[President Trump has denounced Obama’s John Brennan as “the worst CIA Director in our country’s history.” Yet, as Foreign Policy’s investigative journalist Zach Dorfman describes below, Obama’s CIA as a whole is responsible for the disaster he recounts. –JW]

It was considered one of the CIA’s worst failures in decades: Over a two-year period starting in late 2010, Chinese authorities systematically dismantled the agency’s network of agents across the country, executing dozens of suspected U.S. spies.

Since then, a question has loomed over the entire debacle.  How were the Chinese able to roll up the network?

Now, nearly eight years later, it appears that the agency botched the communication system it used to interact with its sources, according to five current and former intelligence officials.

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Facebook, Twitter, and Google are far worse than the original monopolies like International Harvester and Standard Oil and far more dangerous because they monopolize not just our industries but our brains. They control, or at least inordinately influence, how Americans and even much of the world think.

The news that Facebook has "trust" scores for users but will not reveal them to those same users is, to put it mildly, distressing.

Indeed, Facebook has a lot in common with Communist China these days. From the Daily Mail: Communist China will use a 'social credit score' to rank it citizens and give those with the most favored behavior perks.

So here’s what we need to do to end their evil – and it has to be done now, before they cause irreparable damage to the viability of our coming mid-term elections.

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For the better part of the past 15 years since Erdogan and his Islamist AJP party were first elected in December 2002, Turkey watchers in the US – like here at TTP – have warned that US leaders and policymakers that Erdogan is an Islamist revolutionary who intends to transform Turkey into a radical Islamic state.

The Trump administration, like its two predecessors, was not at all eager to acknowledge reality, let alone act on it.

But since Trump entered office, there has been a major obstacle that made ignoring Turkey’s hostility to the US and its interests increasingly difficult to sweep under the rug.

That obstacle is the imprisonment of Pastor Andrew Brunson.  Now, thanks to him, President Trump finally understands the evil that is Erdogan.

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Brian Dye, Senior Vice President of Information Security at Symantec, (in)famously declared back in 2014 that “Antivirus is Dead” in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

Symantec, if you’re not aware in non-Tex-land is the maker of Norton Antivirus.  So, needless to say, his remarks generated significant shock and criticism at the time.

The truth is he was and is absolutely right.  However, as with most things that’s not the whole story.

In my first article on TTP, A Clean Start, I made the following assertion, echoing Dye’s sentiment:

“Anti-virus is today at best about 30% effective at stopping malware.  It’s near-0% in stopping a determined attacker and also near-0% if not kept up-to-date daily.”

What he and I mean when we say Antivirus programs are “dead” is that any computing defense that relies on a “blacklist” of programs that shouldn’t be allowed to run is ineffective by itself in today’s connected world.  We need defenses based on new technologies like behavioral analysis and “whitelisting.”

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Some 450 days ago we were treated to melodramatic announcements from the media about the start-up of Robert Mueller’s “dream” and “all-star” team.

Reporters gushed in the general hysteria of the times that Mueller would no doubt soon indict President Trump, some of his family, and almost anyone else in his campaign—and therefore end the Trump aberration.

Although that Mueller mandate of collusion was never formally defined, much less explained as a criminal offense, the media salivated at the idea that Mueller’s whiz kids nonetheless were going to find it and no doubt thereby usher in impeachment.

Now we have gone from melodrama to bathos.

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Omarosa. The show trial for Paul Manafort. These are the things CNN chipmunks chattered about endlessly the last few days. But CNN has no news judgment because it is run by a moron with a Harvard degree and a Napoleon Complex.

To find the news, I read the South China Morning Post, which is worried spitless that the Red Chinese economy will tank like its stock market has.

Its stocks overall have declined in value by 40% in the last three years. Our stocks are up 33% since we elected Trump. The SCMP thus is running a series of columns by panicked investors and experts.  They should be.  Trump has China reeling for a number of reasons.

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In July, Facebook quickly withdrew its pending subsidiary in the province of Zhejiang, China.

The social media giant, along with Google, Twitter, and Instagram (which is also owned by Facebook) is eager to reach China’s potential audience of 731 million internet users, but it has been blocked in the mainland for almost 10 years.

The subsidiary aimed to establish a new innovation hub as well as finally dip a toe in the Chinese market, but Facebook’s plan to enter China is doomed to fail.

This is not the first time Facebook has attempted to have a piece of the pie. It won’t be the last.  Facebook is still trying, but it needs to understand it will be all but impossible for it to survive in China.  Here’s why.

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