Vladimir Putin and Squirrels: Masters of the Universe

By Graham Vanbergen – As far back as last year the Independent went with a story entitled Russian hackers tried to disrupt UK general election. It said that “Russian hackers tried to disrupt last year’s general election, in what is thought to be the first known cyberattack on the British political system. The group known as ‘Fancy Bears’ planned to target every Whitehall server, including the Home Office, Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence, and every major TV broadcaster, including the BBC, Channel 4 and Sky, but was thwarted by GCHQ.” Well done clever GCHQ!

It should be noted, according to wikipedia that “the Russian Bear is a widespread symbol (generally of a Eurasian brown bear) for Russia, used in cartoons, articles and dramatic plays since as early as the 16th century.” GCHQ are having us believe that a highly secretive and covert mission group operating in the dark web whose raison d’être is to cause political instability, and one has to say – achieve all this undetected, call themselves ‘Fancy Bear.’ How creative – no suspicion of Russian’s there then!

The Independent story, providing no evidence whatsoever, other than to say there was a “possible imminent threat” provided lots of links (to its own stories) that continued to provide no evidence of Russian hackers actively attacking Britain’s institutions. The article said “GCHQ had initially feared Isis’ hacking abilities had reached a new level of sophistication but the attack was eventually linked back to Moscow.” Without providing a single fact, the Independent must have vigorously interrogated the GCHQ spokesperson to the ends of the earth, and not just taken their word for it – obviously.

Apparently, the Russian hackers were posing as ISIS supporters, quite the opposite from what Russian diplomatic and military efforts have proven to be to date. Somehow we are to believe this made up poppycock from the MSM as real news.

The Daily Mail reported that “Labour MP Ben Bradshaw, a prominent Remain supporter, raised doubts about the validity of the EU referendum result last June as he warned that people were underestimating the extent of cyber-warfare by Vladimir Putin.” No evidence is provided by the politician but he gained considerable column inches in the press for saying so.

The Telegraph went with the story: “Systemic, relentless, predatory’ Russian cyber threat to US power grid exposed as malware found on major electricity company computer.” The paper quoted Peter Welch, a Vermont Democratic congressman. “They will hack everywhere, even Vermont, in pursuit of opportunities to disrupt our country.” This allegation is made the same day that 35 Russian diplomats and their families have been expelled from the USA.

This story was published in the Washington Post but was subsequently amended to read as follows: “Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that Russian hackers had penetrated the U.S. electric grid. Authorities say there is no indication of that so far. The computer at Burlington Electric that was hacked was not attached to the grid.” The only piece of information on this report to be truthful is the apology it was forced to print.

Let’s not forget that whilst hackers do present a real problem to the power grid of any country, squirrels do by far the most amount of damage. Let’s get really real about the problem.

The head of cyber-warfare at Squirrel HQ a Mr Chip Nibbles emailed Foreign Policy with the following warning:

“We are everywhere, and yet almost impossible to find. There are other events that have impacted critical infrastructure: a water pump failure in Illinois, power outages in Brazil, a pipeline explosion in Turkey, a cyberattack on a dam in New York; even a blast furnace in a German steel plant was supposedly put into an uncontrolled shutdown from a cyberattack. In each case, the initial cause for the failure was blamed on cyberattacks — but in each case, once the evidence was actually examined, hackers were nowhere to be found. Still, that lack of evidence hasn’t stopped the cyberwar hawks from pointing to these analog events as examples of the coming digital doom.”

The truth is, according to FP, squirrels actually cause over 1,400 outages affecting over 3.6 million people in the US alone each year. It works out to the entire population of the state of Connecticut, or the UK’s second and third city of Manchester and Birmingham combined losing electricity for more than two months. In fact, the covert activities of agent Nibbles & Co have hit the NASDAQ stock exchange twice, as well as the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. In the US, they’ve also attacked 64 schools, 30 universities, 13 hospitals, six government buildings, four airports, two military bases and even caused seven confirmed deaths.

It is a known fact that squirrels cause dozens of outages every day in the US, impacting about 5,000 people for each episode for around two hours. Compare that with the number of outages caused by cyberattack, which in the United States and Britain is exactly… zero. To that end, statistically, you are more likely to be killed by Chip Nibbles than the death squads of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his global network of ISIS lone-wolf cells lurking in your local post-office. Any mainstream media journalist worth his salt would have by now worked out that it is obvious that Chip Nibbles and his Red (furry) Army are Russian agents of espionage sent by Vlad the Bad to kill us all.

In the meantime, somehow Russian hackers managed to tilt the US election in favour of Donald Trump, that is, according to the losers … after they lost. Time magazine debunked that allegation by commenting that “Elections in the USA are decentralized, most voters will use paper ballots and voting machines aren’t connected to the internet.”

Here is an excerpt from a recent blog post from one of Britain’s ex-ambassadors Craig Murray on the same subject – “I find myself in the unusual position of having twice been in a position to know directly that governments were lying in globe-shaking events, firstly Iraqi WMD and now the Russian hacks. There could be no evidence because in reality these were leaks, not hacks. The (Obama) report is, frankly, a pile of complete and utter dross. To base grave accusations of election hacking on this report is ludicrous. Obama has been a severe disappointment to all progressive thinkers in virtually every possible way. He now goes out of power with absolutely no grace and in a storm of delusion and deceit. His purpose is apparently to weaken Trump politically, but to achieve that at the expense of heightening tensions with Russia to Cold War levels, is shameful. The very pettiness of Obama’s tongue out to Putin – minor sanctions and expelling some diplomatic families – itself shows that Obama is lying about the pretext. If he really believed that Russia had “hacked the election”, surely that would require a much less feeble response. By refusing to retaliate, Russia has shown the kind of polish that eludes Obama as he takes his empty charisma and presentational skills into a no doubt lucrative future in the private sector.”

If we are to believe the British and Amercian mainstream media, Vladimir Putin has changed the course of history by manipulating the entire American election process to its favour, caused Britain to leave the European Union, has the obvious proven ability to change the outcome of elections in France and Germany, thereby dismantling the EU, cause societal catastrophe by turning off the power and water anywhere at will, take down the western banking system and god knows, what else.

It is quite clear from what our leaders and the security agencies such as the FBI, MI5/6, NSA and GCHQ are saying, is that they do not have the technical expertise (in the West) to combat Vladimir Putin’s keyboard skills! Between Vlad and Chip, they have the West firmly boxed in – we’re done for. Or could much of what we read in the establishment press be fake news and propaganda; peddled by policy-makers, the security services, corporate threat reduction corporations and anyone else on the revolving doors bandwagon to keep us all in fear for our basic safety.

 

 

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