QAnon claims Trump is fighting the deepstate. Then why does he love the CIA so much? To find out, we explored the QAnon perspective, some history, and what changed after Bush & Obama made a dent. To help us, cyber security and national security journalist Kim Zetter answers some questions about Trump & the CIA's cyber offensives.
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Welcome, listener, to Chapter 101 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Deep State Trump episode.
As always, we're your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
If you've been following the QAnon conspiracy theory, or even just the news, you've probably heard the term Deep State.
Now, if I had to make up a broad definition of it, I'd say the Deep State refers to the unelected portion of those wielding governmental power, with a specific focus on the sedimented intelligence agencies and private military interests.
But for QAnon followers, the word has a specific relationship to Donald Trump, whom they consider to be waging a protracted war against what they openly refer to as the Deep State.
Recently, a lengthy article published to Yahoo News caught my eye.
It was authored by a team of experienced reporters, and it has shed light on Trump's relationship with the CIA.
One of those reporters is Kim Zetter.
She's a cybersecurity and national security journalist, as well as the author of Countdown to Zero Day, Stuxnet, and the launch of the world's first digital weapon.
She also happens to share a byline on the article I mentioned, entitled, So we'll be speaking to her about that a little later.
a more powers to launch cyber attacks.
So we'll be speaking to her about that a little later.
But before all that.
QAnon News.
First up, I have New York Police Union president appears on Fox News with QAnon mug.
Oh, major.
Come on.
Really?
Major.
Oopsie.
So Ed Mullins, the head of the NYPD Sergeants Union, appeared on Fox News on Friday via
remote video with a mug placed behind him and blazed with a big Q in the word QAnon.
Anybody who follows that NYPD union on Twitter knows that they're demented.
Deranged.
I mean, even by police standards.
You'd think they'd want a better public presence, but no, their social media presence is deranged.
And that is why unions are inherently bad.
When reporter Christopher Mathias reached out to Mullins for comment, Mullins said that the Fox segment was filmed in a borrowed office and that he has no idea what QAnon is.
He also would not reveal whose office it actually was.
When a Business Insider reached out to Mullins, he said this.
Our country is falling apart, New York City is in crisis, and the only thing the news media is concerned about is a mug!
Yes, because the crisis is that you and your kind are shit deep in nasty little conspiracy theories that are causing you to harm the public because you're pilled.
So yeah, our issue is that you're pilled, sir.
I mean, this behavior from Ed Mullins isn't surprising.
I mean, it's his job to protect police officers, so of course he's not going to give up the name of whose mug it is.
Not just any department.
Please, the NY goddamn PD.
This is not the first time police have been spotted with QAnon iconography.
Most famously in 2018, that was two goddamn years ago, Sergeant Matt Patton of the Broward County Sheriff's Office in Florida was pictured next to the vice president while wearing a Q patch.
Sergeant Patton was demoted after that incident.
More recently, in June of this year, CBS Chicago reported that LaSalle, Illinois police officers Matthew Kunkel and Mark Manicki were spotted wearing the Q symbol at a rally protesting the lockdown orders.
Officer Kunkel.
Yeah, Officer Kunkel.
Okay.
He sounds like an officer that would come to your kindergarten class and tell you how weed is bad for you.
No, he sounds like a donut mascot.
Officer Kunkel!
Dunkles for Kunkels!
There's also the case of Officer Nico Roche of the Bellevue, Washington Police Department who was spotted posting QAnon stuff on Twitter and was subsequently placed on administrative leave.
A follower of mine also once sent me a photograph of an Irvine, California Police Department motorcycle that had a Where We Go One, We Go All license plate frame.
So there is evidence that police are into QAnon in all four corners of this great nation.
That's right.
Coast to coast.
Why do you think police officers are pilled on, like, essentially a cessation to a criminal enterprise that they have nothing to do with?
You would think that the reason that they're police officers is they want to be on the front lines.
You know, they want to get their hands dirty in fighting crime, you know, what have you.
Well, it's because the promise of QAnon is that, like, all the world's problems can be solved with arresting a bunch of people.
But they're not even going to be doing the arresting, do you think?
It's going to be like the FBI or the military, right?
I guess.
Well, 100,000 people, you're going to need some police officers to arrest that many people in a great grand day of reckoning.
For my next story, Fox Nation's newest show is hosted by a QAnon follower.
Credit for catching this goes to the fine reporters over at Media Matters.
For those who are unfamiliar, Fox News has an online streaming platform called Fox Nation.
It's kind of like a clearinghouse for content and hosts that Fox wants to promote, but are too trashy for Fox News or Fox Business.
Fox Nation's newest series features actor Isaiah Washington in the travel and cooking show, Isaiah Washington Kitchen Talk.
Washington is best known for his role as Dr. Preston Burke on the ABC medical drama Grey's Anatomy.
Washington is a QAnon supporter who has pushed conspiracy theories about COVID-19, 5G networks, Black Lives Matter, and many, many other topics.
To cite one of many examples, Washington in April on Facebook, he shared a YouTube video of an interview with Dr. Judy Mikovits, the star of the discredited documentary, Plandemic.
In July 15th, very recently, Washington posted the hashtag WhereWeGoOneWeGoAll worldwide on Instagram, so he continues to actively promote QAnon even after getting hired for this new show.
On Twitter, Washington has expressed paranoia about Fox News executives, tweeting this.
Feels like the Fox News executive producers are compromised.
They apparently have no intention on supporting me and Isaiah Washington, Kitchen Talk, in a positive way and not bring up my tenure on Grey's Anatomy.
No mention of my five years on CW's The 100?
What's really going on?
Now I sound like Trump.
I just want to note, just more in a general sense, it seems like if you were to judge by the media coverage, it feels like a point where QAnon is drawing a lot of genuine national attention.
To cite just a few instances of reporting for this last week, the QAnon candidates were covered by New York Times, LA Times, and NPR.
The magazine Foreign Policy reported on the Iranian restart opposition movement, which is aligned with QAnon.
And the incident with Ed Mullins and the QAnon bug was covered by CNN.
when that kind of stuff used to be only covered by like us or like extremism reporters.
If there is one thing that QAnon followers and Trump supporters are certain about when
it comes to Trump is that he is taking on the deep state.
Bureaucrats inside the federal government have illegitimately taken the reins of power and the only man who can restore power back to the people is this Washington outsider.
I thought it would be useful to examine whether the QAnon version of Trump battling the CIA has any basis in reality.
So the earliest QDROPs from October of 2017 portrayed Trump as doing battle with all the intelligence agencies.
For example, check out QDROP number 11.
Military Intelligence versus FBI, CIA, NSA.
No approval or congressional oversight.
Who is the Commander-in-Chief of the military?
Under what article can the President impose military intelligence takeover investigations for the three-letter agencies?
Q has special ire for the CIA, which they call Clowns in America.
In QAnon World, the CIA is a totally rogue agency that even attacks American leaders who don't toe the line.
In two November 2017 QDrops, Q even claimed that the CIA was illegally tracking Trump through Twitter somehow.
Three letter agency embedded tracking slash up channel into POTUS's Twitter to specifically target through specialized geo and send his location.
We anticipated this.
It has begun.
Let's be real clear.
The CIA just attacked the Commandant Chief, which was immediately detected by NSA military intelligence and alerted.
Wait, this time they fucked it up even further!
Command in Chief!
In QAnon world, there are only three uncorrupted federal agencies.
The Secret Service, the Department of Homeland Security, and the NSA.
All the rest went rogue because of their corrupt leadership.
Donald Trump himself, on the other hand, in the real world, has historically been quite affectionate towards the CIA.
For example, in December of 2014, Trump tweeted out a few thoughts in response to the release of a Senate report titled The committee study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program.
That Senate report details several actions by CIA officials, including torturing prisoners, providing misleading or false information about classified CIA programs to the President, Department of Justice, Congress, and the media, and impeding government oversight and internal criticism.
It also revealed the existence of previously unknown detainees And that more detainees were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques than was previously disclosed.
It concluded that the use of enhanced interrogation techniques did not yield unique intelligence that saved lives, as the CIA falsely claimed, nor was it useful in gaining cooperation from detainees, and that the program damaged the United States' international standing.
Now, to me, all of that bad stuff, it sounds like textbook deep state behavior, right?
You know, here we have an intel agency, they're doing illegal stuff, and they're lying about it, and they're resisting all attempts at transparency from elected officials.
But it's torture, so Trump is like, yes!
Because cruelty, there's something about it that gets him off.
Exactly.
So Trump, at that time, in multiple tweets, thought that the Senate was being too harsh on the CIA.
Very sad and dangerous that soon-to-be ex-intelligence chair Dianne Feinstein released the CIA report.
Glad she is losing her committee chair.
These Islamists chop Americans' heads off and want to destroy us.
We should be applauding the CIA, not persecuting them.
The CIA deserves our praise for taking the fight to the enemy in the dark corners of the world.
The CIA perseveres.
The politicians whine.
So he's clearly taking the side of the CIA over elected officials.
Pretty, pretty blatant.
But that's because he's not an elected official yet.
But you might say, that was the old Trump.
Surely Trump got serious about deep state abuses when he started campaigning.
What about his campaign slogan, Drain the Swamp?
Well, if you listen to Trump campaign speeches from 2016, you'll notice that the phrase Drain the Swamp was never intended to be an attack In January of 2017, the media reported that intel agencies were evaluating a dossier full of unverified claims about Trump that were compiled by former British agent Christopher Steele.
intelligence agencies until after the election.
In January of 2017, the media reported that intel agencies were evaluating a dossier full
of unverified claims about Trump that were compiled by former British agent Christopher
Steele.
In reaction to these news reports, Trump tweeted this.
Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to leak into the public.
One last shot at me.
Are we living in Nazi Germany?
So secret torture program.
Fine.
Leaking information about me.
This is Nazi Germany.
I don't want anybody thinking I like a pee pee on my face or my bed or other people.
That's where I draw the line.
I mean, it is so childish.
A fight between the CIA and Trump over pee pee.
Yeah.
But even then, Trump has never said a bad word about the CIA specifically.
In fact, the day after Trump's inauguration in 2017, his first stop was the CIA headquarters in Langley.
I just want to feel what it feels like to be in charge of this.
All the torture and the murder, just to be close to it.
The bad vibrations, they're feeding me.
Let me sit on that bench.
In the lobby.
This group is going to be one of the most important groups in this country toward making us safe.
Toward making us winners again.
Toward ending all of the problems.
We have so many problems that are interrelated that we don't even think of, but interrelated to the kind of havoc and fear.
That this sick group of people has caused.
So I can only say that I am with you a thousand percent.
And the reason you're my first stop is that, as you know, I have a running war with the media.
They are among the most dishonest human beings on earth.
Right?
And they sort of made it sound like I had a feud with the intelligence community.
And I just want to let you know, the reason you're number one stopped, it is exactly the opposite.
Was that the CIA giving Trump like a massive ovation?
Massive ovation at dumping on the media and taking his side in his war against the media.
Yes.
CIA's pilled.
I don't understand what the problem is.
Why the QAnon people have a problem with them?
They're pilled as fuck.
Yeah.
I'm with you a thousand percent.
It was my first stop.
Dude, they're pilled to the gills.
He loves it.
He does.
He loves it.
What about Trump's attacks on the Deep State?
Well, Trump actually never made reference to the Deep State at all until this November 2017 tweet.
Charles McCullough, the respected former Intel Comm Inspector General, said public was misled on Crooked Hillary emails.
Quote, emails endangered national security.
Why aren't our deep state authorities looking at this rigged and corrupt?
So right off the bat, it seems that his main complaint isn't that the deep state exists, it's that the deep state isn't going after Hillary Clinton enough.
Yeah, of course.
So all of this is just basically to say that there isn't really any evidence in his rhetoric that Trump ever gave a shit about unelected bureaucrats or intelligence agencies abusing their power in a general sense.
No, he knew what ring to kiss immediately.
He knew exactly who runs shit.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
And so, yeah, so this QAnon image of like, oh, Trump doing war with the CIA and he's the one who's going to reign in the CIA.
It's all bullshit.
It's based on nothing.
Yeah, he went there with fucking wings.
He's like, I've brought wings for everybody.
Spicy, mild.
Have you a few?
You like blue cheese?
I got it.
That's for everybody.
Fresh celery and carrots.
Right over there.
You're my favorite spooks.
Stuxnet.
So I thought it was important to go back a little bit before Trump and explore the kind of attacks that the CIA was partaking in.
In June of 2012, the New York Times covered a wave of cyberattacks perpetrated by the Obama administration.
They began in 2009 and targeted the computer systems running Iran's main nuclear enrichment facilities.
The attacks were nothing new.
In fact, Obama didn't even change the codename of the Bush-era program, which was Olympic Games.
But the attack Obama greenlit very early in his presidency was, according to those participating, unprecedented in scale.
Israel and the United States collaborated to develop a virus which they infected the Iranian computer systems with.
This secret operation was revealed in the summer of 2010 when, due to a programming error, the virus escaped Iran's Natanz nuclear plant and started infecting the public at large.
Specialists studying the virus dubbed it Stuxnet.
Now, certain viruses are known as worms because they replicate themselves in order to spread through systems, and they cause damage through bandwidth usage, at the very least.
And at the very worst, well, let's say you're like a sovereign nation in the Middle East, well, Stuxnet might temporarily take out about 1,000 of the 5,000 centrifuges that you're using to purify uranium.
Here's David Sanger in the aforementioned New York Times article.
The United States government only recently acknowledged developing cyber weapons and has never admitted using them.
There have been reports of one-time attacks against personal computers used by members of Al-Qaeda and of contemplated attacks against the computers that run air defense systems, including during the NATO-led air attack on Libya last year.
But Olympic Games was of an entirely different type and sophistication.
It appears to be the first time the United States has repeatedly used cyber weapons to cripple another country's
infrastructure, achieving with computer code what until then could be accomplished only by bombing a country or
sending in agents to plant explosives.
But because Obama is a smart president, he was aware of the irony of it all.
Mr. Obama, according to participants in many Situation Room meetings on Olympic Games, was acutely aware that with
every attack he was pushing the United States into new territory, much as his predecessors had with the first use
of atomic weapons in the 1940s, of intercontinental missiles in the 1950s, and of drones in the past decade.
He repeatedly expressed concerns that any American acknowledgment that it was using cyber weapons, even under the most careful and limited circumstances, could enable other countries, terrorists or hackers, to justify their own attacks.
Quote, We discussed the irony more than once, one of his aides said.
Another said that the administration was resistant to developing a, quote, grand theory for a weapon whose possibilities they were still discovering.
Yet, Mr. Obama concluded that when it came to stopping Iran, the United States had no other choice.
If Stuxnet failed, he told aides, there would be no time for sanctions and diplomacy with Iran to work.
Israel would carry out a conventional military attack, prompting a conflict that could spread throughout the region.
I give up.
It's all so fucked.
It's horrifying.
It's all so fucked.
If we don't do this, then Israel's gonna attack them and we'll have to support them.
They're gonna bomb them, then we'll have to bomb.
Like, oh, God, man.
We discussed the irony that people will think it's okay to do these kinds of attacks once we've done them.
Keep in mind that this all stemmed from Bush.
Now, triggered that Iran was developing its own nuclear capabilities, Bush and co.
sat many a night in the war room.
But in the end, they settled for Iraq and Afghanistan, and we all know how that turned out.
So, they just kept infecting the Natanz plant over and over with new versions of the Stuxnet virus, slowly testing out their new weapon, which was now capable of, like I said, dishing out physical damage by speeding up the centrifuges until, like, the delicate parts would disintegrate.
And meanwhile it would send messages to the control room that everything was functioning totally fine.
The funny thing is they started not trusting their systems so much that at one point they sent a government guy to sit in the room with the centrifuges with a phone and just report on what's actually going on.
Here's what the New York Times article said about the transition between Bush and Obama.
By the time Mr. Bush left office, no wholesale destruction had been accomplished.
Meeting with Mr. Obama in the White House days before his inauguration, Mr. Bush urged him to preserve two classified programs, Olympic Games and the drone program in Pakistan.
Mr. Obama took Mr. Bush's advice.
Yeah, then he didn't prosecute him for any war crimes stuff around the torture.
Or for bringing us to war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
No, he just continued it.
False pretenses.
And, in classic style, when shit hit the fan, the Americans blamed the Israelis.
Of course!
Here's from the article again.
In the summer of 2010, shortly after a new variant of the worm had been sent into Natanz, it became clear that the worm, which was never supposed to leave the Natanz machines, had broken free, like a zoo animal that found the keys to the cage.
It fell to Mr. Panetta and two other crucial players in Olympic games.
General Cartwright, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Michael J. Morrell, the Deputy Director of the CIA, to break the news to Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden.
An error in the code, they said, had led it to spread to an engineer's computer when it was hooked up to the centrifuges.
When the engineer left Natanz and connected the computer to the internet, the American and Israeli-made bug failed to recognize that its environment had changed.
It began replicating itself all around the world.
Suddenly, the code was exposed, though its intent would not be clear, at least to ordinary computer users.
We think there was a modification done by the Israelis, one of the briefers told the president.
And we don't know if we were part of that activity.
Mr. Obama, according to officials in the room, asked a series of questions, fearful that the code could do damage outside the plant.
The answers came back in hedged terms.
Mr. Biden fumed.
It's gotta be the Israelis, he said.
They went too far.
In fact, both the Israelis and the Americans had been aiming for a particular part of the centrifuge plant, a critical area whose loss, they had concluded, would set the Iranians back considerably.
It is unclear who introduced the programming error.
So at this point, I'm kind of questioning the use of the word error.
Despite the virus being out in the wild, the US and Israel didn't relent.
They pushed out another version of the virus, this time taking down just under a thousand centrifuges, as I mentioned earlier.
The public leak, in the end, didn't really matter.
Fuck the hundred thousand computers that had been infected.
Obama had been running the same scheme on the North Koreans, but they had pretty extreme security in their nuclear facilities.
Iran, it would be.
Later, putting two and two together, specialists analyzing the virus noted that 60% of infected computers were in Iran.
But even the weirdos at the Cato Institute were dubious.
They pointed out that Iran had actually increased centrifuge production due to the pressure of the cyber attacks, and argued that although some claim the attacks set back Iranian uranium refinement by years, it could more realistically be measured in months, if that.
At best, according to the University of Toronto's John Lindsay, Stuxnet thus produced only a temporary slowdown in the enrichment rate itself.
Other experts are even more skeptical.
Ivanka Barzashka, research associate at King's College London and a fellow at Stanford, argues that, quote, "...evidence of the worm's impact is circumstantial and inconclusive."
Brandon Valeriano and Ryan Maness, in their book, Cyber War vs. Cyber Realities, contend, "...it is wholly unclear if the Stuxnet worm actually had a significant impact on Iran."
So another shitty side effect of this was retaliation, of course.
Although there is no proof that Iran became more compliant in response to the virus, there's plenty of evidence suggesting that the Iranian administration learned from the American cyber attacks to start their own division.
Here's from Glenn Greenwald in 2015.
A top-secret National Security Agency document from April 2013 reveals that the U.S.
intelligence community is worried that the West's campaign of aggressive and sophisticated cyber-attacks enabled Iran to improve its own capabilities by studying and then replicating those tactics.
The NSA is specifically concerned that Iran's cyber-weapons will become increasingly potent and sophisticated by virtue of learning from the attacks that have been launched against that country.
Iran's destructive cyber attack against Saudi Aramco in August 2012, during which data was destroyed on tens of thousands of computers, was the first such attack NSA had observed from this adversary.
The NSA document states, Iran, having been a victim of a similar cyber attack
against its own oil industry in April 2012, has demonstrated a clear ability to learn from the
capabilities and actions of others.
The document was provided to The Intercept by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and was prepared in
connection with a planned meeting with government communications headquarters,
the British Surveillance Agency. The document references joint surveillance successes such as,
quote, support to policy makers during the multiple rounds of P5 plus one negotiations,
referring to the ongoing talks between the five permanent members of the UN Security Council,
Germany and Iran, to forge an agreement over Iran's nuclear program.
The document suggests that Iran has become a much more formidable cyber force by learning from the viruses injected into its systems, attacks which have been linked back to the United States and Israel.
Seems like a really bad strategy.
Right.
Just a loser strategy.
Right.
Helped no one.
Made Iran stronger.
Yeah, absolutely.
So all of this to say that I was not very surprised when just recently Yahoo News published an article entitled, Secret Trump Order Gives CIA More Powers to Launch Cyber Attacks.
Kim Zetter is a journalist focused on national and cyber security.
She wrote a book about Stuxnet and she co-authored the latest Yahoo News article about the CIA's cyber attacks under Trump.
Kim, welcome to the show.
Thank you.
So we've briefly explored Stuxnet and cyber attacks under Bush and Obama.
What what differentiates them, in your opinion, from the attacks greenlit by the Trump administration?
So obviously Stuxnet was conducted under Obama, but that was conducted by NSA primarily and Israel with some assistance from CIA, but it was primarily NSA.
So when we think of offensive cyber operations, we normally think of the NSA.
We don't think of CIA, although the CIA obviously is engaged in espionage activities.
What this new finding does, presidential finding signed by Trump in 2018, is that it sort of broadens the CIA's ability to do the kinds of offensive operations that we're expecting the NSA to do.
But also it is removing oversight of CIA.
So previously, if CIA was going to be conducting a covert operation, it would have to get a sign off from the White House and obviously National Security Council within the White House as well.
And what this does is it basically just gives the CIA a blanket authorization saying whatever you decide to do is okay with us so they don't have to come back and make a case for each individual operation they do.
What that means and what that's resulted in in the last two years since the finding was signed in 2018 Is that the CIA has had this wish list of operations that they never actually carried up the banner of authorization because they felt like they wouldn't get approved.
So when they had the White House and the National Security Council that they had to go through, they had operations that they never even brought to the White House to approve because they knew they wouldn't get approved.
And so what this has done is it's given the CIA the ability to essentially self-authorize its covert operations.
And in having that ability to self-authorize, it means that they can go back to this list of activities that they wanted to do prior and knew that they wouldn't be able to and now can authorize them themselves.
And so this means potentially attacks against banks and financial infrastructures, which were always a big no-no under previous administrations because of the potential repercussions on the global economies.
And also conducting potentially destructive attacks against critical infrastructure.
So, you know, maybe taking out the power grid in some places or wiping servers clean.
And, and one other thing that it allows them to do, it allows them to do hack and dump operations.
There was a quote in the article by a government official that was interviewed, and it was, uh, our government is basically turning into fucking WikiLeaks.
So, like, what do they mean by that?
Yeah.
So, I mean, obviously we were all appalled at what happened in 2016 when Russians, uh, nation state hackers infiltrated DNC servers and then leaked emails from that server to WikiLeaks.
Um, and so, you know, everyone was actually the CIA, you know, thinks that that's an okay operation because that's traditional espionage, right?
Um, you obtain information about someone and you release it publicly or you do something else to embarrass them.
So what Russia did was in the CIA's mind, at least, um, sort of really ordinary kinds of espionage, um, and dumps.
The rest of us, however, are a little disturbed by that ability.
I mean, obviously, if you're doing espionage in the old world of statecraft and you were releasing information, let's say, to a newspaper, we weren't talking about trenches of millions of documents that are easily released online.
And there's no gatekeeper, right?
It's not going to media.
It's basically just getting dumped online.
So what we're talking about here is the potential for the CIA to act like a WikiLeaks and just dump data online without, you know, any kind of oversight.
And that raises the potential for really escalation in this regard.
And it really puts all political parties in the U.S.
in the line of targets, although they have been already in the past.
But it sort of provides some kind of sanction for that activity now.
I wanted to read a part of the article you co-wrote.
So the CIA seems kind of split about Trump's new policies.
among some officials.
Quote, Trump came in and way overcorrected, said a former official.
Covert cyber operations that in the past would have been rigorously vetted through the NSC,
with sometimes years-long gaps between formulation and execution,
now go, quote, from idea to approval in weeks, said the former official.
So the CIA seems kind of split about Trump's new policies.
Is this kind of schism habitual in the intelligence community?
Yes, I interviewed a former general counsel for the CIA, who's named in the article, Robert Eatinger.
And he said that, you know, there's always been this split in the CIA of people who felt like,
under the Trump and Obama, I'm sorry, under the Obama and Bush administrations,
there was too much oversight.
There were too many bars that you had to jump over in order to get something approved.
They felt that there was just too much micromanaging.
And so those people, of course, are likely happy that this, you know, the oversight of the White House and the National Security Council have been removed because that frees them to do operations more quickly, especially in cyberspace, right?
Because you want to be able to act very quickly in cyberspace.
And with all those levels of authorization, that sometimes prevents you from doing things that you need to do in a timely manner.
But of course there are other people who feel like those kinds of levels of oversight are appropriate, especially for operations that have the potential to cause loss of life.
If you're talking about causing destruction of critical infrastructure, let's say a chemical plant, petrochemical plant, if you blow that up, the potential there is to kill someone.
And operations that in the past have the potential to cause loss of life would get nixed.
And that's not necessarily the case anymore.
Have any of the operations that have kind of been allowed, I suppose, under this new change been exposed yet?
Do we know what kind of operations are going on?
Well, we've told, in the story we talk about, sources told us that there were operations done, hack and dump operations, done against both Iran and Russia.
And they wouldn't confirm specific operations to us, but we pointed out in the story that in March 2019, there had been a hack and dump operation against an entity in Russia.
The source told us that the hack and dump operation had been against a Russian company that was working secretly with Russian intelligence operations.
And so that hack and dump that did occur, it happened online, In March 2019, was indeed against a private company.
We name it a SciTech.
And that resulted in something like seven terabytes of data and documents being stolen from that Russian, it's an IT firm, being stolen from that company.
And they were posted online and passed around to journalists secretly by the leaker.
We don't know who the leaker was, at least publicly.
And some of those documents showed that that company was indeed working secretly for Russian intelligence.
So there's one operation that seems to match precisely with the information that we obtained from the source, although the sources won't confirm that that is a CIA operation.
Right.
We also named some Iranian hack and dump operations that occurred that were very similar to the Russian one.
But again, we didn't get any confirmation from sources.
And so, you know, although regime change is not really anything new for the CIA, there's a passage in the article that I wanted to get your comments on.
And here it is.
Fatigue from having to continually beat back Iran's nuclear progress gradually led U.S.
officials to take an even more aggressive approach that began to resemble a regime change
strategy, according to former officials.
The thinking became, quote, if we can impact the regime, then no bomb, said another former
Quote, we're playing semantics.
Destabilization is functionally the same thing as regime change.
It's a deniability issue, the former official said.
So yeah, could you just tell us a bit about that?
Yeah.
So the US and the West has been dealing with Iran's nuclear program for really since 2000, 2002.
So that's a long time.
And Because of sort of diplomacy and traditional methods of addressing these kinds of things, it's taken a very long time.
It took a long time to get Iran to the negotiating table with under the Obama administration.
And not everyone, of course, was happy with the agreement that came out of that.
So so what that quote is talking about is that kind of, you know, longstanding, decades long efforts.
to try and deal with the Iranian nuclear program. And a much more efficient method,
some believe, would be simply to get regime change in Iran.
Of course, the US has a history of helping regime changes along that then also become
problematic themselves.
Saddam Hussein in Iraq, for example. So there's no guarantee that when you
instigate a regime change that you even get the results that you want. But it's also very dangerous.
It causes a lot of loss of life. I mean, that's what you mentioned earlier,
that the operations where loss of life is being considered would have the more scrutiny. So
maybe it's that as well. If you relabel it something else, you don't have as much scrutiny.
Well, but it's also sort of blind to the actual destabilization you're getting.
I mean, that quote was about, you know, destabilization is the same as regime change, but that's talking about internal destabilization, right?
You destable inside so that the people sort of overthrow the government there.
But what you're really doing is destabilizing the entire region, really.
And it's like the protections that were against hacking banks and financial institutions.
You don't really know the reverberations that will occur when you do those kinds of activities.
In banking, because you don't know all the interconnected networks and systems that will be affected by a hack of a bank.
In the same way, it's exactly the same thing when you destabilize a country in a regime.
You know what you know right now when that regime is there.
You don't know what you don't know.
You don't know what's going to happen when you destabilize that and the reverberations that that will have throughout the region and beyond.
Right, of course.
And, I mean, here they're talking about the oversight being relatively flimsy, it seems.
You have a former official on record saying, as long as you can show that it vaguely looks like the charity is working on behalf of that government, then you're good.
Uh, that, that seems, you know, it says before you would need years of signals and dozens of pages of intelligence to show that this thing is a de facto arm of the government.
So you mentioned one operation that did end up being connected potentially to the Russian government, but don't you think there are other potentially flimsier operations in course?
Yeah.
So what that quote is, is I'm referring to specifically, um, with regards to the presidential finding is that one other thing that it did and when Trump signed this, Was that it lowered the bar for the CIA to go after entities, third-party entities, like media outlets, journalists, or charity organizations, or religious organizations, or companies, or individuals in any of those organizations, who have some kind of connection to an adversary's foreign intelligence apparatus.
So let's say a bank that is essentially laundering money for the IRGC in Iran or something like that.
So in the past, if you wanted to go after some kind of third party, which wasn't directly a foreign adversary, you had to have a lot of evidence actually pointing out that connection before you could get that approved.
What the finding is doing is it's lowering the bar so that you don't need all that signals intelligence.
You don't need all that evidence to show a connection.
You just have to show sort of a general connection in order to go after those.
So that's what that was referring to specifically.
Right.
And so there's also, as you mentioned, a kind of wish list that the CIA had been compiling for the day when exactly, you know, something exactly like this would happen and they would have a bit more freedom.
And here there's a source saying that at least a dozen operations that were on the wish list have been started and quote, this has been a combination of destructive things.
Stuff is on fire and exploding and also public dissemination of data leaking or things that look like leaking.
And there is a later quote as well by another CIA official indicating that there's at least a part of the CIA that took this very positively.
He said people were doing backflips in the hallways.
So, I mean, I think that just someone who doesn't study security or intelligence agencies such as yourself, they might just read this and be terrified.
Is that warranted?
Well, I think that someone pointed out to me a really interesting distinction between the NSA and the CIA, you know, and U.S.
Cyber Command.
So the NSA has a mandate not only to operate offensively, to conduct offensive operations, but they also have a mandate to defend U.S.
military networks.
And so I think that when you're in that position of weighing those two, the offensive and defensive, you take, let's say, maybe a more cautious attitude toward the kinds of operations that you conduct and you have an understanding of the potential blowback against U.S.
systems.
The CIA doesn't have any defensive element to it.
It's all, you know, sort of offensive in terms of espionage and operations like this.
So they don't necessarily have that sort of stopgap of thinking about potential blowback.
And that's a concern, right?
When you've given them the ability to self-authorize their own operations.
There's no one who basically steps in and says, well, no, you have to think about what is the potential for what could potentially come happen back in the U.S.
if you do that.
So it sounds like, you know, Trump, with this new change, has put in place an environment in which the CIA has less accountability and is able to operate even more like a, quote, you know, deep state, as the term gets flung around a lot these days.
I mean, would you would you say that that Trump is maybe not what what he's made out to be a kind of a valiant fighter against these kinds of, you know, quote unquote, deep state operations?
Well, I mean, when he's talking about deep state, he's referring to a deep state conspiracy against himself.
Administration.
What we're talking about with the presidential finding is, you know, Trump authorizing them to go after others, not to come after Trump, but to go
after foreign adversaries.
So there's a big distinction there.
Yes, yes.
One is that makes a smile happen on the face of him.
And the other one, it's a big frown.
Yeah, I mean, Iran, of course, is a big target for Trump.
He's made no secret of that.
And that's why I say that he would likely be pleased for Iran to know that he has signed something like this, because he tends to be in favor of a show of strong arms, right?
And this does make the Trump administration appear to have a strong arm with regard to Iran.
So I think that in terms of authorizing quote-unquote deep state, it disturbs me to use that term in this context.
Right, that makes sense.
I think that a lot of the media environment has been flinging around words like this and they lose meaning, but it's important to get some of the details.
So I guess to be scared for the right reasons?
Well, I think listeners should definitely pick up your book Countdown to Zero Day, Stuxnet, and the launch of the world's first digital weapon.
And they should also probably go follow you on Twitter at Kim Zetter.
That's Z-E-T-T-E-R.
Is there anything else you'd like to plug?
No, you've done a good job of that.
Thank you.
Right?
Well, thank you so much for coming on.
Thanks so much, Kim.
Thank you.
My pleasure.
Good conversation.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
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Listener, until next week, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's a fact.
And now, today's Auto-Q.
Show of hands, who knows who Q is?
If you don't know who Q is, it's not my job to provide everything.
Go check it out.
Q posts kinda regularly, and you can follow Q drops at a QAlerts.app.
And here, you can learn where to read the Q clock.
Not gonna lie, that shit's pretty cool.
Q has only been a known presence to us since October.
October of 2017, I believe.
I only just learned who Q is.
My reaction?
Who the fuck is that?
Obviously, there's a lot of speculation as to who the hell Q is.
Now, what people have fallen on is Q has to be somebody who's very close to the president.
Now, there are clues that show that Q is a few people.
And a lot of people speculate that Q is Donald Trump.
A lot of people speculate Q is Barron, which is a pretty good theory.
