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Jan. 4, 2019 - Tim Pool Daily Show
11:39
German Nationalists Office Bombed, MASSIVE Hack Exposes Politicians

German Nationalists Office Bombed, MASSIVE Hack Exposes Politicians. Two major incidents have just hit the news.The first was that overnight an explosion hit the office for the German nationalist party "Alternative for Germany" in Saxony, police believe this was meant to harm people and was an escalation in political tensions. Many people speculate this was the far left targeting AFD.However, alongside this was news of the largest cyber attack in Germany history. Politicians, celebrities, journalists, and even Angela Merkel had private information released to the public. But what made this alarming was that only the AFD was not victim to the leak.This led people on the left to believe far right interests have perpetrated the hack.For now, the only thing we know for sure is that political tensions are escalating. Support the show (http://timcast.com/donate) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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tim pool
A regional office for the German Nationalist Party was hit by a bomb blast last night.
Three individuals suspected of being involved have been detained.
Law enforcement believes this is an escalation in political violence.
They believe the explosion was meant to hurt people.
Fortunately, no one was injured.
But that's not the only thing to hit Germany overnight.
They have just been hit by the largest hack attack in their history.
Private information of left-wing politicians, journalists, and publication are being released to the public.
Oddly though, the only group seemingly unaffected is the AFD.
And now you have people speculating that maybe they were involved.
Maybe it's the far right attacking the far left or someone working to benefit them.
While some experts say maybe this is a frame-up.
Germany is experiencing some extreme political turmoil right now.
So today, let's take a look at exactly what's going on to figure out who's to blame or maybe this is all just one big frame-up meant to escalate political tensions.
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The first story from Reuters.
Blast hits office of German far-right AFD in Saxony.
In this photo they say, assistant of the AFD office Silke Vorberger, waits inside the office of the Alternative for Germany, AFD, far-right party in the city of Doblind, Germany, January 4th, 2019.
One day after an explosion set the office on fire and damaged vehicles and nearby buildings.
German police have detained three men suspected of involvement in an explosion that targeted an office of the Alternative for Germany.
No one was injured in the explosion outside the AFD office in the city of Dobelm late Thursday.
The blast set the office on fire and damaged vehicles and nearby buildings, Saxony's LKA Criminal Investigation Office said in a statement.
The LKA said its anti-terrorism unit had determined that the explosion was an escalation of politically motivated attacks targeting AFD offices in Saxony that are usually limited to acts of vandalism.
The attacks against the AFD office in Nobelne is special given the explosion was intended to harm people.
Saxony was the site of far-right riots and demonstrations sparked by the stabbing to death of a Cuban-German man in the city of Chemnitz in August, initially blamed on two migrants from Iraq and Syria.
The riots, which featured skinheads performing the Hitler salute and chasing migrants in the streets of Chemnitz, highlighted the depth of a rift created by Chancellor Angela Merkel's decision in 2015 to welcome almost one million asylum seekers, mainly Muslims from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Saxony has a large far-right scene, but it is also home to many supporters of the hard-left Die Linke, which is a second-largest party in the regional assembly.
Police said the three men it detained were aged 29, 32, and 50.
The LKA's anti-terrorism unit is still investigating the incident.
One of the more important aspects of this story to note.
In September, the local reported right-wing AFD, second-most popular party in Germany, polled fines.
And for those that are not familiar, Wikipedia describes AFD as a German nationalist, right-wing populist, and Euro-skeptic party.
They say that the AFD has been increasingly open to working with far-right extremist groups, such as Pegida.
Parts of the AFD have racist, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, and xenophobic tendencies linked to far-right movements such as Neo-Nazism and Identitarianism.
There are many people who dispute the claims made by some news outlets and the media, and they believe this is more of an issue of some kind of cultural rift in Europe between those who want stronger nationalism and those who believe in the EU and bringing in more migrants.
The AFD is one of the most popular parties on the right-wing side.
Now, while we can see the direct impact of that act of terror, another major incident has occurred in Germany from The Guardian.
German politicians' personal data leaked online.
Huge cache of documents published daily in December, but came to light only on Thursday.
Sensitive data belonging to hundreds of German politicians and celebrities has been published online via a Twitter account in one of the largest leaks in the country's history.
The huge cache of documents includes personal phone numbers and addresses, internal party documents, credit card details, and private chats.
A government spokeswoman, Martina Feitz, said the leak affected politicians of all levels, including in the European, national, and regional parliaments.
The German government is taking this incident very seriously, she said, adding that faked documents could be among the cash.
I want to stop to point out something we hear a lot when it comes to government officials having documents released.
We tend to hear the same line, maybe the documents are fake.
Well, there's no real way to know for sure, but it is true some of them may be fake.
However, often it feels like this is an attempt to try and discredit any leaks that could come out to damage the politicians.
The reality is, we just don't know.
If you see a leak, it might be real, it might not.
We don't need to tell people they might be fake.
What we need are good journalists to make sure they verify the authenticity of any leaks or any documents before publishing them.
However, there is the pitfall in that The information is public now.
Anybody can read through it, and it's going to be very difficult to try and stop any fake news that might emerge from these leaks.
Documents were published online in December, but only came to light on Thursday night.
The Federal Office of Information Security said all but one of the seven parties in the Bundestag lower house were affected.
German media said that the party was the far-right alternative for Germany, AFD, prompting speculation that hackers may have a far-right background.
Several letters to and from Angela Merkel were among the documents, German media reported, though a government spokesman said no sensitive information from the Chancellery was leaked.
Cabinet members and the German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier were also among those affected, Bild newspaper reported.
The German Green Party leader, Robert Habeck, was among the leak's biggest victims as record of his personal chats with family members were reportedly posted online.
You have to ask yourself where all this data comes from.
Michael Gotchenberg, a reporter for ARD, who had seen part of the leaked cache set on Friday.
He said no politically sensitive data appeared to have been leaked, but some especially painful personal chats relating to family life were among the documents he had seen.
Other reports listed photos of ID cards, direct debit records, and family photos as being among the documents.
Much of the data is being treated as authentic, but there were suggestions some of it could have been faked.
Florian Post, an SPD MP, told the German news agency, DPA, he had never seen at least one of the messages said to be from his communications.
The mysterious account, which was hastily shut down on Friday, purportedly had more than 18,000 followers.
It described its activities as security researching, artist, and satire and irony, and said it was based in Hamburg.
A motive for the leak remains unclear, as does how it could have stayed unnoticed for more than 10 days over the Christmas break.
Spiegel reported that the Twitter account followed only a couple of others, including anonymousnews.ru, a site known for spreading far-right hate speech.
An Interior Ministry spokesman could not say whether the documents had been obtained via an external hacking attack, on the German parliament or by an insider.
And now we see the interesting juxtaposition.
Two stories, one in which the AFD was subjected to an act of terrorism and another in which, oddly, the AFD were the only political party not hit by this breach.
John Schindler, a columnist at the Observer, tweets, Germany's political establishment, except oddly, AFD, gets hit by a cyber breach so bad that Berlin has asked the NSA for help.
A national security Twitter account called Operation Wolverines tweeted,
Why the targets matter. The AFD is the far right fascist party in Germany that's financially and
ideologically aligned with Russia and they weren't targeted in this targeted infiltration
and release of info.
So while we see elements of the left saying the AFD, they're fascists, they're far-right, they're Nazis, this must be in their benefit.
One journalist from Build, Julian Roepke, said, although that the AFD was not affected, he said, you didn't see me using the word Russia.
So far, there is no evidence for its involvement so far.
But what I can say is that hackers needed months, if not years, to collect, inspect, categorize, and describe the leaked data, pointing at a group of high professionalism.
And this is what makes the whole story extremely complicated.
by the hacking scandal so far does not mean it is behind it.
My personal evaluation is rather that someone wanted to create exactly this discrepancy and
increase political tensions among German Bundestag parties, respectively left and right. And this is
what makes the whole story extremely complicated. For one, it's kind of unrelated, but we do see
the fact that there are acts of terror being taken out against the AFD. When you hear stories
about this hacking, it does seem like it's going to smear the AFD because they're the only ones
who weren't targeted by this leak.
But then again, you have journalists saying, it just seems too obvious.
Why would someone trying to benefit the AFD implicate them, in a sense, by not harming them directly?
Clearly, this does benefit the AFD.
But then you can just go back and forth because anybody who did do this would know how people would respond.
The only logical conclusion, in my opinion, is that they're trying to sow discord.
It may be, it may not be, that this was intended to benefit the AFD, but the only real outcome is that tensions will escalate between the AFD and other parties.
And at a time where we're seeing escalations in political violence, that can't be a good thing.
Maybe it was Russia, because this certainly does destabilize Germany from within.
But we don't know that.
And as much as many people on the left like to believe and act like Russians are doing all of these things to destabilize the West, sure, they probably are.
But often these stories are extremely exaggerated and sources are dubious.
I made a video about one group that uses a system called Hamilton 68.
This is basically what most journalists cite when they talk about Russian bots, but now we're learning that at least one of their campaigns was staged, that they faked the whole thing.
And that draws everything they're saying into question.
Now we don't really know who is doing what, but we do know something is happening, because this was an extremely sophisticated hack that even targeted Angela Merkel.
Regardless of who did what, it is important to point out, ultimately, this will benefit the AFD, because the information is damaging to the left.
However, one cybersecurity researcher says, according to Reuters, This data breach is alarming, but at the same time, it's not surprising.
Mike Hart at commercial cybersecurity firm FireEye citing previous hacks.
It highlights the need for the government to take cybersecurity very seriously.
Security officials have blamed most previous attacks on a Russian hacking group, APT28, that experts say has close ties to a Russian spy agency.
Experts held the same group responsible for an attack ahead of the 2016 US presidential election.
Whoever is responsible wants to intimidate politicians that will not succeed, said Lars Klingbeil, Secretary General of the center-left Social Democrats, Merkel's coalition partner.
We have seen similar things affect the United States.
The DNC email hacks.
We've seen offices of Republicans be firebombed and actually shot up in drive-by shootings.
It would seem that political tensions in the West are escalating to a rather extreme degree.
Where this ends up, I honestly don't know, but it is kind of alarming.
All this will do, these two stories, is make people distrust each other.
And as I noted in a video just the other day, political discrimination is on the rise, with party affiliation being one of the biggest issues causing mistrust between two people.
People are actually less likely to mistrust each other based on race or other issues, but political parties having an extreme effect.
Let me know what you think in the comments below.
We'll keep the conversation going.
Who do you think is behind this hack?
Do you think that it's someone trying to frame the AFD, as some journalists have suggested?
Do you think it's Russia just trying to smear the left?
Is it just an attempt to sow discord?
And who do you think is behind the bombing of the AFD?
It would be easy to point the finger at the far left, but you also have refugee groups and religious groups who may take issue with the AFD.
But again, let me know what you think in the comments below.
We'll keep the conversation going.
It's a pretty serious issue, so I look forward to your thoughts.
You can follow me on Twitter at TimCast.
Stay tuned, I'll have new videos up on my second channel, youtube.com slash TimCastNews, starting at 6pm, and videos on this channel every day at 4pm.
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