Washington Post

A day after making comments calling on Russia to find Hillary Clinton's deleted e-mails, Donald Trump has a novel explanation for all of it: I was joking! Here's his exchange with "Fox and Friends" from July 28:

BRIAN KILMEADE: Clinton campaign says this is a national security issue. Now, the idea that you'd have any American calling for a foreign power to commit espionage in the US for the purpose of somehow changing an election, I think that we're now in a national security space. Your reaction?
TRUMP: You have to be kidding. His client, his person, deleted 33,000 e-mails illegally. You look at that. And when I'm being sarcastic with something —
KILMEADE: Were you being sarcastic?
TRUMP: Of course, I'm being sarcastic. But you have 33,000 e-mails deleted, and the real problem is what was said in those e-mails from the Democratic National Committee. You take a look at what was said in those e-mails — it's disgraceful. It's disgraceful. They talk about religion, they talk about race, they talk about all sorts of things, including women, and what they said in those e-mails is a disgrace.

Trump backer and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani offered the same explanation later on CNN: "No. He was telling a joke. When he got off the plane, he tweeted out the e-mails should be sent to the FBI. He was joking around."

Donald Trump’s campaign has denied press credentials to a number of disfavored media organizations, including The Washington Post, but on July 27, the campaign of his running mate, Gov Mike Pence (R-IN), went even further. At Gov Pence’s first public event since he was introduced as the Republican vice-presidential candidate two weeks ago, a Post reporter was barred from entering the venue after security staffers summoned local police to pat him down in a search for his cellphone. Gov Pence’s campaign expressed embarrassment and regret about the episode, which an official blamed on overzealous campaign volunteers.

Post reporter Jose A. DelReal sought to cover Gov Pence’s rally at the Waukesha County Exposition Center outside Milwaukee (WI), but he was turned down for a credential beforehand by volunteers at a press check-in table. DelReal then tried to enter via the general-admission line, as Post reporters have done without incident since Trump in June banned the newspaper from his events. He was stopped there by a private security official who told him he couldn’t enter the building with his laptop and cellphone. When DelReal asked whether others attending the rally could enter with their cellphones, he said the unidentified official replied, “Not if they work for The Washington Post.” After placing his computer and phone in his car, DelReal returned to the line and was detained again by security personnel, who summoned two county sheriff’s deputies. The officers patted down DelReal’s legs and torso, seeking his phone, the reporter said.

If it’s on Facebook, can it be secret? Members of the National Weather Service Employees Organization (NWSEO) thought they had a secret Facebook page that was available only to them. But not only did National Weather Service (NWS) management officials know about the page, they accessed it and made scornful comments about the postings, according to the union. That amounts to “illegal surveillance” of union activities, according to the labor organization’s complaint filed July 27 with the Federal Labor Relations Authority.

In the past six months, Weather Service officials “engaged in the surveillance of internal union communications about and discussions of protected activities” on the labor organization’s “ ‘secret’ (that is, ‘members only’) Facebook page,” according to the complaint. Susan Buchanan, an NWS spokeswoman, said the agency does “not conduct surveillance on our employees’ private social media accounts, including NWSEO’s members-only Facebook page.” Unlike other cases of surreptitious surveillance, managers did not try to keep their spying secret, the union’s complaint alleges. It says management officials made critical comments about some of the Facebook postings to stifle the commentary.

The Tor Project, a digital privacy group, said July 27 that an internal probe found that Jacob Appelbaum, a former employee who has been held up across the Web as a champion of online privacy, engaged in sexual misconduct. "Many people inside and outside the Tor Project have reported incidents of being humiliated, intimidated, bullied and frightened by Jacob, and several experienced unwanted sexually aggressive behavior from him," Tor Project Executive Director Shari Steele wrote.

The allegations against Appelbaum shook the online privacy community when they surfaced in June because he had become a bit of a celebrity in the online world as the debate intensified over government surveillance and online privacy. The scandal caused a divide in the broader privacy community, with some rushing to his defense and others coming forward with even more troubling stories.

Internet providers who oppose the government's network neutrality rules will once again take the issue to court as they ask more than a dozen federal judges to throw out the regulations. A Washington trade group representing cellular carriers, CTIA, will be requesting a rehearing of the case by the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, apprently. Likely joining the group will be AT&T, the trade association USTelecom and a number of others.

The challenge comes weeks after the industry was broadly defeated at the DC Circuit Court, when three judges ruled to uphold the net neutrality rules, which dramatically broaden the government's ability to regulate Internet providers. As written, the rules ban the blocking and slowing of Internet traffic by companies, such as Comcast and Verizon, as well as wireless carriers, such as T-Mobile and Sprint. In defending the rules from the industry's legal assault, the Federal Communications Commission argued that discriminating against some types of online content while giving other types preferential treatment would create an uneven playing field.

[Commentary] Over at the CIA and the National Security Agency headquarters, they must be really enjoying watching Democrats in Philadelphia (PA) squirm over WikiLeaks’s exposure of tens of thousands of internal Democratic Party e-mails. There’s a word for what is happening in the intelligence community: Blowback.

Throughout the entirety of the Obama Administration, nothing was done as WikiLeaks damaged our national security with its serial leaks of highly classified intelligence documents. Now Democrats are paying the price for President Barack Obama’s inaction. Apparently, exposing intelligence sources and methods has not mattered enough for the Obama Administration to do something about WikiLeaks. Maybe saving Hillary Clinton from further embarrassment, or worse, will finally spur them to action.

On May 18, "Morning Joe" co-host Mika Brzezinski said Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz "should step down" because she had favored Hillary Clinton over Sen Bernie Sanders (I-VT) throughout the primary. One week later, Brzezinski doubled down, saying, "My contention all along has been that [Wasserman Schultz] has been in the tank for Hillary from the get-go, and it's been quite obvious." The repetition seemed like no big deal at the time, but now hacked DNC e-mails show that in between Wasserman Schultz and her staff flipped out, pressuring MSNBC to make Brzezinski and partner Joe Scarborough tone down their criticism. Clearly, it didn't work.

The WikiLeaks' release of DNC e-mails offers a window into Democrats' relations with the press. In some cases, the view of the media isn't terribly flattering. "This is the LAST straw," Wasserman Schultz wrote to her communications director, Luis Miranda, on the morning that Brzezinski called for her resignation. "Please call Phil a [sic] Griffin. This is outrageous. She needs to apologize."

A top official with Hillary Clinton’s campaign accused the Russian government of orchestrating the release of damaging Democratic Party records to help the campaign of Republican Donald Trump — and some cybersecurity experts agree.

The extraordinary charge came as some national security officials have been growing increasingly concerned about possible efforts by Russia to meddle in the election, according to several individuals familiar with the situation. Although other experts remain skeptical of a Russian role, the hacking incident has caused alarm within the Clinton campaign and also in the national security arena. Officials from various intelligence and defense agencies, including the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, attended the White House meeting Thursday, on the eve of the email release. If the accusation is true, it would be the first time the Russians have actively tried to influence an election in this manner, analysts said.

Wikileaks posted a massive trove of internal Democratic National Committee e-mails online July 22, in what the organization dubbed the first of a new "Hillary Leaks" series. The cache includes nearly 20,000 e-mails and more than 8,000 file attachments from the inboxes of seven key staffers of the DNC, including communications director Luis Miranda and national finance director Jordan Kaplan.

The e-mails span from January 2015 through late May and are presented in a searchable database. The cache appears to contain sensitive personal information about some donors, including Social Security numbers, passport numbers and credit card information. A hacker known as Guccifer 2.0 claimed credit for handing the documents over to Wikileaks on Twitter. However, some experts have expressed skepticism about his involvement, citing differences between the data Wikileaks released and Guccifer 2.0's previous leaks of hacked data.

The Federal Communications Commission selected a Swedish-owned firm to run a sensitive national database that routes billions of phone calls across the country, apparently satisfied that the award would not jeopardize national security. The vote by the five commissioners clears the way for Telcordia, owned by Ericcson and based in New Jersey, to proceed with the challenging task of building a system that can track calls and text messages by nearly every phone number in North America while ensuring the data remains secure.

The database handles the intercarrier routing of calls and texts for more than 650 million US phone numbers and for more than 2,000 carriers. If numbers are scrambled or deleted, a massive communications breakdown could occur. The database is particularly important for the FBI and other law enforcement agencies that query the database every day, several million times a year, in the course of criminal and intelligence investigations to track which phone company provides service for a particular number. Security experts say that if a foreign spy agency wants to know which of its agents the United States has under surveillance, it could attempt to hack the system to see what numbers the FBI has wiretaps on. The system includes the phone number, database and the platform that tells law enforcement which carrier owns which number.