So if I followed the story, it as GRU (Russian intel) that hacked his phone. Dutch intel then recruited a spy from GRU that handed over the data.
In any case, Kushner - and rightfully so - could not obtain a security clearance the first time around, due to massive debt. But it was overruled / waived by higher ups.
I've worked in intel, and Kushner seems like the textbook example - a cautionary tale - on the type of person you do not want to grant anything of importance.
Honestly it sort of blows my mind that the US has a system decisions by security professionals can simply be overruled.
"Dutch government hacked into Jared Kushner's phone" is accurate.
The GRU double-agent proved that the GRU had compromised Kushner's phone. Subsequently, Dutch intelligence themselves independently attempted to hack Kushner's phone.
"In The Hague, the MIVD hacking team tried to reverse engineer the Russian penetration of Kushner’s iPhone." [...]
"The Dutch team had been trying to pick the phone’s door lock, so to speak, when it occurred to them that the Russians may have found an unlocked window to gain entry instead. Their hypothesis was correct. By early 2018, the MIVD had found a vulnerability in the iPhone that gave them access." [...]
"when Kushner used the phone, they could see his screen. Almost as soon as they got inside, the intelligence service began capturing every image of Kushner’s screen as he used it, filing their own cache of surveillance on their internal computer servers."
Also (edit):
The part of the story I actually care about is two governments hoarding an iphone zero day, and using it to secretly hack iphones. I condemn it.
Digital privacy is important to me. I think that all humans should have it. Feel free to disagree. Jared Kushner is a human.
So again, I condemn this extrajudicial activity, which undermines the digital security and privacy of everyone.
> Digital privacy is important to me. I think that all humans should have it. Feel free to disagree. Jared Kushner is a human.
This isn't about the privacy of one individual human. This is about the security practices of a politically exposed person and the information they have access to.
Any high profile, high security clearance individual must have top-notch security. Any information gleaned or stolen from them can have enormous repercussions.
It's strange to me, as it appears that in the US it apparently doesn't matter if any charges have already been filed. In my country a pardon can only be given to someone, who was already sentenced - there was even some controversy when a couple of years ago the president gave out a pardon before the legal process concluded. As a PhD in law he should have known this made no sense.
USA won't extradite their war criminals. Look how
desperately Trump tries to fight down The Hague
criminal court. They have a LOT of dirt to cover
up here. I mean, just take the bombing of a school
with girls in Iran - is that not a war crime? And
that's just one of many more examples one could
give; Trump denying data to Ukrainians via Starlink
means he supports Putin's genocide.
If you’ve got some sort of stain on your résumé so bad that you can’t get even get a job flipping burgers you can always fall back on a career in politics.
> the US has a system decisions by security professionals can simply be overruled
Also a problem in the UK (Boris Johnson with Lord Lebedev).
Unfortunately I think it does have to sit somewhere on the elected side. A situation where the permanent state can overrule elected representatives unconditionally isn't great. But what really ought to happen is an open court case; you cannot have public policy decisions made on the basis of secret intel in a democracy. That gives you the Iraq war.
> recruited a spy from GRU that handed over the data.
Isn't that kinda bad for their health? Polonium intake is unhealthy.
I'm not an American so don't take this the wrong way, but Jared's response to the tweet, that the story is fabricated because of how complicated it is and VanityFair disclosed no evidences, should be considered as well.
> Isn't that kinda bad for their health? Polonium intake is unhealthy.
I believe the current modus operandi is to offer a window.
On a serious note: plenty of people were surprised that Navalny returned to Russia. I suspect that after his poisoning it became clear Putin and his cronies wanted him dead, so he chose to give them the judicial spectacle they wanted so that they would at least spare his family.
It does? You're talking about a country that tells its civil servants to say "Super Intelligence" in stead of "Artificial Intelligence" [0], because... It's just so Super.
Came across it here [1]: "Per Executive Order 14434, federal agencies are now using "Super Intelligence" (SI) in place of "Artificial Intelligence" (AI). You may see both terms across NIH content during this transition."
> Dutch intel then recruited a spy from GRU that handed over the data.
Dutch intel can think that happened, or not. It is independent from if that is true. The whole thing equally sounds like a setup using the Dutch to launder the story.
Which is also entirely independent from any stories of this sort in the media being true one way or another.
> I've worked in intel, and Kushner seems like the textbook example - a cautionary tale - on the type of person you do not want to grant anything of importance.
As an outsider, ever since I learned some things about the trump family and kushner ten years ago, he always stood out for me as the most interesting and dangerous character of the lot. Always in the background, never front and center, always making high stakes decisions, wielding power of large amounts of money, sitting in more important meetings than trump (in my opinion). Literally whenever anything happens regarding trump's/usa/global issues, I always ask myself, where is kushner, where is he involved? He gives me the same feeling as observing a young putin from 30 years ago, same power dynamics at play. Interesting person nonetheless.
And let's not forget, he was stupid enough to end up with massive amounts of debt despite his network, his education and his starting capital. Once the USA was stupid enough to elect Trump, every foreign agency must have had him in their crosshairs.
“Kushner’s counsel, however, said Kushner did not make any agreements or arrangements with leaders or officials in foreign countries that were not agreed to by the President of the United States and in the best interests of the United States.”
This is all categorically untrue and besides, I had permission.
The 2 "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" books (mostly the second one) by Perkins do a good job of describing the relation between the US and the Saudis.
Why should we be warned. It's pretty much widely known that the entire Trump administration is compromised. That details may be salacious goes without saying.
Why wouldn't they? Only a deeply stupid world leader would carry their phone with them all the time, or conduct any sort of business on it.
My understanding is that the current crop of politicians is terrified of FOIA requests, and so pushes as much to their phones as possible. You can't FOIA many of the apps on there.
This is a cowardly practice. These officials are either overtly cowards, or they are too stupid to understand that their phones are targets for foreign intelligence agencies.
“What was odd, the source said, was that the money in the account—hundreds of millions of dollars—had come from a bank in Azerbaijan. Most importantly, Kushner appeared to have transferred significant amounts of money from the Dubai account to other individuals, including a warlord, a mercenary, and a one-time hit man,” Cole wrote.
Looking at it myself that is inaccurate. It seems like GRU hacked the phone first and then Dutch intelligence did the same thing. See my comment above.
It's over for the US they will never wake up no matter how bad things get. It's so comically bad you'd imagine the so called well-regulated militia would have intervened by now
That was Trump's 'magic', somehow appearing that he related with those types. Probably mostly accidentally because of his limited vocabulary, resulting in a very basic style of communication, in combination with only seeing the way the world works at a first-order effects level.
The "so called well-regulated militia" hasn't been a real thing in the USA since shortly after the "founding" of the nation (if it even existed then). The closest thing (maybe) might be the National Guard, but these day they're clearly mostly just puppets for the rich and powerful.
Well-regulated militia is the National Guard. Note the term well-regulated. They’re military personnel that belong to the states, but still operate alongside the regular force. What do you mean by puppets?
Every government spies on every other government with every available tool. Even allied ones. (Especially Israel, because it has a really good spy agency)
Various sources also claim that Dutch intelligence deployed or was involved with deploying Stuxnet in Iran.
In 2019, it was reported that an Iranian mole working for Dutch intelligence at the behest of Israel and the CIA inserted the Stuxnet virus with a USB flash drive or convinced another person working at the Natanz facility to do so.
As a Flemish person I can attest that the Dutch have outstanding engineers. So if their intelligence agency has a proper budget, they definitely have a nice pool to select from.
The real question is: is he going to sue Vanity Fair? If not, he can say all he wants on X, but the message is clear; Vanity Fair's evidence apparently holds up.
Hasn't that already been the case for a while now though? Seems like you get in trouble with the law, you gotta prove your innocence, and you're treated as guilty until you do (and suffer some consequences still even after proving your innocence, just for having been "in the system" in that way).
Worse yet, the "media" these days gets away with bloody murder compared to the way things used to be before the Internet. It's all about maximum outrage and division these days, because that "engagement" is what sells advertising space. Convicted by the media is almost as bad as convicted by the "Justice" system. Either one can totally ruin lives.
We live in a country founded by colonial aristocrats who viciously sniped at each other in the local paper. The constraints on speech control and proclamations about guilt are for the government, not the governed.
It is strange though that you are lamenting this state of affairs for Jared Kushner, of all people. He will be pardoned, and will not lack for invites to New York soirees just because he took bribes from blood-soaked US allies.
I mean this sincerely, what prompted you to comment on this case?
I understand he is a billionaire and transfer of money from different banks around the world is axiomatic for him, but why would he be involved in payments involving assassins I think more tangible evidence is needed.
If you wait for more tangible evidence for the presidents daughters husband who has no business in government but is operating at an extremely high level doing foreign negotiations between waring countries... You will never get it in a timely fashion. For obvious reasons.
Our now former allies aren't making this public to smear some guy they met at a party they don't like. They are warning the world that the us is an oligarchy and rule of law is dead.
Anyone directly connected to trump has lost the presumption of innocence until proven guilty standard of common law. That group has been proven guilty, with no retribution, so many times it's statistically more likely they actually did something far worse than whatever is being alleged.
Seriously, how, with a straight face, can you even attempt to excuse these stains on history?
If he's telling the truth, then I would do the same.
If he's lying, then it might work, I would also probably do the same.
The interesting thing here is that two publications allowed the journalist to call Kushner "corrupt". This means that the lawyers would have seen compelling evidence that would mean one of two things:
1) Kushner wouldn't take them to court, because he would have to settle out of court in an expensive way
2) Kushner, if he were to take court action, would not win civil case.
This leads me to think that there is more than a shred of evidence, but an awful lot of evidence that he didn't declare what he was supposed to (at best) and at worse laundered foreign cash for his own purposes
After Russiagate that seems like a rather generous allowance to the profession of journalism. They managed a Pulitzer-winning investigation that failed to uncover the eventual truth, which is the whole thing was ginned up out of whole cloth and everyone pushing it would like to move on from that, thankyouverymuch.
Although it is always possible that they've got something worth saying it is also entirely possible that they're just making up a story out of nothing.
The white house recently released reports into electoral interference that showed that the majority of Russian influence was targeted at supporting trump. I assumed that people would notice this massive foot in mouth moment, but it seems people don't actually read the source material, and just claim that it supports their position. Unfortunately, this stance seems to work.
What is going on? How does a government release a report that directly contradicts what they claim they're releasing the report for, and then steadfastly stand by the claims that were disproven by the report they released?
Everyone already made up their minds. People who know Russiagate happened looked at the evidence. People who believe it didn’t listened to Trump’s denials. New evidence won’t cause them to not believe Trump, because the old evidence was sufficient.
As always you can’t logic people out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.
I’m not sure where you are getting your sources but the reporting that the Times and Post won the Pulitzer for was validated by both the Mueller report, Congressional investigations and 2 different reviews by the Pulitzer board.
Rather than moving on from this the Pulitzer Board is vigorously defending their decision in court as we speak.
There certainly hasn’t been a retraction. You’ll also note Trump never sued the papers over their coverage.
Journalists (un)covered everything that would be in a Special Counsel report months/years later - in what world is that bad reporting? It's the exact opposite.
In any case, Kushner - and rightfully so - could not obtain a security clearance the first time around, due to massive debt. But it was overruled / waived by higher ups.
I've worked in intel, and Kushner seems like the textbook example - a cautionary tale - on the type of person you do not want to grant anything of importance.
Honestly it sort of blows my mind that the US has a system decisions by security professionals can simply be overruled.
The GRU double-agent proved that the GRU had compromised Kushner's phone. Subsequently, Dutch intelligence themselves independently attempted to hack Kushner's phone.
"In The Hague, the MIVD hacking team tried to reverse engineer the Russian penetration of Kushner’s iPhone." [...]
"The Dutch team had been trying to pick the phone’s door lock, so to speak, when it occurred to them that the Russians may have found an unlocked window to gain entry instead. Their hypothesis was correct. By early 2018, the MIVD had found a vulnerability in the iPhone that gave them access." [...]
"when Kushner used the phone, they could see his screen. Almost as soon as they got inside, the intelligence service began capturing every image of Kushner’s screen as he used it, filing their own cache of surveillance on their internal computer servers."
Also (edit):
The part of the story I actually care about is two governments hoarding an iphone zero day, and using it to secretly hack iphones. I condemn it.
Digital privacy is important to me. I think that all humans should have it. Feel free to disagree. Jared Kushner is a human.
So again, I condemn this extrajudicial activity, which undermines the digital security and privacy of everyone.
This isn't about the privacy of one individual human. This is about the security practices of a politically exposed person and the information they have access to.
Any high profile, high security clearance individual must have top-notch security. Any information gleaned or stolen from them can have enormous repercussions.
Well, problem solved. He certainly used his new position to get rid of his debt.
America will need a number of constitutional amendments to counter the last 40+ years, which I hope is peaking this administration.
Also a problem in the UK (Boris Johnson with Lord Lebedev).
Unfortunately I think it does have to sit somewhere on the elected side. A situation where the permanent state can overrule elected representatives unconditionally isn't great. But what really ought to happen is an open court case; you cannot have public policy decisions made on the basis of secret intel in a democracy. That gives you the Iraq war.
Isn't that kinda bad for their health? Polonium intake is unhealthy.
I'm not an American so don't take this the wrong way, but Jared's response to the tweet, that the story is fabricated because of how complicated it is and VanityFair disclosed no evidences, should be considered as well.
I believe the current modus operandi is to offer a window.
On a serious note: plenty of people were surprised that Navalny returned to Russia. I suspect that after his poisoning it became clear Putin and his cronies wanted him dead, so he chose to give them the judicial spectacle they wanted so that they would at least spare his family.
Came across it here [1]: "Per Executive Order 14434, federal agencies are now using "Super Intelligence" (SI) in place of "Artificial Intelligence" (AI). You may see both terms across NIH content during this transition."
[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/09/inau...
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/
It's like trying to make "fetch" happen by executive order.
Dutch intel can think that happened, or not. It is independent from if that is true. The whole thing equally sounds like a setup using the Dutch to launder the story.
Which is also entirely independent from any stories of this sort in the media being true one way or another.
And copy paste of the above for Trump.
https://wallhop.io/https://www.vanityfair.com/story/jared-ku...
My understanding is that the current crop of politicians is terrified of FOIA requests, and so pushes as much to their phones as possible. You can't FOIA many of the apps on there.
This is a cowardly practice. These officials are either overtly cowards, or they are too stupid to understand that their phones are targets for foreign intelligence agencies.
And yet having enough reach to be on their radar.
Only a couple of states actually have their own militia that is independent of federal government.
I'm on the ground and the conversations are changing. There is significant damage that will take decades to repair, but I do not think it impossible.
We broke the trust with allies on so many levels and you should continue to hedge, because America might not be peaking on absurdity yet...
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50201259
I recall they helped the UK during the Falklands War with SIGINT/cryptanalytic stuff
In 2019, it was reported that an Iranian mole working for Dutch intelligence at the behest of Israel and the CIA inserted the Stuxnet virus with a USB flash drive or convinced another person working at the Natanz facility to do so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_van_Sabben
Europeans should not trust any of that team: it is a compromised government.
The irony is that Yuri explained this already in the 1980s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5It1zarINv0
It was a literal prediction of the KGB seizing power. Putin is from the KGB clique. Gorbachev really should have neutered the KGB totally.
Hasn't that already been the case for a while now though? Seems like you get in trouble with the law, you gotta prove your innocence, and you're treated as guilty until you do (and suffer some consequences still even after proving your innocence, just for having been "in the system" in that way).
Worse yet, the "media" these days gets away with bloody murder compared to the way things used to be before the Internet. It's all about maximum outrage and division these days, because that "engagement" is what sells advertising space. Convicted by the media is almost as bad as convicted by the "Justice" system. Either one can totally ruin lives.
These are the people that gave us: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarring_and_feathering after all.
It is strange though that you are lamenting this state of affairs for Jared Kushner, of all people. He will be pardoned, and will not lack for invites to New York soirees just because he took bribes from blood-soaked US allies.
I mean this sincerely, what prompted you to comment on this case?
A [free, or discounted] pardon awaits every member of the trump family.
Our now former allies aren't making this public to smear some guy they met at a party they don't like. They are warning the world that the us is an oligarchy and rule of law is dead.
Seriously, how, with a straight face, can you even attempt to excuse these stains on history?
If he's telling the truth, then I would do the same.
If he's lying, then it might work, I would also probably do the same.
The interesting thing here is that two publications allowed the journalist to call Kushner "corrupt". This means that the lawyers would have seen compelling evidence that would mean one of two things:
1) Kushner wouldn't take them to court, because he would have to settle out of court in an expensive way
2) Kushner, if he were to take court action, would not win civil case.
This leads me to think that there is more than a shred of evidence, but an awful lot of evidence that he didn't declare what he was supposed to (at best) and at worse laundered foreign cash for his own purposes
Although it is always possible that they've got something worth saying it is also entirely possible that they're just making up a story out of nothing.
What is going on? How does a government release a report that directly contradicts what they claim they're releasing the report for, and then steadfastly stand by the claims that were disproven by the report they released?
We truly are living in the post truth era...
As always you can’t logic people out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.
Here's to the changing of the tide.
Rather than moving on from this the Pulitzer Board is vigorously defending their decision in court as we speak.
There certainly hasn’t been a retraction. You’ll also note Trump never sued the papers over their coverage.
One of whom pled guilty to lying about the proposed Trump Tower Moscow scheme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Tower_Moscow
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50194105
In short, the facts are:
- Trump's campaign met repeatedly with Russians and lied about it.
- Trump's inner circle took meetings with a Russian spy in hopes of getting dirt and lied about it.
- Russia actually did release dirt to help Trump campaign and lied about it.
- Trump's campaign eagerly accepted that help and asked for more publicly, and Russia obliged.
- Trump's campaign shared internal campaign data with Russian intelligence officers.
- If they could have exonerated Trump they would have, but they couldn't.
These are cold hard facts available in the mueller report and the senate intel committee report, both authored by Republicans.