Posted on 03/02/2018 5:48:32 AM PST by b4its2late
It seems Nellie Ohr was well aware the National Security Agency can intercept and store every communication on the Internet. Did that affect her decision to become a ham radio operator?
In the late 1950s, when I was entering early adolescence, I became an amateur radio operator. It was like joining a very large audio-visual club whose geekiness was on steroids. Along with knowledge of electronics and Morse code, being a total techno-weirdo was an absolute pre-requisite.
The world back then seemed to be a much larger place, and communicating with foreign countries via the short-wave spectrum was a challenging and random proposition. So it was fun and exciting to communicate by code or voice with hams in remote parts of the planet. At least at first.
Unfortunately, the conversations were confined to exchanging names and locations, describing the strength and clarity of the other operator’s signal, and discussing the type of equipment and antenna being used. This never varied.
For example, I once had a chance contact with a Christian missionary in the far-away Belgian Congo. At the time, the Belgians were relinquishing colonial control, Katanga Province had declared independence, and a bloody civil war had broken out. The missionary briefly mentioned in passing that the communist-backed Simba rebels were lurking about, but so far so good. With that small detail out of the way, he then quickly moved on to truly important matters such as the fact that he was using a homemade transmitter, a Hammarlund HQ-110 receiver, and a dipole antenna. And that was that.
It made no difference whether I was communicating with Great Britain, Alaska, Kwajalein, or across the street. The conversation was always the same, and it became mind-numbingly boring. After high school, I let my ham license lapse and had no further contact with amateur radio until a few years ago, when I met an active operator at a social event.
Upon learning that I had once been a ham, he urged me to return to the fold. I responded by holding up my cell phone and pointing out the obvious. With this little device, I could use voice, email, or text messages to easily and reliably contact anyone else similarly equipped anywhere on the face of the earth. Equally important, I could speak to people who might have something more to talk about than signal strength and equipment. So why in today’s world would I or anyone else become a ham operator?
A Curious Question Indeed
That brings us to Nellie Ohr, holder of amateur radio call sign KM4UDZ. Ohr graduated from Harvard University in 1983 with a degree in history and Russian literature. She studied in the Soviet Union in 1989 and obtained a PhD in Russian history in 1990.
For those of you who may be tempted to read her 400-plus page PhD thesis, here’s a spoiler alert: in murdering untold millions, Joseph Stalin may have engaged in some “excesses” which, in her words, “sometimes represented desperate measures taken by a government that had little real control over the country.” Translated into simple English, she meant, “Hey, cut the guy some slack. Creating a proletarian paradise can be tough and anybody can get carried away.”
She is said to be fluent in the Russian language and an expert on cybersecurity. Her husband is Bruce Ohr, the former number four official in President Obama’s Justice Department.
According to a sworn court filing by Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson, she was hired by that firm to conduct opposition research on behalf of the Clinton campaign against candidate Donald Trump. In his statement, Simpson acknowledged bank records reflect that Fusion GPS contracted with her “to help our company with its research and analysis of Mr. Trump.”
At the same time, Fusion GPS retained the services of former British spy and FBI informant Christopher Steele to obtain derogatory information from his Russian sources about Trump. The final Fusion GPS product became the now-discredited eponymous Steele dossier, which James Comey’s FBI and Obama’s DOJ used to obtain Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants to spy on a Trump campaign member.
Who Are Nellie and Bruce Ohr?
The so-called Nunes memorandum by the Republican majority on the House Intelligence Committee states Nellie Ohr was “employed by Fusion GPS to assist in the cultivation of opposition research on Trump” and added that her husband “later provided the FBI with all of his wife’s opposition research.” Sen. Lindsey Graham has stated publicly that she “did the research for Mr. Steele.”
We now know that, before the House Intelligence Committee, Simpson disclosed that he met personally with Bruce Ohr “at his request, after the November 2016 election to discuss our findings regarding Russia and the election.” That committee also learned that during the election campaign, Bruce Ohr met with Steele, the dossier’s author.
It has also come out that Bruce Ohr failed to report the source of his wife’s income from Fusion GPS on his DOJ ethics disclosure forms. Such disclosure is mandatory, and Ohr’s omission raises many questions.
For example, under the law, such an omission could be considered evidence tending to prove his consciousness of guilt. Why would he, in effect, conceal by omission his wife’s employment by the firm that produced the meretricious Steele dossier that his own employer, the Obama DOJ, submitted under oath to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) for authorization to spy on the Trump campaign and presidency? Was he trying to hide his connections with Fusion GPS? If so, why? And what inference should a jury draw from such concealment?
He is not alone in this regard. What about Nellie Ohr’s ham radio license?
Why Did Nellie Ohr Suddenly Become a Ham in 2016? Ohr is a member of Women in International Security, which describes itself as supporting “research projects and policy engagement initiatives on critical international security issues, including the nexus between gender and security.” She has done cybersecurity consulting for Accenture, a politically connected firm, for which she gave a presentation on “Ties Between Government Intelligence Services and Cyber Criminals – Closer Than You Think?”
Did she develop an overwhelming middle-aged desire to talk to geeks over the radio?
It is apparent that, between her own professional experience and her marriage to a top DOJ official, she was well aware of the ability of the National Security Agency to intercept and store every communication on the Internet. Did this knowledge have anything to do with her mid-life decision to become a ham radio operator and communicate outside cyberspace?
I got into amateur radio because I was a horny, zit-infested teenager with no hope of ever successfully interacting with members of the opposite sex. Faced with that reality, I sublimated my priapic energies into learning electronics and building radios. My sublimated adolescent urges were so strong that, on several occasions, I almost invented the Internet 20 years before the Pentagon and Al Gore got around to it.
That’s why I became a ham. So what’s Nellie’s excuse? Did she develop an overwhelming middle-aged desire to talk to geeks over the radio? Was this a case of Sudden Onset Geek Syndrome? Or is there some other less benign explanation?
What Was Happening When Nellie Ohr Got Her License On May 23, 2016, she received a technician-level amateur radio license. The timing is significant. The presidential campaign was underway and she and her employer, Fusion GPS, were digging for dirt in Russia to use against Trump. Given her cybersecurity knowledge, was Nellie Ohr hoping to use non-cyber short wave communications to hide her participation in that nefarious effort from the NSA?
Recall that, in early 2016, NSA head Admiral Mike Rogers became aware of “ongoing” and “intentional” violations and abuse of FISA surveillance, which he subsequently exposed in testimony before Congress. Thereafter, pressure mounted within the Obama administration to fire him.
Rogers and his NSA posed a potential threat to Fusion GPS’s operation as well as the anti-Trump elements at the FBI and DOJ.
The week after the presidential election, when he was facing removal from his post, Rogers visited the president-elect at Trump Tower. On November 19, 2016, Reuters reported that Rogers’ decision “to travel to New York to meet with Trump on Thursday without notifying superiors caused consternation at senior levels of the [Obama] administration.”
The day following Rogers’ visit, the president-elect’s transition team vacated Trump Tower and moved its operations to New Jersey. Was this because Rogers had warned Trump that he and his transition team were being subjected to illegal government surveillance? While that is unknown, it is clear that Rogers was not and had never been an Obama team player, such that he and his agency posed a potential threat to Fusion GPS’s operation as well as the anti-Trump elements at the FBI and DOJ.
So, was Nellie Ohr’s late-in-life foray into ham radio an effort to evade the Rogers-led NSA detecting her participation in compiling the Russian-sourced Steele dossier? Just as her husband’s omissions on his DOJ ethics forms raise an inference of improper motive, any competent prosecutor could use the circumstantial evidence of her taking up ham radio while digging for dirt on Trump to prove her consciousness of guilt and intention to conceal illegal activities.
This type of circumstantial evidence can be quite powerful. For example, a video of a nun buying a bustier at Victoria’s Secret would not be direct evidence that she was having an affair. But it most assuredly would prompt a jury to seriously wonder about her motives and commitment to celibacy. The same can be said for Nelly’s ham license. Just what was she up to?
Undoubtedly further information on this topic will be forthcoming. But, in the meantime, it is fair to ask in the ham vernacular of yesteryear, “Dit-dah-dah; dah; dit-dit-dah-dit?” That’s Morse code for “WTF?”
George Parry is a former federal and state prosecutor who practices law in Philadelphia. He blogs at knowledgeisgood.net and may be reached at kignet1@gmail.com.
You have to ‘ask’ in a nice way...................
Is AMSAT still working?................
But that is really not a practical solution. Only useful by calculating the path. None of them I know about are geosynchronous.
Duh...
Heck, you were probably the Freeper who steered me towards him! (someone tipped me off, and I haven’t looked back...:)
Everything is recorded. Ham radio is not a mystery to anyone. Repeaters are everywhere and all of them have the capacity to archive every communication.
It all kinda depends.
The deal with all RECORDED calls can be just the fact your number called a certain number, and when. Thus you get those “spiderweb” graphs—legal—but showing the connections between certain callers and unknowns (for example).
MUCH easier when all you have to do is sift through known telephone numbers. I dunno if the NSA could do this with radio frequencies unless they have a LOT more information.
Or—you can have a code so simple no one knows it is even code. As in—the title of LeCarre’s novel where the address on the envelope WAS the coded message.
64 DOLLAR QUESTION:
Who are the three (3) ham radio operators who signed Nellie Ohr’s test for the license.
Are these individuals affiliated in any with with the alphabet spooks?
Not so much that personal wireless is covert, just compared with the alternative, use of a public utility, it is.
You ask a very good question about the VEs who signed the forms and it ought to include an inquiry into the VEC, too, IMO. Full disclosure - I am a VE.
Most ham supply stores won't sell ham equipment to unlicensed buyers, but what about private sales? (Oh noes! The "hamfest loophole!!")
But, again, somebody is always listening, and hams do not react well to people coming up on the bands and failing to ID. And, of course, once you do ID, there's QRZ.com and 10 seconds later, anybody with a browser can know exactly who you are, where you are, and what you look like (if you posted a pic on your profile).
Bottom line, sure you could use ham radio equipment to evade a certain type of surveillance, but note that having a license does not exactly aid in such.
(Amateur Extra here, but not telling my callsign; I ain't doxxing myself!)
When there is a FISA surveillance, they can record ALL calls within two hops of a person, that is, if person A is under surveillance, they can record EVERYTHING and EVERYONE person A talks to. From each person person A talks to, they can record EVERYONE person B talks to. They even used to allow a person C and person D.
That is an ENORMOUS volume of calls to be surveilled.
If you use a Ham radio...sure, those can be monitored, but...for some reason, I suspect they aren’t, or are very little.
“Repeaters are everywhere and all of them have the capacity to archive every communication.”
Nope - some may be capable of that but none around my area can do that, to my knowledge. Specifically, I’m the site rep for a location that has 3 repeaters on 6 meters, 222 MHz, & 440 MHz so I know for a fact that none of those three have that capability. I’m also the president of a local ham radio club and I know none of the club’s repeaters have that ability, either. The truly geeky may record transmissions by way of a receiver in their home, though.
Yes, he lays out all of he interconnections. However, there are so many people and connections, it is hard to follow. Therefore I made a concept map of the people and connections. It makes it much clearer to see the overall picture. It is helpful to look at this when listening to the podcasts.
Well, I would suspect there is no social life outside of the alphabet circle of business-related associates. Therefore, the VEs are worthy targets for further inquiry.
Looking back at the first time that I looked at the digital modes, my thought was about transmitting in code or semi-obscure messages.
One of those kit radios from India or thereabouts have open frequencies that are well outside of the normal ARRL band list.
73s
It REALLY draws your eyes to all the things that, independently might just seem to people to be coincidences, but when you look at it in the graphic format, your eyes are drawn to entities that have a LOT of relationships that are...NOT coincidental looking.
There is at least ONE really, REALLY suspicious connection you did not show...you might want to consider adding it in (if you think it helps):
Perkins Coie Law Firm to Organizing for America to Obama.
Here is the Wikipedia entry on this...they seem to be trying deliberately in changing names and missions over time to confuse and obfuscate:
"...Organizing for America, then Organizing for Action, (OFA) is a community organizing project of the Democratic National Committee. Initially founded after the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama, the group sought to mobilize supporters in favor of Obama's legislative priorities, particularly health care reform. Eventually, the organization played a role in the midterm elections of 2010. Later, it became the grassroots arm of Obama for America. After Obama's second inauguration, it was reorganized as Organizing for Action and returned to its previous mission of organizing around the President's agenda. It has since turned into a hub of the Democratic protest movement..."
From an article at Breitbart: "...Obama for America began the payments to Perkins Coie in April 2016 — the same time the law firm hired Fusion GPS to look into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, The Federalist’s Sean Davis reported Sunday..."
Total nonsense. The NRO maintains satellites that easily intercepts ham radio.
K callsigns are Tech class. These are not commercial. They are 2x3 ARS.
I don’t know if it is total nonsense or not...if they do intercept ham radio (I doubt it is hard to do) are they feeding it into the same analyzer they might use for phone calls, etc?
And again...THEY might not know it was being monitored.
They are, after all, “the smartest people in the room”, and are arrogant enough to think they could do all kinds of ‘clever’ stuff including trying to entice members of the Trump team (Carter Page and George Papadpoulos) into having illicit or illegal contact with foreign agents (Which I FULLY believe now to be a setup to try to get a retroactive FISA warrant that would have covered surveillance) and other such things.
Like Hillary using her own email server, only to get tripped up when they noticed during the Benghazi investigation that some official emails were not being routed through, the official .gov servers...compounded by the hack of the DNC servers (who did THAT...inside job?) and compounded by the idiot Podesta who got nailed in a phishing scam that showed even more emails that are incriminating to Obama.
They tried to be too clever by half, and their arrogance is going to bring them down (If indeed, anything does)
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