So if I followed the story, it as GRU (Russian intel) that hacked his phone. Dutch intel then recruited a spy from GRU that handed over the data.
In any case, Kushner - and rightfully so - could not obtain a security clearance the first time around, due to massive debt. But it was overruled / waived by higher ups.
I've worked in intel, and Kushner seems like the textbook example - a cautionary tale - on the type of person you do not want to grant anything of importance.
Honestly it sort of blows my mind that the US has a system decisions by security professionals can simply be overruled.
"Dutch government hacked into Jared Kushner's phone" is accurate.
The GRU double-agent proved that the GRU had compromised Kushner's phone. Subsequently, Dutch intelligence themselves independently attempted to hack Kushner's phone.
"In The Hague, the MIVD hacking team tried to reverse engineer the Russian penetration of Kushner’s iPhone." [...]
"The Dutch team had been trying to pick the phone’s door lock, so to speak, when it occurred to them that the Russians may have found an unlocked window to gain entry instead. Their hypothesis was correct. By early 2018, the MIVD had found a vulnerability in the iPhone that gave them access." [...]
"when Kushner used the phone, they could see his screen. Almost as soon as they got inside, the intelligence service began capturing every image of Kushner’s screen as he used it, filing their own cache of surveillance on their internal computer servers."
Also (edit):
The part of the story I actually care about is two governments hoarding an iphone zero day, and using it to secretly hack iphones. I condemn it.
Digital privacy is important to me. I think that all humans should have it. Feel free to disagree. Jared Kushner is a human.
So again, I condemn this extrajudicial activity, which undermines the digital security and privacy of everyone.
I'd love to correlate this comment of yours with the ones made around the time when it was found that the USA was spying wholesale on EU government officials, hacking telecommunications providers and so on.
The U.S. spent years explaining to the world that nothing is extrajudicial that happens to non-Americans outside of the United States. So please explain how this activity of the MIVD broke any Dutch laws.
> Digital privacy is important to me. I think that all humans should have it. Feel free to disagree. Jared Kushner is a human.
All the counter-arguments I've read to this comment so far have been along the lines of, "well they started it."
And well they did. But if your response to the U.S.'s brand of dehumanization is more dehumanization then you've actually helped them achieve their goal. The people who run the U.S. want a world where respect for privacy (among so many other things) is thrown away because they believe they have the guns and resources to gain the most from that kind of world.
It's part of why I'm getting out of the USA. Key norms of decency we had are broken now, and in our social system you can bet that the next powers who come in will do little more than make a show of repairing them. They now see what's possible and they'll use it for their own ends. It's a spiral.
I agree with you but by this time we know that this has become business as usual. I mean the U.S lead the way: Spy anyone including friends and allies. Find what they talk with their mother as well, maybe it would serve the orange pumpkin well in a negotiation.
Spying on everyone including your friends and allies has been standard practice for hundreds of years. The US's major sin, from an international politics perspective, might only be that they've been so hamfisted about it.
Compare to courtly politics in post-Renaissance Europe. All sorts of intrigue and backstabbing, largely only governed by two cardinal rules. First, never conduct yourself in an unseemly manner. Second, don't get caught.
I don't consider it extrajudicial. Kushner should be charged with crimes in the united states. It is not extrajudicial just because the US is corrupt and won't prosecute kushner. Had that prosecution happened, everything the dutch did would be evidence against kushner.
I don't see why the dutch have any obligation to avoid monitoring a compromised phone that the US lets happen. The dutch have every right to know what the russians are getting from that phone.
Becoming a public servant means you should have fewer privacy rights compared to the average person because of the outsized power and influence a public servant has. All the info that Kushner hid should have been in the security clearance form that he was exempted from.
Kushner's behavior undermined the world far more than this phone hack.
The part of the story I actually care about is two governments hoarding an iphone zero day, and using it to secretly hack iphones. I condemn it.
Sorry, but the US threw this out of the window starting with the Patriot Act. Many tech companies were in the NSA PRISM program and the program probably still exists today. Common US E2E encrypted messengers can be read out by US services through weak defaults (e.g. iMessage in iCloud is encrypted at-rest unless ADP is enabled both sides of the chat, similarly, WhatsApp only encrypts backups at-rest by default).
The US can grab all that data from US companies, regardless whether the person regardless of whether the person is inside or outside the US thanks to the CLOUD Act.
> Digital privacy is important to me. I think that all humans should have it. Feel free to disagree. Jared Kushner is a human.
This isn't about the privacy of one individual human. This is about the security practices of a politically exposed person and the information they have access to.
Any high profile, high security clearance individual must have top-notch security. Any information gleaned or stolen from them can have enormous repercussions.
Submitting yourself for security clearances involves signing up for these investigations. Either he did so and regrets it, or he took a job that absolutely requires that he did, but he didn't.
Kushner should not have been near any job of any importance. Especially not after it became known that corruption and crime wasn't just an individual thing but something that runs in the family.
Neither. He just do not give a shit, because he is Trumps family and as such, he does not have to give a shit. Practically speaking, he is very much above any law and there is whole party dedicated to keeping that way for him.
It requires nothing like a party. Presidents can pardon anybody they want, and we set a precedent, which seems to be holding for now, from the last President that you can even preemptively pardon people for any possible crime that they may or may not have committed during some window of time. So anybody sufficiently close to a President is defacto immune to the law. This will only change if immunity, pardoning, and other related laws change. And they will not.
This just isn’t true. They _should_ have top notch security but that also requires responsible, security-aware action from the principal.
This assumption was destroyed during the first Trump administration and continued being eroded in his second. They do not practice good opsec. (See Signal app usage) Nobody is enforcing policies, and nobody tells the bosses that they can’t do something because [reason].
You're out to lunch. The Dutch government has an obligation to spy on the US. To not do so would be an abdication of their responsibilities as a government.
It's strange to me, as it appears that in the US it apparently doesn't matter if any charges have already been filed. In my country a pardon can only be given to someone, who was already sentenced - there was even some controversy when a couple of years ago the president gave out a pardon before the legal process concluded. As a PhD in law he should have known this made no sense.
You could certainly argue US pardons are supposed to work the same way too, it's just no one has standing to challenge the blanket pardons, but I don't think anyone has tried recently. And the current regime is happy to keep such things around so they can use it on the way out the door.
Correct - it's even weirder, pardons can be given for a categories or even just a blanket pardon for any crimes that might have been committed. There aren't a lot of limits on it.
Kushner may not, but the excerpt indicates that Kushner’s lawyers only performed actions with approval of the president and in the interests of the United States.
So… the President is in pretty hot water if any senators decide to ask a few questions here.
Ah yes ... looks at calendar ... it's a Friday ... whooo boy, the President is in some pretty hot water today! Like yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that, and all the tomorrows until he's not the president any more.
Seriously, there is absolutely nothing the current US president could do that could constitute a "hot water" situation for him give the willingness of the Republican party and the SCOTUS to support him unconditionally.
USA won't extradite their war criminals. Look how
desperately Trump tries to fight down The Hague
criminal court. They have a LOT of dirt to cover
up here. I mean, just take the bombing of a school
with girls in Iran - is that not a war crime? And
that's just one of many more examples one could
give; Trump denying data to Ukrainians via Starlink
means he supports Putin's genocide.
Iran is actually fair game since it doesn't want to be part of the ICC. The same was true for Iraq and Afghanistan. There are no rights without obligations.
However, this isn't the case with Palestine, which is why Netanyahu has problems - and obviously Putin as well.
Israel and the US are also not part of the ICC. Yet they still call out "violations" of international law all the time. The ICC is just a colonialist tool used to beat down any trend towards sovereignty.
> the US has a system decisions by security professionals can simply be overruled
Also a problem in the UK (Boris Johnson with Lord Lebedev).
Unfortunately I think it does have to sit somewhere on the elected side. A situation where the permanent state can overrule elected representatives unconditionally isn't great. But what really ought to happen is an open court case; you cannot have public policy decisions made on the basis of secret intel in a democracy. That gives you the Iraq war.
Lebedev isn't a clean example: appointment to the Lords really isn't the same as getting Top Secret clearance. In fact, one of MI5s reported reasons for revising their assessment was that peers don't routinely see classified information iirc. Mandelson getting DV clearance via an FCO override so he could be ambassador is a better example, although they're still claiming Starmer didn't put his finger on the scales there, where Trump clearly did.
> recruited a spy from GRU that handed over the data.
Isn't that kinda bad for their health? Polonium intake is unhealthy.
I'm not an American so don't take this the wrong way, but Jared's response to the tweet, that the story is fabricated because of how complicated it is and VanityFair disclosed no evidences, should be considered as well.
> Isn't that kinda bad for their health? Polonium intake is unhealthy.
I believe the current modus operandi is to offer a window.
On a serious note: plenty of people were surprised that Navalny returned to Russia. I suspect that after his poisoning it became clear Putin and his cronies wanted him dead, so he chose to give them the judicial spectacle they wanted so that they would at least spare his family.
> Jared's response to the tweet, that the story is fabricated because of how complicated it is and VanityFair disclosed no evidences, should be considered as well.
You are right that it has nonzero value, but appropriate bayesian priors should take into account Vanity Fair being a reliable source, and Jared being a historically unreliable, untransparent source.
tl;dr: VF > JK absent further evidence in either direction
It does? You're talking about a country that tells its civil servants to say "Super Intelligence" in stead of "Artificial Intelligence" [0], because... It's just so Super.
Came across it here [1]: "Per Executive Order 14434, federal agencies are now using "Super Intelligence" (SI) in place of "Artificial Intelligence" (AI). You may see both terms across NIH content during this transition."
If you’ve got some sort of stain on your résumé so bad that you can’t get even get a job flipping burgers you can always fall back on a career in politics.
> Dutch intel then recruited a spy from GRU that handed over the data.
Dutch intel can think that happened, or not. It is independent from if that is true. The whole thing equally sounds like a setup using the Dutch to launder the story.
Which is also entirely independent from any stories of this sort in the media being true one way or another.
> Honestly it sort of blows my mind that the US has a system decisions by security professionals can simply be overruled.
Without commenting on the merits of Kushner, I don’t understand your comment about “professionals.” Security professionals, like lawyers or accountants or any other professional, are advisors, not final decision makers. Obviously the civilian government retains the final say.
I can’t imagine it’s any different in any European country. I’m fully willing to believe that in say the Netherlands, the civilian government is smart enough to listen to the advice of professionals. But surely there is no special legal status that makes professional judgments final decisions over that of elected or appointed officials?
Yes, Europe has also corrupt places and officials. OP might be from less corrupt place, the one where you dont get to overrule security professionals just because you want to.
It’s not about corruption. It’s about the allocation of power. At the end of the day, the power to make the final decision should obviously rest with the elected government.
While there's a lot of mysticism around the field, it is not a small one. In US alone tens and tens of thousands are employed at the various agencies. Only a tiny part are HUMINT working with assets, most have the most A4 office jobs imaginable.
But my point is: The one experience EVERYONE share (those that work there, or have worked), from the sanitary workers to the directors, is that they've gone through the security clearance process. A hefty enough credit card debt could jeopardize the clearance to any one of those.
> I've worked in intel, and Kushner seems like the textbook example - a cautionary tale - on the type of person you do not want to grant anything of importance.
As an outsider, ever since I learned some things about the trump family and kushner ten years ago, he always stood out for me as the most interesting and dangerous character of the lot. Always in the background, never front and center, always making high stakes decisions, wielding power of large amounts of money, sitting in more important meetings than trump (in my opinion). Literally whenever anything happens regarding trump's/usa/global issues, I always ask myself, where is kushner, where is he involved? He gives me the same feeling as observing a young putin from 30 years ago, same power dynamics at play. Interesting person nonetheless.
And let's not forget, he was stupid enough to end up with massive amounts of debt despite his network, his education and his starting capital. Once the USA was stupid enough to elect Trump, every foreign agency must have had him in their crosshairs.
Imagine being born into the deep state transnatioal criminal class that runs the world, and still fucking up so bad that you end up with negative coins. Then get your phone hacked by mere spooks and have your dirty laundry aired out before the public. What an incompetent embarrassment, even for that whole lot who call themselves the elite.
Of course there will be no justice served, they're above that. But a sliver of hope for the public is that the richest biggest criminals are visibly falling apart from generations of coddled degeneracy, all the power in the world cannot save them from their own idiocy. How do you become such losers that badly when you run a rigged game.
“Kushner’s counsel, however, said Kushner did not make any agreements or arrangements with leaders or officials in foreign countries that were not agreed to by the President of the United States and in the best interests of the United States.”
This is all categorically untrue and besides, I had permission.
Why wouldn't they? Only a deeply stupid world leader would carry their phone with them all the time, or conduct any sort of business on it.
My understanding is that the current crop of politicians is terrified of FOIA requests, and so pushes as much to their phones as possible. You can't FOIA many of the apps on there.
This is a cowardly practice. These officials are either overtly cowards, or they are too stupid to understand that their phones are targets for foreign intelligence agencies.
The 2 "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" books (mostly the second one) by Perkins do a good job of describing the relation between the US and the Saudis.
Why should we be warned. It's pretty much widely known that the entire Trump administration is compromised. That details may be salacious goes without saying.
I am a bit surpriced so many people are accepting everything to be true on face value. It is from a chapter of a book that an author hoped to make a lot of money from. How reliable is he or his sources. The MIVD is not know to share any information and leaking can land you in jail for up to 8 years.
Required watching for more on the extreme Kushner family corruption, I see other comments going on about his father-in-law, why not learn how fucked up his father is as well: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U-xT3ilk51c
Looking at it myself that is inaccurate. It seems like GRU hacked the phone first and then Dutch intelligence did the same thing. See my comment above.
It's over for the US they will never wake up no matter how bad things get. It's so comically bad you'd imagine the so called well-regulated militia would have intervened by now
That was Trump's 'magic', somehow appearing that he related with those types. Probably mostly accidentally because of his limited vocabulary, resulting in a very basic style of communication, in combination with only seeing the way the world works at a first-order effects level.
Scott Adams (crazy I know) had a good point about calling Trump a mass hypnotist. He seems to have a way of speaking that lets people hear whatever they want to, it's mystifying.
I wonder if the militia types like Trump because people like you, talk about them, like you do. Regardless how much Trump is on their side, he is your enemy, they are obviously your enemy with the disdain you feel for them, so its at worst an alliance of convenience.
The "so called well-regulated militia" hasn't been a real thing in the USA since shortly after the "founding" of the nation (if it even existed then). The closest thing (maybe) might be the National Guard, but these day they're clearly mostly just puppets for the rich and powerful.
Well-regulated militia is the National Guard. Note the term well-regulated. They’re military personnel that belong to the states, but still operate alongside the regular force. What do you mean by puppets?
As far as I can tell, that's what "militia" means in modern parlance? If you're not an organ of the state - military or police - and you're an armed organized group, that's paramilitaries.
Eh, there are a lot of anti-Trump and "liberal" gun owners, but I think nearly all of them know that if they go all violent and rogue against this admin it's only going to be used to justify much worse.
I'm kind of curious if New Yorkers will try and do a tea party impression with the Russian diesel ship though.
I'm interested in seeing the chaos of a republican party with all the ideas of power that Trump has given them, but without any of them having the godhead position that Trump has in order to keep the rest of them in line. There will be a bunch of wannabe Trump's, and all the puffery that goes with it, but without the large supportive entourage. It will be infighting like never before seen.
And if the Democrats don't do an absolutely stellar job of trying to fix things, and making life at least seem better for most of the US voting public, then an entirely chaotic Republican party could still get back in.
... and that's saying nothing of the possibilities for repeats of Jan 6th come midterm results or the 2028 election.
> And if the Democrats don't do an absolutely stellar job of trying to fix things, and making life at least seem better for most of the US voting public, then an entirely chaotic Republican party could still get back in.
Pessimistically, this is my expectation. The Oligarchy has become so out of hand, i.e. corporate-government-media collusion. The Dems are doing the same "Win at all Costs" so we can "Dominate those who think differently" thing. We The People have to take the reins back.
That's my reading too. If they don't sew it up this time around they're going to be in jail for life, the lot of them. So they must be getting a bit desperate to cling to what they've made because any step back is going to embody the risk of losing it all.
I don't think anybody has ever been able to corral the Democrats the way Trump has the Republicans. If they were that controlled, you wouldn't have The Squad and Fetterman in the party.
“What was odd, the source said, was that the money in the account—hundreds of millions of dollars—had come from a bank in Azerbaijan. Most importantly, Kushner appeared to have transferred significant amounts of money from the Dubai account to other individuals, including a warlord, a mercenary, and a one-time hit man,” Cole wrote.
Excellent story, the bigger picture IMO is that Jared is being thrown out to the wolves. Not sure by who. Preparation for when/if house/senate flips? Also why would the Dutch intelligence expose Kushner and thus Trump? Trump will be on their case very soon.
> Also why would the Dutch intelligence expose Kushner and thus Trump?
This is so out of character for them that I think there is another level to this: it's a way to let Trump know that they may have more about Trump than they've let on so far. That's very obviously not something that can be proved so take it with a large helping of salt but there has to be a reason why they put their own name out there, it is totally against their normal MO.
MH17 will never be forgotten and there is a large chunk of anger about that still powering the attitude people have here with respect to Trump cozying up to the Russians.
Every government spies on every other government with every available tool. Even allied ones. (Especially Israel, because it has a really good spy agency)
Correct, 100% speculative. It could be true, seeing the history of secret services.
But this story is too good to be true! Real questions are: who benefits of this story? And why?
In my (probably naive) humble opinion, the entire population of the USA should benefit from knowing their leadership are corrupt and only interested in enriching themselves and their peers.
But having seen the huge amount of American citizens that spend their days justifying the actions of these corrupt politicians and bi/trillionaires where they apparently can do no wrong, I'm thinking that nobody will really benefit from this and it will be filed under "business as usual".
Various sources also claim that Dutch intelligence deployed or was involved with deploying Stuxnet in Iran.
In 2019, it was reported that an Iranian mole working for Dutch intelligence at the behest of Israel and the CIA inserted the Stuxnet virus with a USB flash drive or convinced another person working at the Natanz facility to do so.
As a Flemish person I can attest that the Dutch have outstanding engineers. So if their intelligence agency has a proper budget, they definitely have a nice pool to select from.
Flanders has not been a part of the Netherlands for almost 200 years and was only ever really part of it for 15 years (It's the Dutch speaking part of Belgium).
The real question is: is he going to sue Vanity Fair? If not, he can say all he wants on X, but the message is clear; Vanity Fair's evidence apparently holds up.
Hasn't that already been the case for a while now though? Seems like you get in trouble with the law, you gotta prove your innocence, and you're treated as guilty until you do (and suffer some consequences still even after proving your innocence, just for having been "in the system" in that way).
Worse yet, the "media" these days gets away with bloody murder compared to the way things used to be before the Internet. It's all about maximum outrage and division these days, because that "engagement" is what sells advertising space. Convicted by the media is almost as bad as convicted by the "Justice" system. Either one can totally ruin lives.
We live in a country founded by colonial aristocrats who viciously sniped at each other in the local paper. The constraints on speech control and proclamations about guilt are for the government, not the governed.
It is strange though that you are lamenting this state of affairs for Jared Kushner, of all people. He will be pardoned, and will not lack for invites to New York soirees just because he took bribes from blood-soaked US allies.
I mean this sincerely, what prompted you to comment on this case?
> It is strange though that you are lamenting this state of affairs for Jared Kushner, of all people.
100% not the case at all. Honestly, my comment is more an expression that I've lost all faith in the "Justice" system entirely. I have zero hopes that any truth or justice will come out of this situation, as I firmly believe that at this point that humans are far more anti-social than social creatures, and we've allowed the system of "civilized" society to break down to a dangerous degree. We're basically "cooked" as a species. Just haven't admitted it to ourselves because we're too busy playin' the game our overlords have set by the rules they made up. They want us divided and at each other's throats so that we aren't laser focused on them and the problems they created for us all.
> He will be pardoned, and will not lack for invites to New York soirees just because he took bribes from blood-soaked US allies.
Sadly, I'm just about 100% sure you're right about that.
> I mean this sincerely, what prompted you to comment on this case?
Honestly, what prompts me to comment on anything anymore. It's not as if my one voice has ever held any power. I've seen this mess coming for years and been ridiculed every time I try to say anything about any of it. It's wasted energy to even bother trying to talk about anything to anyone these days, yet for some stupid reason I keep opening my mouth. Guess I'm just an idiot. Bought into the whole "humans are social creatures" BS and now I'm pretty much broken, having discovered the hard way that "the law of the jungle" is the only law humans actually believe in.
> humans are far more anti-social than social creatures
We are social!
Violent Individualism, Solipsism, Alienation are (primarily) socially constructed and we can choose to live another way.
You can build solidarity and community in the US, despite the odds. But if your social skills and belief in others have atrophied; You'll have to be the change you want to see.
Strike up conversations with your neighbors, pick up new hobbies, volunteer, say yes to things, go outside your home every day, host events, even when it's weird and awkward. Set good boundaries, there will be setbacks, but decent people will stick around.
This kind of thing is harder around wealthy, workaholic adults, but it's still possible, and people are desperate for genuine connection, but their social habituation is atrophied too (COVID made everything worse).
> I keep opening my mouth.
You also might need to practice communicating differently if everyone misunderstands/rejects? you when you try to reach out. This might be something to work out in a safe environment. Also, if you are expecting another rejection, it can be easy to assume other people hate you when they don't think that (or don't think about you at all).
As to the justice system... well, it can be repaired or reformed, but that will take a sociopolitical movement. I recommend joining something.
Not quite. USA first amendment makes winning a libel case almost impossible, especially against established media. UK is on the other end of the spectrum - there probably would be slam dunk.
So usually in the USA the smarter move is just to wait for the thing to fall off from the news cycle instead of creating news fodder every day with a trial.
I understand he is a billionaire and transfer of money from different banks around the world is axiomatic for him, but why would he be involved in payments involving assassins I think more tangible evidence is needed.
Anyone directly connected to trump has lost the presumption of innocence until proven guilty standard of common law. That group has been proven guilty, with no retribution, so many times it's statistically more likely they actually did something far worse than whatever is being alleged.
Seriously, how, with a straight face, can you even attempt to excuse these stains on history?
If you wait for more tangible evidence for the presidents daughters husband who has no business in government but is operating at an extremely high level doing foreign negotiations between waring countries... You will never get it in a timely fashion. For obvious reasons.
Our now former allies aren't making this public to smear some guy they met at a party they don't like. They are warning the world that the us is an oligarchy and rule of law is dead.
If he's telling the truth, then I would do the same.
If he's lying, then it might work, I would also probably do the same.
The interesting thing here is that two publications allowed the journalist to call Kushner "corrupt". This means that the lawyers would have seen compelling evidence that would mean one of two things:
1) Kushner wouldn't take them to court, because he would have to settle out of court in an expensive way
2) Kushner, if he were to take court action, would not win civil case.
This leads me to think that there is more than a shred of evidence, but an awful lot of evidence that he didn't declare what he was supposed to (at best) and at worse laundered foreign cash for his own purposes
After Russiagate that seems like a rather generous allowance to the profession of journalism. They managed a Pulitzer-winning investigation that failed to uncover the eventual truth, which is the whole thing was ginned up out of whole cloth and everyone pushing it would like to move on from that, thankyouverymuch.
Although it is always possible that they've got something worth saying it is also entirely possible that they're just making up a story out of nothing.
The white house recently released reports into electoral interference that showed that the majority of Russian influence was targeted at supporting trump. I assumed that people would notice this massive foot in mouth moment, but it seems people don't actually read the source material, and just claim that it supports their position. Unfortunately, this stance seems to work.
What is going on? How does a government release a report that directly contradicts what they claim they're releasing the report for, and then steadfastly stand by the claims that were disproven by the report they released?
Everyone already made up their minds. People who know Russiagate happened looked at the evidence. People who believe it didn’t listened to Trump’s denials. New evidence won’t cause them to not believe Trump, because the old evidence was sufficient.
As always you can’t logic people out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.
I’m not sure where you are getting your sources but the reporting that the Times and Post won the Pulitzer for was validated by both the Mueller report, Congressional investigations and 2 different reviews by the Pulitzer board.
Rather than moving on from this the Pulitzer Board is vigorously defending their decision in court as we speak.
There certainly hasn’t been a retraction. You’ll also note Trump never sued the papers over their coverage.
Journalists (un)covered everything that would be in a Special Counsel report months/years later - in what world is that bad reporting? It's the exact opposite.
And the second reply to him calls his father-in-law an orange turd. Gotta love how social media has erased class divides; even the onepercenters can't escape what peasants think of them.
In any case, Kushner - and rightfully so - could not obtain a security clearance the first time around, due to massive debt. But it was overruled / waived by higher ups.
I've worked in intel, and Kushner seems like the textbook example - a cautionary tale - on the type of person you do not want to grant anything of importance.
Honestly it sort of blows my mind that the US has a system decisions by security professionals can simply be overruled.
The GRU double-agent proved that the GRU had compromised Kushner's phone. Subsequently, Dutch intelligence themselves independently attempted to hack Kushner's phone.
"In The Hague, the MIVD hacking team tried to reverse engineer the Russian penetration of Kushner’s iPhone." [...]
"The Dutch team had been trying to pick the phone’s door lock, so to speak, when it occurred to them that the Russians may have found an unlocked window to gain entry instead. Their hypothesis was correct. By early 2018, the MIVD had found a vulnerability in the iPhone that gave them access." [...]
"when Kushner used the phone, they could see his screen. Almost as soon as they got inside, the intelligence service began capturing every image of Kushner’s screen as he used it, filing their own cache of surveillance on their internal computer servers."
Also (edit):
The part of the story I actually care about is two governments hoarding an iphone zero day, and using it to secretly hack iphones. I condemn it.
Digital privacy is important to me. I think that all humans should have it. Feel free to disagree. Jared Kushner is a human.
So again, I condemn this extrajudicial activity, which undermines the digital security and privacy of everyone.
The U.S. spent years explaining to the world that nothing is extrajudicial that happens to non-Americans outside of the United States. So please explain how this activity of the MIVD broke any Dutch laws.
All the counter-arguments I've read to this comment so far have been along the lines of, "well they started it."
And well they did. But if your response to the U.S.'s brand of dehumanization is more dehumanization then you've actually helped them achieve their goal. The people who run the U.S. want a world where respect for privacy (among so many other things) is thrown away because they believe they have the guns and resources to gain the most from that kind of world.
It's part of why I'm getting out of the USA. Key norms of decency we had are broken now, and in our social system you can bet that the next powers who come in will do little more than make a show of repairing them. They now see what's possible and they'll use it for their own ends. It's a spiral.
Compare to courtly politics in post-Renaissance Europe. All sorts of intrigue and backstabbing, largely only governed by two cardinal rules. First, never conduct yourself in an unseemly manner. Second, don't get caught.
I don't see why the dutch have any obligation to avoid monitoring a compromised phone that the US lets happen. The dutch have every right to know what the russians are getting from that phone.
You are picking the wrong case for your cause.
Kushner's behavior undermined the world far more than this phone hack.
Sorry, but the US threw this out of the window starting with the Patriot Act. Many tech companies were in the NSA PRISM program and the program probably still exists today. Common US E2E encrypted messengers can be read out by US services through weak defaults (e.g. iMessage in iCloud is encrypted at-rest unless ADP is enabled both sides of the chat, similarly, WhatsApp only encrypts backups at-rest by default).
The US can grab all that data from US companies, regardless whether the person regardless of whether the person is inside or outside the US thanks to the CLOUD Act.
It goes a lot deeper than that..
there are branches of govt in the US system, not a single entity. Even the almighty secret police have been curtailed many times.
Believe me, not everyone is onboard with this approach to surveillance
This isn't about the privacy of one individual human. This is about the security practices of a politically exposed person and the information they have access to.
Any high profile, high security clearance individual must have top-notch security. Any information gleaned or stolen from them can have enormous repercussions.
This assumption was destroyed during the first Trump administration and continued being eroded in his second. They do not practice good opsec. (See Signal app usage) Nobody is enforcing policies, and nobody tells the bosses that they can’t do something because [reason].
So… the President is in pretty hot water if any senators decide to ask a few questions here.
Seriously, there is absolutely nothing the current US president could do that could constitute a "hot water" situation for him give the willingness of the Republican party and the SCOTUS to support him unconditionally.
America will need a number of constitutional amendments to counter the last 40+ years, which I hope is peaking this administration.
Somebody must have a very thin skin!
However, this isn't the case with Palestine, which is why Netanyahu has problems - and obviously Putin as well.
The current American regime is hardly friendly to the ICC. Are they fair game too? (I'd likely say yes, they would strongly disagree!)
Well, problem solved. He certainly used his new position to get rid of his debt.
Also a problem in the UK (Boris Johnson with Lord Lebedev).
Unfortunately I think it does have to sit somewhere on the elected side. A situation where the permanent state can overrule elected representatives unconditionally isn't great. But what really ought to happen is an open court case; you cannot have public policy decisions made on the basis of secret intel in a democracy. That gives you the Iraq war.
Isn't that kinda bad for their health? Polonium intake is unhealthy.
I'm not an American so don't take this the wrong way, but Jared's response to the tweet, that the story is fabricated because of how complicated it is and VanityFair disclosed no evidences, should be considered as well.
I believe the current modus operandi is to offer a window.
On a serious note: plenty of people were surprised that Navalny returned to Russia. I suspect that after his poisoning it became clear Putin and his cronies wanted him dead, so he chose to give them the judicial spectacle they wanted so that they would at least spare his family.
Why return only after being poisoned and not earlier?
You are right that it has nonzero value, but appropriate bayesian priors should take into account Vanity Fair being a reliable source, and Jared being a historically unreliable, untransparent source.
tl;dr: VF > JK absent further evidence in either direction
Came across it here [1]: "Per Executive Order 14434, federal agencies are now using "Super Intelligence" (SI) in place of "Artificial Intelligence" (AI). You may see both terms across NIH content during this transition."
[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/09/inau...
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/
It's like trying to make "fetch" happen by executive order.
Dutch intel can think that happened, or not. It is independent from if that is true. The whole thing equally sounds like a setup using the Dutch to launder the story.
Which is also entirely independent from any stories of this sort in the media being true one way or another.
Without commenting on the merits of Kushner, I don’t understand your comment about “professionals.” Security professionals, like lawyers or accountants or any other professional, are advisors, not final decision makers. Obviously the civilian government retains the final say.
I can’t imagine it’s any different in any European country. I’m fully willing to believe that in say the Netherlands, the civilian government is smart enough to listen to the advice of professionals. But surely there is no special legal status that makes professional judgments final decisions over that of elected or appointed officials?
But my point is: The one experience EVERYONE share (those that work there, or have worked), from the sanitary workers to the directors, is that they've gone through the security clearance process. A hefty enough credit card debt could jeopardize the clearance to any one of those.
And copy paste of the above for Trump.
Of course there will be no justice served, they're above that. But a sliver of hope for the public is that the richest biggest criminals are visibly falling apart from generations of coddled degeneracy, all the power in the world cannot save them from their own idiocy. How do you become such losers that badly when you run a rigged game.
The Dutch intelligence services are world class.
My understanding is that the current crop of politicians is terrified of FOIA requests, and so pushes as much to their phones as possible. You can't FOIA many of the apps on there.
This is a cowardly practice. These officials are either overtly cowards, or they are too stupid to understand that their phones are targets for foreign intelligence agencies.
https://wallhop.io/https://www.vanityfair.com/story/jared-ku...
And yet having enough reach to be on their radar.
Hmm, where have I heard that before, the last time the fascists took over and we had a world war about it.
Only a couple of states actually have their own militia that is independent of federal government.
I'm kind of curious if New Yorkers will try and do a tea party impression with the Russian diesel ship though.
I'm on the ground and the conversations are changing. There is significant damage that will take decades to repair, but I do not think it impossible.
We broke the trust with allies on so many levels and you should continue to hedge, because America might not be peaking on absurdity yet...
And if the Democrats don't do an absolutely stellar job of trying to fix things, and making life at least seem better for most of the US voting public, then an entirely chaotic Republican party could still get back in.
... and that's saying nothing of the possibilities for repeats of Jan 6th come midterm results or the 2028 election.
Pessimistically, this is my expectation. The Oligarchy has become so out of hand, i.e. corporate-government-media collusion. The Dems are doing the same "Win at all Costs" so we can "Dominate those who think differently" thing. We The People have to take the reins back.
This is so out of character for them that I think there is another level to this: it's a way to let Trump know that they may have more about Trump than they've let on so far. That's very obviously not something that can be proved so take it with a large helping of salt but there has to be a reason why they put their own name out there, it is totally against their normal MO.
In my (probably naive) humble opinion, the entire population of the USA should benefit from knowing their leadership are corrupt and only interested in enriching themselves and their peers.
But having seen the huge amount of American citizens that spend their days justifying the actions of these corrupt politicians and bi/trillionaires where they apparently can do no wrong, I'm thinking that nobody will really benefit from this and it will be filed under "business as usual".
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50201259
I recall they helped the UK during the Falklands War with SIGINT/cryptanalytic stuff
In 2019, it was reported that an Iranian mole working for Dutch intelligence at the behest of Israel and the CIA inserted the Stuxnet virus with a USB flash drive or convinced another person working at the Natanz facility to do so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_van_Sabben
Europeans should not trust any of that team: it is a compromised government.
The irony is that Yuri explained this already in the 1980s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5It1zarINv0
It was a literal prediction of the KGB seizing power. Putin is from the KGB clique. Gorbachev really should have neutered the KGB totally.
But they need kompromat to make them Krasnovs.
Hasn't that already been the case for a while now though? Seems like you get in trouble with the law, you gotta prove your innocence, and you're treated as guilty until you do (and suffer some consequences still even after proving your innocence, just for having been "in the system" in that way).
Worse yet, the "media" these days gets away with bloody murder compared to the way things used to be before the Internet. It's all about maximum outrage and division these days, because that "engagement" is what sells advertising space. Convicted by the media is almost as bad as convicted by the "Justice" system. Either one can totally ruin lives.
These are the people that gave us: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarring_and_feathering after all.
It is strange though that you are lamenting this state of affairs for Jared Kushner, of all people. He will be pardoned, and will not lack for invites to New York soirees just because he took bribes from blood-soaked US allies.
I mean this sincerely, what prompted you to comment on this case?
100% not the case at all. Honestly, my comment is more an expression that I've lost all faith in the "Justice" system entirely. I have zero hopes that any truth or justice will come out of this situation, as I firmly believe that at this point that humans are far more anti-social than social creatures, and we've allowed the system of "civilized" society to break down to a dangerous degree. We're basically "cooked" as a species. Just haven't admitted it to ourselves because we're too busy playin' the game our overlords have set by the rules they made up. They want us divided and at each other's throats so that we aren't laser focused on them and the problems they created for us all.
> He will be pardoned, and will not lack for invites to New York soirees just because he took bribes from blood-soaked US allies.
Sadly, I'm just about 100% sure you're right about that.
> I mean this sincerely, what prompted you to comment on this case?
Honestly, what prompts me to comment on anything anymore. It's not as if my one voice has ever held any power. I've seen this mess coming for years and been ridiculed every time I try to say anything about any of it. It's wasted energy to even bother trying to talk about anything to anyone these days, yet for some stupid reason I keep opening my mouth. Guess I'm just an idiot. Bought into the whole "humans are social creatures" BS and now I'm pretty much broken, having discovered the hard way that "the law of the jungle" is the only law humans actually believe in.
We are social!
Violent Individualism, Solipsism, Alienation are (primarily) socially constructed and we can choose to live another way.
You can build solidarity and community in the US, despite the odds. But if your social skills and belief in others have atrophied; You'll have to be the change you want to see.
Strike up conversations with your neighbors, pick up new hobbies, volunteer, say yes to things, go outside your home every day, host events, even when it's weird and awkward. Set good boundaries, there will be setbacks, but decent people will stick around.
This kind of thing is harder around wealthy, workaholic adults, but it's still possible, and people are desperate for genuine connection, but their social habituation is atrophied too (COVID made everything worse).
> I keep opening my mouth.
You also might need to practice communicating differently if everyone misunderstands/rejects? you when you try to reach out. This might be something to work out in a safe environment. Also, if you are expecting another rejection, it can be easy to assume other people hate you when they don't think that (or don't think about you at all).
As to the justice system... well, it can be repaired or reformed, but that will take a sociopolitical movement. I recommend joining something.
A [free, or discounted] pardon awaits every member of the trump family.
So usually in the USA the smarter move is just to wait for the thing to fall off from the news cycle instead of creating news fodder every day with a trial.
Seriously, how, with a straight face, can you even attempt to excuse these stains on history?
Our now former allies aren't making this public to smear some guy they met at a party they don't like. They are warning the world that the us is an oligarchy and rule of law is dead.
In the civilised world, those caught abusing public office resigned.
"Deny, deny, deny" in the face of all evidence is a curioulsy Trumpian move.
If he's telling the truth, then I would do the same.
If he's lying, then it might work, I would also probably do the same.
The interesting thing here is that two publications allowed the journalist to call Kushner "corrupt". This means that the lawyers would have seen compelling evidence that would mean one of two things:
1) Kushner wouldn't take them to court, because he would have to settle out of court in an expensive way
2) Kushner, if he were to take court action, would not win civil case.
This leads me to think that there is more than a shred of evidence, but an awful lot of evidence that he didn't declare what he was supposed to (at best) and at worse laundered foreign cash for his own purposes
Although it is always possible that they've got something worth saying it is also entirely possible that they're just making up a story out of nothing.
What is going on? How does a government release a report that directly contradicts what they claim they're releasing the report for, and then steadfastly stand by the claims that were disproven by the report they released?
We truly are living in the post truth era...
As always you can’t logic people out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.
Here's to the changing of the tide.
Rather than moving on from this the Pulitzer Board is vigorously defending their decision in court as we speak.
There certainly hasn’t been a retraction. You’ll also note Trump never sued the papers over their coverage.
One of whom pled guilty to lying about the proposed Trump Tower Moscow scheme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Tower_Moscow
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50194105
In short, the facts are:
- Trump's campaign met repeatedly with Russians and lied about it.
- Trump's inner circle took meetings with a Russian spy in hopes of getting dirt and lied about it.
- Russia actually did release dirt to help Trump campaign and lied about it.
- Trump's campaign eagerly accepted that help and asked for more publicly, and Russia obliged.
- Trump's campaign shared internal campaign data with Russian intelligence officers.
- If they could have exonerated Trump they would have, but they couldn't.
These are cold hard facts available in the mueller report and the senate intel committee report, both authored by Republicans.