Devin Nunes interview with Seb Gorka
“That’s why I’m suing Twitter for $500 MILLION!” Devin Nunes with Sebastian Gorka on AMERICA First
Supermicro Backup Server Used by Hillary Clinton Highlights Security Risks of China Supply Chain
A little-noticed detail in the FBI’s investigation files related to former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email servers has highlighted the security risks inherent in today’s tech supply chain.
Clinton’s use of private email servers during her 2009–2013 tenure raised the question of whether classified information was improperly stored or transmitted.
President Donald Trump has previously suggested on Twitter that Clinton’s emails were accessed by China. Several media also have cited anonymous sources that have said China had access to her emails.
But the brand of the particular server Clinton used to back up her emails became a telling detail after Bloomberg’s explosive report published in October 2018 revealed that a malicious microchip was allegedly planted by Chinese spies into server motherboards manufactured in China.
In 2013, after Clinton left office, the IT service provider Clinton contracted to manage the email server, Platte River Networks (PRN), moved the server to a data center in Secaucus, New Jersey, called Equinix. There, PRN staff set up a backup system using Datto, a U.S. data backup company. Datto’s backup server took multiple snapshots a day of the main email server which were then deleted every 60 days.
That Datto server was in turn manufactured by Supermicro, according to FBI files.
Supermicro is the tech company at the center of Bloomberg’s story.
Twitter user @Joestradamus91 was among the first to notice and publicize this detail.
Citing anonymous U.S. officials and tech company insiders, the Bloomberg report claimed that a Chinese military unit designed malicious microchips with backdoor access, and was able to secretly implant them at Chinese factories that supplied Supermicro with motherboards. Those compromised motherboards were then built into servers assembled at Supermicro.
The U.S.-based company, founded by a Taiwanese businessman in 1993, is a popular vendor of choice among tech companies. It designs servers according to clients’ specifications, often offered at much cheaper prices than its competitors, according to Gary Miliefsky, a top cybersecurity expert and CEO of Cyber Defense Media Group. Most of Supermicro’s components are made in China.
Though Supermicro and its two clients mentioned in the Bloomberg article—Apple and Amazon—have all denied the allegations, cyber experts believe such attacks are plausible but difficult to trace and attribute to a culprit.
Yossi Appleboum, founder and CEO of cybersecurity firm Sepio Systems and a former Israeli intelligence officer, said in a previous interview with the Israeli edition of The Epoch Times that he had seen such hardware implants before, including in computer keyboards and printers.
“In most cases, hardware manufacturers leave hardware connectors open on the motherboard, which enable access either to the processors or internet connections. This situation is like paradise to the attackers,” Appleboum said.
In response to the Bloomberg report, Apple wrote a letter to Congress that said it hasn’t detected “outbound traffic” that could suggest malware or malicious activity.
But Miliefsky noted that seemingly benign traffic could be exploited. A hypothetical example: Traffic could be going to a website that sells Apple products, but that IP address could have been set up by an attacker to transfer data to China.
Full article below
https://www.theepochtimes.com/supermicro-backup-server-used-by-hillary-clinton-highlights-security-risks-of-china-supply-chain_2847748.html
Research: Google Search Bias Flipped Seats for Democrats in Midterms
New research from psychologist and search engine expert Dr. Robert Epstein shows that biased Google searches had a measurable impact on the 2018 midterm elections, pushing tens of thousands of votes towards the Democrat candidates in three key congressional races, and potentially millions more in races across the country.
The study, from Epstein and a team at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology (AIBRT), analyzed Google searches related to three highly competitive congressional races in Southern California. In all three races, the Democrat won — and Epstein’s research suggests that Google search bias may have tipped them over the edge.
The research follows a previous study conducted in 2016 which showed that biased Google results pushed votes to Hillary Clinton in the presidential election. Democrats and Google executives have disputed these findings.
Epstein says that in the days leading up to the 2018 midterms, he was able to preserve “more than 47,000 election-related searches on Google, Bing, and Yahoo, along with the nearly 400,000 web pages to which the search results linked.”
Analysis of this data showed a clear pro-Democrat bias in election-related Google search results as compared to competing search engines. Users performing Google searches related to the three congressional races the study focused on were significantly more likely to see pro-Democrat stories and links at the top of their results.
As Epstein’s previous studies have shown, this can have a huge impact on the decisions of undecided voters, who often assume that their search results are unbiased. Epstein has called this the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME).
According to Epstein’s study, at least 35,455 undecided voters in the three districts may have been persuaded to vote for a Democrat candidate because of slanted Google search results. Considering that each vote gained by a Democrat is potentially a vote lost by a Republican, this means more than 70,910 votes may have been lost by Republicans in the three districts due to Google bias. In one of these districts, CA 45, the Democrat margin of victory was just over 12,000 votes.
Full article below:
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2019/03/22/research-google-search-bias-flipped-seats-for-democrats-in-midterms/