Tag Archives: hackers

Makes Me Proud To Be A Lawyer!

Okay, a recovering lawyer…but still.

One of the worst aspects of this traitorous and criminal administration has been its willingness to spit in the eye of those who believe in and support the rule of law. After a period of stunned silence, lawyers who have retained their integrity have begun to respond. 

Above the Law has reported on a lawsuit that–as it says–“Drags the Trump Administratiion to Hell.” I am going to quote liberally from the complaint filed by Williams Connolly on behalf of another law firm–Perkins Coie–because I cannot improve on its language. Trump had issued one of his insane “Executive Orders,” purportedly stripping Perkins Coie lawyers of security clearances, and terminating government contracts with the firm.

From the Complaint:

The Order is an affront to the Constitution and our adversarial system of justice. Its plain purpose is to bully those who advocate points of view that the President perceives as adverse to the views of his Administration, whether those views are presented on behalf of paying or pro bono clients. Perkins Coie brings this case reluctantly. The firm is comprised of lawyers who advocate for clients; its attorneys and employees are not activists or partisans. But Perkins Coie’s ability to represent the interests of its clients—and its ability to operate as a legal-services business at all—are under direct and imminent threat. Perkins Coie cannot allow its clients to be bullied. The firm is committed to a resolute defense of the rule of law, without regard to party or ideology, and therefore brings this lawsuit to declare the Order unlawful and to enjoin its implementation.

The document notes that the Order’s “peculiar title” demonstrates that its purpose isn’t executive. “Rather, the Order reflects a purpose that is judicial—to adjudicate whether a handful of lawyers at Perkins Coie LLP engaged in misconduct in the course of litigation and then to punish them.” The purpose is, rather clearly, to deter law firms from representing clients antagonistic to Trump.

Above the Law judges the following lengthy paragraph to be the hardest-hitting:

Because the Order in effect adjudicates and punishes alleged misconduct by Perkins Coie, it is an unconstitutional violation of the separation of powers. Because it does so without notice and an opportunity to be heard, and because it punishes the entire firm for the purported misconduct of a handful of lawyers who are not employees of the firm, it is an unconstitutional violation of procedural due process and of the substantive due process right to practice one’s professional livelihood. Because the Order singles out Perkins Coie, it denies the firm the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment. Because the Order punishes the firm for the clients with which it has been associated and the legal positions it has taken on matters of election law, the Order constitutes retaliatory viewpoint discrimination and, therefore, violates the First Amendment rights of free expression and association, and the right to petition the government for redress. Because the Order compels disclosure of confidential information revealing the firm’s relationships with its clients, it violates the First Amendment. Because the Order retaliates against Perkins Coie for its diversity-related speech, it violates the First Amendment. Because the Order is vague in proscribing what is prohibited “diversity, equity and inclusion,” it violates the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. Because the Order works to brand Perkins Coie as persona non grata and bar it from federal buildings, deny it the ability to communicate with federal employees, and terminate the government contracts of its clients, the Order violates the right to counsel afforded by the Fifth and Sixth Amendment.

It isn’t just the lawyers.

While the legal profession takes to the courts, other Americans possessing specialized expertise are using that expertise on behalf of the resistance. Heather Cox Richardson recently reported on three recent outages of X, spanning more than six hours. She cited the former head of the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Center, who said that the outages appear to have been an attack called a “distributed denial of service,” attack– “an old technique in which hackers flood a server to prevent authentic users from reaching a website.” He added that he couldn’t “think of a company of the size and standing internationally of X that’s fallen over to a DDoS attack for a very long time,” adding that the outage “doesn’t reflect well on their cyber security.” (Musk, of course, blamed hackers in Ukraine for the outages, an accusation Martin called “pretty much garbage.”)

I think the resistance is just getting started…

Comments

Can This Be True?

The Democratic National Committee’s server was hacked last week, and embarrassing (although not very surprising) emails publicly released. The obvious intent was to create division right before the Democratic Convention, and to feed suspicions about Hillary Clinton’s nomination.

Voters and pundits can draw their own conclusions about the contents of the emails. The more intriguing–and troubling–question involves the source of the mischief. A number of media outlets have noted that the FBI’s investigation is focused upon Russia and Vladimir Putin.

My first reaction to the suggestion that Putin might be interfering with America’s election was a very pronounced eye roll. (I’m not much for conspiracy theories. In a different context, that sounds like the sort of wild accusation Trump would come up with.)

And yet..the FBI says the hackers were Russian, and this article by Anne Applebaum in the Salt Lake Tribune does give one pause.

The secret plot to control America, launched from abroad, is an old theme in American pop culture. “The Manchurian Candidate,” a film made in 1962, imagined a Chinese scheme to engineer a coup d’etat. Aficionados of paranoid thrillers may also recall “Lucky Bastard,” a 1998 Charles McCarry novel, which featured a U.S. president controlled by a Soviet case officer who happens to be his wife.

But now it is 2016, truth is stranger than fiction, and we finally have a presidential candidate, Donald Trump, with direct and indirect links to a foreign dictator, Vladimir Putin, whose policies he promotes. And yet it is not secret, it is not a plot, there is no conspiracy. No one has been hypnotized or recruited by foreign intelligence. Just as Marine Le Pen, leader of the French National Front, openly accepts Russian money, the Trump campaign advertises its Russian links and pays no real political price.

Applebaum details Trump’s considerable business connections with Russia, and his efforts to attract Russian investment in his real estate projects. As she notes , Trump has also surrounded himself with “people whose deep links to the corrupt world of Russian business would normally disqualify them from U.S. politics.” She cites campaign operatives, among them Carter Page, a foreign policy aide who has long-standing connections to Russian companies and who supported the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, who worked for several years in Ukraine for Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian president ousted in 2014.

Although Applebaum doesn’t mention it, the LA Times reports that retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn,another close Trump advisor, flew to Moscow last year to attend a gala banquet celebrating Russia Today, the Kremlin’s propaganda channel, and was seated at the head table near Putin. Flynn is evidently a regular guest on Russia Today.

Russian state media is actively supporting Trump, and Applebaum says that whatever resources Putin is investing in Trump’s campaign, they are paying dividends.

For even if Trump never becomes president, his candidacy has already achieved two extremely important Russian foreign policy goals: to weaken the moral influence of the United States by undermining its reputation as a stable democracy, and to destroy its power by wrecking its relationships with its allies. Toward these ends, Trump has begun repeating arguments identical to those used on Russian state television. These range from doubts about the sovereignty of Ukraine — earlier this week, Trump’s campaign team helped alter the Republican party platform to remove support for Ukraine — to doubts about U.S. leadership of the democratic world. The United States has its own “mess” to worry about, Trump told the New York Times on Wednesday: It shouldn’t stand up for democracy abroad. In the same interview, he also cast doubt on the fundamental basis of transatlantic stability, NATO’s Article 5 guarantee: If Russia invades, he said, he’d have to think first before defending U.S. allies.

None of this, of course, is absolute proof that Putin and the Russians were behind the hack of the DNC. But it once again underlines the manifest dangers of Trump’s capture of the GOP–and the unthinkable consequences of a Trump Presidency.

Comments