Contacted by Fox News, investigators for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) confirmed that Nellie H. Ohr, wife of the demoted [DOJ] official, Bruce G. Ohr, worked for the opposition research firm last year. The precise nature of Mrs. Ohr’s duties – including whether she worked on the dossier – remains unclear but a review of her published works available online reveals Mrs. Ohr has written extensively on Russia-related subjects. HPSCI staff confirmed to Fox News that she was paid by Fusion GPS through the summer and fall of 2016.
But wait, it doesn’t stop there… Mrs. Nellie Ohr was not only a Fusion GPS contracted employee, but she was also part of the CIA’s Open Source Works, in Washington DC (link)
Both Mr. and Mrs Ohr worked on a collaborative group project surrounding International Organized Crime…
A month after Hillary Clinton hired Fusion GPS (April 2016) to sub-contract retired British MI6 agent Christopher Steele to write the opposition research report “the Trump Russia Dossier”, Fusion GPS employee Nellie Ohr applied for a HAM radio license (May 23rd 2016); a communication tool that would allow Nellie Ohr and Christopher Steele the ability to communicate outside the normal risk of communication intercepts…
So are we to believe it’s COINCIDENTAL? All of a sudden, a 60(ish)-year-old woman decides to use a HAM radio the month after contracting with Christopher Steele for a Russian opposition research dossier on Donald Trump?
Nonsense.
The more plausible scenario is MI6 Agent Christopher Steele and Mrs. Nellie Ohr knew any communication with foreign sources/actors could be easily monitored; and this need for communication was, most likely, going to lead to an organized operation where an FBI counterintelligence operation would exist -per Agent Peter Strzok- and, due to the subject matter being constructed, confidential communication would be required.
The people who understand the tech who commented seem to think there would be ways to scramble the conversation.
It sounds fun. You find a way that NSA can’t penetrate, and then you drive out, all spy-like to a high point, and transmit to your confederate, enjoying a totally secure, professional spook conversation.
What I would say from my experience is, two things. One, you are not going to discover a super-secret way to bypass NSA, and if you think you have, it may actually compromise you. When you deal with somebody like NSA, it isn’t their first rodeo. They have been doing it for decades, and they will not leave an easy way to circumvent them just sitting out there. If there is a way that looks good to bypass their collection, foreign spies have used it, NSA has learned about it, and they have developed technology to monitor it specifically, and alert them when someone uses it, because the people they are interested in are gravitating to it.
This technological dominance gradually eliminates alternatives, and as it does, it funnels the interesting people – the spies, the terrorists, the threats – into ever fewer arcane technologies. As it does, the agency realizes that the interesting things they want to know about are happening on those arcane technologies, and their resources rapidly get focused on flagging and capturing them. If SSB is a good way to bypass them, then every spy and terrorist operating in the country would be on it, and NSA would have already dumped a few hundred million into it, because if they can develop a set-it-and-forget-it system to record every such conversation and alert them to it, they will get every spook conversation going on all the time.
The second thing I would point out is that doing strange things gets you attention. If she was driving somewhere and transmitting simple static, she would draw attention, especially in Washington DC. I would not be surprised if NSA could tell you all the addresses with malfunctioning electronic appliances which are emitting strange static over the airways. There are probably people with malfunctioning microwaves who have no idea their microwave is malfunctioning, but it is in the NSA database as a disregarded anomaly.
So it would not surprise me that even if the technology she was using was secure, she drew attention, somebody broke into her house while she was out, and they swapped her radio for an identical one, except the new one sent out a copy of everything to NSA directly, live as it happened. Especially since she was related to a government official who may have known interesting things about the US government’s covert intelligence and counterintelligence programs at DOJ.
The bottom line is, you can go toe to toe with intel, but if you have no training and haven’t seen how long the game has been played, and how far beyond you your competition is, you will have a steep learning curve. Generally if your first foray into the field is done while performing actions that could land you a lengthy prison sentence, you probably should not be making any long-term travel plans, unless they are to countries without an extradition treaty.
Along those lines, I saw this summary of what happened on /pol:
NSA compliance officer notices weird information regarding FISA information & FBI, informs Admiral Rodgers
Admiral Rodgers orders a full audit, discovers FISA court was lied to by Obama admin & FBI to illegally obtain warrant to spy on Trump
Admiral Rodgers informs FISA court, FBI informs FISA court just before Admiral Rodgers to try to make it seem like it was just a mistake, not intentional, court doesn’t buy it.
Admiral Rodgers informed Trump without telling anyone else in government what he was doing
Trump moves transition team the very next day, and accuses Obama of wire tapping him
If this is how it happened, it says something else to me. There are no coincidences in spookdom. Being a spook builds a high degree of paranoia. You know what is out there. You know people are watching and manipulating, and how controlled everyone’s environment can be in your world. Your day to day job is doing it to other people. You know that unlike the fantasy world average civilians live in, coincidences in the spook world are rare, compared to engineered-coincidences. What happens is, you become very sensitive to any time an expectation of a future event that you had is violated, and a coincidence occurs.
Here, Rodgers expected to go to the FISA court and reveal to them that the FBI had lied in FISA applications. When he got there, he found that just by coincidence, the FBI had just come in and reported the errors themselves.
Rodgers first thought would had to have been that FBI was spying on him and his people, and knew in real time of his decision to alert the FISA court, and that is why they came in right before him. That is probably the moment Rodgers got pissed enough to go off grid and alert Trump, and take down the machine. It may also have been the moment Rodgers decided to hook Trump up with first class intelligence support which was capable of helping to formulate a super-evil extra-devious secret-plan to take everything down. The Lord works in mysterious ways.
The book about this, if it ever comes out, will be one of the most amazing stories of American history ever told. And I don’t think we have even finished the second chapter yet.
Tell everyone about r/K Theory, because there is so much going on there isn’t even time for politics
Not that anyone choosing to use HAM radio to get around surveillance likely cared, but it is strictly against the rules for HAM radio operators to use HAM frequencies as described here. And even if somehow no spooks were listening in, I can assure you other HAMs _were_ listening in. Encryption is also strictly forbidden except in specific open ways in specific parts of specific HAM radio bands. In other words, if the plan was to escape notice by using HAM radio, it was both illegal and doomed from the start.
His Will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven
off-topic on the nsa https://www.techarp.com/guides/complete-meltdown-spectre-cpu-list/
a list of the CPUs hit by ‘meltdown’ and ‘spectre’—-started with cpus post 2009. it’s as if the nsa had the capability to insert backdoors all along but were held back under greenlight by the new adminstration in 2009.
The HAM radio avenue is actually pretty simple — and also illegal.
You get an off the shelf transceiver and a laptop. You encode your message/file using PGP (this is the illegal part — it is illegal to transmit coded or encrypted messages on ham radio frequencies.) You go down the coast and use a directional antenna to xmit to Britain. You use RTTY (radioteletype — an almost century old technology, literally) and transmit your coded message.
You don’t need any particular skill, especially if you have the money for an off the shelf antenna and an auto-tuner for the antenna. You do a sked (scheduled contact) on a freq plan, you transmit your encrypted message (could take a while, but that depends on the file size). You do it from the beach so that your beam is literally going straight out over the ocean. You can do all of this from a case that is the size of a carryon bag, depending on the antenna (which could be very long, but rolls up.)
So. Your beam is narrow and going straight over the water. That means that the NSA will have to do their direction finding from either very nearby (from the weak lobes) or from the Europe side (low precision) or an ocean going intel ship (pure luck). You are using an off-the-shelf software package, so there is no CW fist to identify. There is literally no way for them to know the intended target. There’s no way to reasonably decode the PGP if they record the intercept.
The only reason for her to have a ham license is to excuse having the equipment itself. (Some shops won’t even sell to you without your ticket.) She’s certainly not going to identify herself on the xmission with her callsign.
Another thing to remember is that Steele set it up so that SHE is taking all the risk. She’s the one transmitting an encoded message on ham frequencies (or in the alternative, transmitting an encoded message out-of-band, stacking two crimes.) All Steele is doing is receiving a signal and decoding it, itself perfectly legal. (The espionage part is separate.)
Standard espionage rules apply. Do it on your vacation down Ocean City. Don’t carry your cell phone. Avoid tolls, traffic cameras, and security cameras. Take a circuitous route, etc etc. (Or don’t, if Steele doesn’t care if she gets burned, because she’s the one who would be investigating herself.)
Interesting. How often are we hearing about Russian Spy ships loitering just off the coast?
You don’t hear about them the same way you don’t hear about how there are delis in NYC.
The Russians just do that for trolling purposes. It’s kind of cute actually.
It’s the nuclear submarines of Russia and China that should really concern us, as well as the stuff (and operatives) they could leave behind.
While there are older people with more flexible minds that might take on a new hobby, it seems likely in this case that she was establishing a more secure comm channel.
However, it seems unlikely that she was just having “open” short wave communications with her contacts. That would rely on the fact that no one was listening, which seems like an awful risk. The solution is burst, encrypted short wave packets — but that requires more specialized equipment, not just a normal HAM radio. Who taught this desk jockey how to do that? Steele? Bill P? Peter S?
Admiral Rodgers, being a Patriot, would have realized the people who “botched” the Hillary email investigation in the FBI also had full time surveillance on Trump (and the Secret Service). Everybody in Washington also knows that Clinton will do (or kill) anything to get what she wants. Worse still the Electoral College (Dec. 19, 2016) had not voted yet when this was discovered, creating the potential for disaster. And because the “dossier” creators were so close to the email investigation, and that investigation was botched, it must be re-opened as well.
Ham has been used for a long, long time for encoded messages. During the cold war there were “numbers” channels where people came on at certain times and read long strings of numbers.
How you going to prove in court it was encoded.You could say you were mimicking the numbers channels in memorial and they meant nothing.
Gonna have to agree with prior posters regarding ham radio. It is a really bad way to go about it if you want to talk without being intercepted. Frankly, the type of use we are talking about is so illegal I don’t understand the point of bothering to study and test for the ham licence in the first place. It just creates a paper trail that can be traced back to you.
If you are trying to make a contact these days over long distances, it takes some skill and a decent investment in quality gear given the current solar conditions. Right now there are ZERO sunspots, and the only usable bands are the wavelengths of 40 meters or longer. Good luck building a directional antenna on those bands that’s actually portable.
Getting across the Atlantic on a portable antenna isn’t a big deal, if you are willing to do it at the right time (hence the sked) and spend the money.
http://alphaantenna.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=5&products_id=73
http://www.buddipole.com/debupa.html
Like I said, the point of the ham ticket is to have the excuse for getting caught with the gear. You don’t care if you are intercepted if it’s well encoded. They know you passed a message, but have no way to figure out who sent it or what it contains.