-wing Trumpist ecosphere picked up the refrain and maintains it to this day.

Except none of them are demanding Google turn over the original Gmail servers through which John Podesta was hacked and hundreds of contacts phished.

And none of the demands are expressly about AWS servers used to host some of DNC’s email, communications, and data.

The demands are focused on some indeterminate yet singular server belonging to or used by the DNC.

~ ~ ~
The DNC had to shut down their affected equipment and remove it from their network in order to clean out the intrusion; some of their equipment had to be stripped down to “bare metal,” meaning all software and data on affected systems were removed before they were rebuilt or replaced. 180 desktops and laptops had to be replaced — a measure which in enterprise settings is highly disruptive.

Imagine, too, how sensitive DNC staff were going forward about sharing materials freely within their organization, not knowing whether someone might slip and fall prey to spearphishing. There must have been communications and impromptu retraining about information security after the hack was discovered and the network remediated.

All of this done smack in the middle of the 2016 election season — the most important days of the entire four-year-long election cycle — leading into the Democratic Party’s convention.

(This remediation still wasn’t enough because the Russians remained in the machines into October 2016.)

If the right-wing monkey horde cares only about the DNC’s “the server” and not the Google Gmail servers accessed in March 2016 or the AWS servers accessed April through October 2016, this should tell you their true aim: It’s to disrupt and shut down the DNC again.

The interference with the 2016 election wasn’t just Russian-aided disinformation attacking Hillary Clinton and allies, or Russian hacks stealing emails and other files in order to leak them through Wikileaks.

The interference included forcing the DNC to shut down and/or reroute parts of its operation:

(excerpt, p. 22, DNC lawsuit against Russian Federation, GRU, et al)

And the attack continues unabated, going into the 2020 general election season as long as the right-wing Trumpists continue to demand the DNC turn over the server.

There is no one server. The DNC shouldn’t slow or halt its operations to accommodate opponents’ and suspects’ bad faith.

~ ~ ~
As for Trump’s complaint from Helsinki: he knows diddly-squat about technology. It’s not surprising his comments reflected this.

But he made these comments in Helsinki, after meeting with Putin. Was he repeating part of what he had been told, that Russia didn’t hack the server? Was he not only parroting Putin’s denial but attempting to obstruct justice by interfering in the investigation by insisting the server needed to be physically seized for forensic inspection?

~ ~ ~
With regard to Roger Stone’s claims about Crowdstrike, his complaints aren’t just a means to distract and redirect from his personal exposure. They provide another means to disrupt the DNC’s normal business going forward.

The demands are also a means to verify what exactly the Special Counsel’s Office and Crowdstrike found in order to determine what will be more effective next time.

The interference continues under our noses.

This is an open thread.

Tuesday: Tilted

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I miss prosthesis and mended souls
Trample over beauty while singing their thoughts
I match them with my euphoria
When they said “Je suis plus folle que toi”

— excerpt, Tilted by Christine And The Queens

We’ve spent (and will spend) a lot of time looking at Americans this month, given the two major parties’ political conventions back to back. Yeah, we’ll look at Russia with a gimlet eye directed by media. But we could use a look away.

The artist in this video is actually Héloïse Letissier; Christine and the Queens is the stage name she and a group of transgender supporting artists use, though many of her works are solo performances. Letissier’s work isn’t confined to music alone as she also works in graphic arts. Her work frequently combines French and English lyrics with strong synthpop beat, making for wide appeal outside of France. If you like Tilted, try the mournful but earworm-y Paradis Perdus and the more hip-hoppy No Harm Is Done.

Allons-y!

Eat more cyber

Motor mayhem

  • Tesla driver ‘speeding’ before Florida crash (Reuters) — IMO, the truck driver still bears some responsibility here, failed to yield to oncoming vehicle in spite of their speed. But I don’t have all the data, can’t be certain. One thing I can be more sure of: Tesla’s ‘driving-assist software’ should NOT be perceived as autopilot. If this was true autopilot, the software would have adjusted the vehicle’s speed to meet and not exceed the posted limit.
  • U.S. District court gives prelim approval to Volkswagen’s $15B settlement (LAT) — Settlement covers consumers’ and EPA’s suit on passenger diesels with emissions cheat devices. The deal offers car owners to choose a vehicle buy-back on 2.0L passenger diesel models. VW Group’s 3.0L models are not included in this preliminary offer.
  • Volkswagen owners in EU get an apology, not a check (Politico.EU) — They are NOT happy with the disparity between the $15B initial settlement offered to US passenger diesel owners and the lip service offered to EU vehicle owners.

    “For the same car, in the U.S., you get a compensation, while in Europe you get an apology,” said Maroš Šefčovič, a Commission vice president overseeing energy and climate policy. “I don’t think it is fair.”

    Yeah, it’s not fair, and VW’s head engineer Ulrich Eichhorn is wrong when he says EU customers aren’t damaged. Baloney–the entire EU is damaged by higher NOX and other pollutants generated by these fraudulent cars. People are sick and dying because EU’s biggest automaker is poisoning the air.

Science-y schtuff

  • WHO: Antibiotic resistance a bigger threat than cancer within ~30 years (Euronews) — The rise of superbugs and inadequate research is already costing tens of thousands lives each year and beaucoup money. It will only get worse if the use of antibiotics remains excessive and research doesn’t increase.
  • Plasma technology may extend storage life of fruits (ScienceDaily) — Plasma technology — using energy applied to a gas — can zap bacteria on surface of fruit to prevent deterioration the bacteria cause. Except it’s expensive compared to simply washing fruit with known natural antibacterial agents. Like vinegar and water. Plasma tech might be best used on soft fruits like berries which don’t handle washing very well. But still, more energy required, and any heat generated might cook the fruit. ~smh~
  • Better beer through yeast (Nature) — Soon-to-be-published paper will detail 150 yeast strains’ genomes in an effort to help beermakers find the perfect yeast. What happens when they find The One, though? Will we lose our excuse for sampling widely and deeply?

Longread for your next commute
Belt magazine offers a four-part series, Walking to Cleveland by Drew Philps. It’s a travelogue of sorts, documenting Philp’s journey on foot from Dearborn to Cleveland in time for the Republican National Convention. Visit the Midwest with read.

Catch you later!