Whoa

Tim Johnson, McClatchy DC

The Pentagon won’t yet say how the USS John S. McCain was rammed by an oil tanker near Singapore, but red flags are flying as the Navy’s decades-old reliance on electronic guidance systems increasing looks like another target of cyberattack.

The incident – the fourth involving a Seventh Fleet warship this year – occurred near the Strait of Malacca, a crowded 1.7-mile-wide waterway that connects the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea and accounts for roughly 25 percent of global shipping.

“When you are going through the Strait of Malacca, you can’t tell me that a Navy destroyer doesn’t have a full navigation team going with full lookouts on every wing and extra people on radar,” said Jeff Stutzman, chief intelligence officer at Wapack Labs, a New Boston, New Hampshire, cyber intelligence service.

“There’s something more than just human error going on because there would have been a lot of humans to be checks and balances,” said Stutzman, a former information warfare specialist in the Navy.

So allow me to reiterate: 45* keeps making all kinds of stoopid noise about beefing up the US Military's ability to wage war in MeatSpace, when the fight is going on in CyberSpace.

A New(ish) Wrinkle

Ol' Doc Maddow lined this out quite a while ago, talking about conflicts of interest and such.

And then, boom - there it is.

Abha Bhataria at WaPo:

Guests at 14 Trump properties, including hotels in Washington, New York and Vancouver, have had their credit card information exposed, marking the third time in as many years that a months-long security breach has affected customers of the chain of luxury hotels.

The latest instance occurred between August 2016 and March 2017, according to a notice on the company’s website, and included guest names, addresses and phone numbers, as well as credit card numbers and expiration dates. The breach took place on the systems of Sabre Hospitality Solutions, a reservation booking service used by Trump Hotels, but did not compromise the Trump Hotels’ systems.

1. The (Russian?) mob loves credit card shit - it's easy pickin's
2. Why 45*'s hotels specifically?
3. Is this an attack on the hotels, or is this an attack on US interests?
4. How do we tell the difference?
5. If there's a response, what will that response be?
6. If there's no response - or a nominal/weak shit response - what can we reasonably surmise from that in itself?

BTW - remember that F-35 bullshit I posted about earlier? It seems we're not addressing a pretty important question - 

When we know the Russians are attacking us in Cyberspace, why the fuck are we beefing up on hardware to fight a battle in Meatspace?

- and it seems we're avoiding that question with increased vigor since January 20th this year.

This New Thing

This counter-terrorism expert believes the Trump campaign and Russian propaganda were synchronized pic.twitter.com/Y3rZhKb1tz

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) April 3, 2017

Since it's pretty obvious Putin is waging war against us in Cyberspace, somebody needs to explain to me why 45* is pushing us so hard to waste our time energy and money increasing our capability for fighting wars in Meatspace.

What was that thing we were supposed to remember about stuff like this? 

Oh yeah.

Politicians and generals always insist on starting out by fighting the previous war