Latest FOIA Revelations Show A ‘FIX’ Of Hillary’s Exoneration

The American Centre for Law and Justice finally got some satisfaction from its numerous FOIA requests to the Department of Justice. It took a specific court order from a federal judge to release long-secret documents that might raise a few eyebrows among those who are still interested in matters pertaining to Hillary Clinton’s aides and the former secretary of state’s missing emails.

The ACLJ has obtained the DOJ’s infamous immunity agreements with Hillary Clinton’s top aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson – documents previously unreleased to the public and which include the DOJ attempting to enter an agreement not to comply with the requirements of FOIA, and which confirm it agreed to “dispose” of evidence, including Mills’ and Samuelson’s “culling laptops” which contained all of the missing emails from Hilary Clinton’s private homebrew server.

The immunity agreements signed by Mills and Samuelson are, to say the least, overly generous to their legal interests:

As we have advised you, we consider Cheryl Mills to be a witness based on the information gathered to date in this investigation. We understand that Cheryl Mills is willing to voluntarily provide the Mills Laptop to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, if the United States agrees not to use any information directly obtained from the Mills Laptop in any prosecution of Cheryl Mills for the mishandling of classified information and/or the removal or destruction of records as described below.

That might be fairly standard. But what’s highly unusual is that the content of those laptops remains the private property of the aides. In other words, some of the content is immune from FOIA requests.

This became clear in a separate letter obtained by ACLJ:

The terms “custody and control” is a FOIA term of art. So, in other words, the DOJ/FBI purported or attempted to agree itself out of the requirements of FOIA, so that nothing on Mills’ or Samuelson’s culling laptops would be subject to FOIA. This agreement is particularly noteworthy given what former FBI lawyer Lisa Page told the DOJ Office of Inspector General:

[T]hese are the State Department’s records. And if the Secretary in the first place had actually followed normal protocol, every single one of these emails, whether personal or work-related would have been in the State Department’s possession, and there would be no attorney-client discussions happening with respect to the sort of this material.

In other words, the DOJ voluntarily agreed to refuse to comply with the requirements of FOIA as to documents that were clearly within the purview of FOIA requests and had otherwise been prevented from being FOIA’d by being stored on Clinton’s private server.

''The DOJ agreed that the FBI would “dispose” of Mills’ and Samuelson’s laptops after the search. According to the agreement:

As soon as the investigation is completed, and to the extent consistent with all FBI policies and applicable laws, including the Federal Records Act, the FBI will dispose of the Device and any printed or electronic materials resulting from your search.

In other words, after agreeing to limit its search of Mills’ laptop to (1) only a certain method of searching; (2) only for certain email-related files; and, (3) only files created within a certain time-frame, the DOJ/FBI agreed to dispose of the laptop – meaning anything else embarrassing, negative or potentially implicating on the laptop – including official State Department records – would be destroyed and never be exposed. (Emphasis mine)

https://galaxynewsexpress.com/blog/breaking-latest-foia-revelations-show-a-fix-of-hillarys-exoneration/

My job is to make your streets safer. That begins with recruiting another 20,000 police officers.

https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1156459357212762112

Ethiopia Plants Record-Breaking 350 Million Trees

About 353 million trees were planted in a single day in Ethiopia on Monday, setting a new world record for seedling plantings, as CNN reported.

The record-setting day is part of a wider "green legacy" initiative started by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's office. The campaign wants every Ethiopian to plant 40 seedlings during the rainy season, which runs from May to October. In the end, the country will have 4 billion indigenous trees to help mitigate the effects of the global climate crisis.

Ethiopia is particularly vulnerable to extreme weather and has suffered from recurrent droughts and deforestation. According the UN figures, Ethiopia's forest coverage dropped from 35 percent a century ago to just 4 percent in the 2000s, as the Guardian reported.

While 80 percent of Ethiopia's population depends on agriculture for their livelihood, extensive farming has increased Ethiopia's vulnerability to land degradation, soil erosion and flooding, according to CNN.

Bekele Benti, a bus driver in Ethiopia's capital Addis Ababa who has witnessed the effects of deforestation, participated in the tree plantings.

"As a bus driver, with frequent trips across the country, I have witnessed the extent of deforestation in different parts of Ethiopia," Benti told Xinhua. "It's really frustrating to see forest-covered areas turned to be bare lands within a few years."

The Green Legacy project "is an ambitious undertaking to become a green society by planting various types of eco-friendly seedling to combat environmental degradation and, a national platform that will be used for various societal green activities," according to the prime minister's official website.

The initial plan for Monday was to plant 200 million trees, which would shatter the record for a single day planting, set in India in 2017 when 1.5 million volunteers planted 66 million trees. To facilitate the planting, many government offices were closed and civil servants were given the day off to take part in the planting, as CNN reported.

After the 12-hour period ended, the Prime Minister posted to Twitter that Ethiopia had far exceeded its goal. A total of 353,633,660 tree seedlings had been planted, the country's minster for innovation and technology, Getahun Mekuria, tweeted, as CNN reported.

Abiy took part in the planting, making appearances that included stops in Addis Ababa, Arba Minch and Wolaita Sodo. More than 400 staff from the United Nations planted trees, along with staff from the African Union, and various foreign embassies in Ethiopia, according to the BBC.

Ethiopian Airlines was one of several corporate entities to join the effort. "Environmental sustainability is one of our corporate philosophies," said the airline, which shared pictures of its executives planting trees near airplanes, according to the Africa Times.

The move to plant so many trees comes in the wake of a recent study that planting 500 billion trees could remove one-fourth of the carbon in the atmosphere, as EcoWatch reported.

Planting Billions of Trees Is the 'Best Climate Change Solution Available

https://www.ecowatch.com/ethiopia-plants-record-breaking-trees-2639514648.html

Apple iMessage Flaw Allows Remote Attackers to Read iPhone Messages

Remote exploitation can be achieved with no user interaction.

Five bugs in Apple’s iMessage service for the iPhone have been uncovered that require no user interaction to exploit, including one that would allow remote attackers to access content stored on iOS devices.

First discovered by Google Project Zero security researcher Natalie Silvanovich, Apple has fully patched four of the flaws as part of the 12.4 iOS update.

CVE-2019-8646 is the bug that allows an attacker to read files off a remote device with no user interaction. An exploit could leak the SMS database, binary files like images and more. Silvanovich has made a proof-of-concept public for the flaw.

In the bug description, the researcher explained where the issue lies: “The class _NSDataFileBackedFuture can be deserialized even if secure encoding is enabled. This class is a file-backed NSData object that loads a local file into memory when the [NSData bytes] selector is called.”

This presents two problems, she added: opening up access to local files if the code deserializing the buffer ever shares it; and, it allows an NSData object to be created with a length that is different than the length of its byte array.

In the latter case, “this violates a very basic property that should always be true of NSData objects,” Silvanovich explained. “This can allow out-of-bounds reads, and could also potentially lead to out-of-bounds writes, as it is now possible to create NSData objects with very large sizes that would not be possible if the buffer was backed.”

Since the potential for information exfiltration is significant, iOS users should take care to upgrade to the latest version as soon as possible.

“Apple publishes less granular details about the distribution of iOS versions than Google does for Android,” OneSpan senior product marketing manager Sam Bakken told Threatpost in an email interview. “Apple data from May 2019 reports that 85 percent of all devices use iOS 12. But, depending on what minor version of iOS 12 they are on (12.0, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3, etc.) a lot of those users will be vulnerable to this seemingly very dangerous vulnerability.”

Other Bugs

As for the other issues, CVE-2019-8647 is a remote, interactionless use-after-free vulnerability that can crash SpringBoard, the standard application that manages the iOS home screen, with no user interaction.

Silvanovich explained in the bug description that when deserializing a class with initWithCoder, subclasses can also be deserialized “so long as they do not override initWithCoder and implement all methods that require a concrete implementation.”

When_PFArray, which is a subclass of NSArray, is deserialized that way, it eventually calls [_PFArray initWithObjects:count:].

More

https://threatpost.com/apple-imessage-remote-attackersread-iphone-messages/146789/