Well, it's been on hell of a year. After leaving the madness of the 2016 US elections behind many of us thought 2017 would be a little calmer. Boy were we wrong. With a trove of CIA documents released by Wikileaks, the "Russia meddled with the election" narrative ramping up culminating in a special council, the Awan brothers scandal unfolding, and many more stories, we couldn't have been more wrong.

At the beginning of this year the official US intelligence agencies report on alleged Russian interference during the presidential election was published. 13 days later, On January 20th, Trump was Inaugurated. Since then, the political and media attack on both Trump and Wikileaks has been sustained, vicious, and at times crippling.

In this post I will be taking a look back at some of the biggest stories I managed to cover throughout 2017.

FEBRUARY

February saw the build up to Vault 7, a release of CIA documents by Wikileaks. After seeing how under reported this story was I decided to sign up to Steemit and report on it myself. Below is my first article on Steemit.

VAULT 7 | C.I.A. Espionage orders for the 2012 French elections - 2/17/2017

Over the last 2 weeks @Wikileaks has been tweeting cryptic tweets asking who/what/where/when/why is Vault7? If you are unfamiliar with Vault7 this video will give you some background. Today, Thursday 16th Feb 2017, Wikileaks revealed on Twitter what Vault7 is and it appears to be a/the C.I.A. database.

A few days after Wikileaks released the first part of Vault 7 I had a moment where all the pieces of the puzzle came together. This inspired me to write this next post which, with over 23,000 views, still stands as my most read piece.

VAULT 7 | We take a look and it's scary as hell - 02/20/2017

There is a struggle going on right now between the the global elites, C.I.A., Donald Trump, Julian Assange and Wikileaks. A struggle so powerful it threatens to rip apart the fabric of our current reality. It's not a struggle between left and right. it's a war between the infinitely rich and powerful, and the rest of human civilization.

MARCH

After the flurry of activity around part 1 of Vault 7 had died down I found myself in the weird and wonderful world of Cicada 3301. Cicada 3301 is an online real time live action role playing game designed around historical mathematics and digital encryption techniques.

CICADA 3301 | A Binary/Quantum Encryption Model Based On DNA? A New Form Of Decentralized Encryption - 03/26/2017

Today we discovered something truly unique and potentially game changing. I say this with caution as some of the knowledge uncovered is incredibly complex. This is why I am posting it here. I know this platform has some of the brightest minds.

APRIL

in April we had the elections in Ecuador where if one of the candidates won he would have removed Assange from the Ecuadorian Embassy in the UK. Fortunately Moreno won and Assange was aloud to stay.

WIKILEAKS | Julian Assange Safe After Moreno Wins Ecuador Election - 04/03/2017

During the first few months of the year I joined in with solving yet more strange and complex internet puzzles. After spending a couple of months working on Cicada 3301 I stumbled across another odd, cultish game called 'The Department of convolution'. At the same time I had also discovered 'Tengri'.

Then in late April Wikileaks tweeted a link to insurance file for the second part of Vault 7. This next part, which still hasn't been released, was dubbed Media Ops which will hopefully be published in 2018.

MAY

In the first week of May we saw the dumping of thousands of hacked emails and documents from the then French presidential candidate, Emmanuel Macron.

MACRON LEAKS | How Much Is Real And What We Know So Far - 05/07/2017

Over the last 24 hours there has been quite a frenzy online. An hour before the traditional media black out that happens 48 hours before every election a 9GB data dump was linked on /pol/, one of the messaging boards on 4Chan.org. It contains what appears to be some or all of Emmanuel Macrons campaign database.

A few days later on the 9th James Comey was fired from his position as director of the FBI following his mishandling of the Clinton email server investigation.

A.G. MEMO ON COMEY | Subject: Restoring Public Confidence In The FBI - 05/10/2017

This memo is from todays press conference. It outlines the reasons why Comey lost his job.

On the 19th, to much delight from his supporters, Sweden finally dropped the rape charges against Julian Assange. The same day the charges on Assange were dropped Wikileaks published the 8th installment from their CIA Vault 7 archive. Code-named Athena, the document describes the CIA's ability to load malware on to a target computer.

Out of no where on the 19rd Kim DotCom came out with a statement supporting the popular theory Seth Rich was behind the DNC leaks. A few days later a Wikileaks associate replied with a statement of their own distancing themselves from any of the comments in Dotcoms previous statement.

Towards the end of May a story broke involving Jared Kushner and his supposed improper use of back-channel talks with the Russians during the US elections. The reporting of this event was made to sound as if it was a very serious matter so I decided to take a closer look at exactly what a back channel is. It turned out nothing criminal was happening.

KUSHNER | What Is a 'Back Channel' And How Common Are They? - 05/29/2017

Over the last few days there have been reports in the MSM that Jared Kushner tried to set up secret lines of communication with Russia during the presidential race. These often informal and secret lines of communication are commonly known at Back-channels.

Next, this post was probably the best bit of research done by an independent journalist into the Russia/Trump collusion that I have seen all year. It takes a look at the metadata of some of the files in the Wikileaks DNC archive and compares them to the same documents that appeared on the Gucccifer 2.0 website.

SETH RICH | How The Hacker Guccifer 2.0 Was Made Up By The DNC - 03/05/2017

As most of us know the DNC have blamed the Russians for their email leaks starting back in June 2016 after a supposed Russian hacker called Guccifer 2.0 initially released a few of them online. New evidence and research from the internet suggests Guccifer 2.0 was actually just an invention made up by the DNC or someone within the DNC to detract us from the real source of the leaks, Seth Rich.

Rounding off the end of May was the Shadow Brokers with the start of their monthly dump service whee they auction off stolen NSA exploits.

JUNE

A spat between Hillary Clinton and the Director of Data Science for the DNC erupted in the first week of June. In an interview with REcode Clinton accused Andrew Therriault of proving inaccurate and poor election data during the presidential race. This, she says, was just one of the many reasons why she lost.

HILLARY CLINTON | Head Of Data Science At The DNC Resopnds To Accusations Of "Mediocre To Poor" Data - 06/01/2017

Hillary Clinton spoke at a conference in Silicon Valley yesterday hosted by ReCode, a media outlet that's reimagining tech news, reviews and events. She covered many thing most of if was to do with the Russians and how they helped Trump win the elections. She speaks of how a 1,000 Russian agents who were involved in Macidonian content farms creating and pushing fake news media during the election.

The next day Judicial Watch released further FOIA requested emails from Hillary Clintons time at the State Dept. These revealed more classified documents hat she had kept on her unsecured home server.

On June 7th I posted about Reality Winner, the NSA employee who leaked top secret documents relating to the Trump Russia investigation. Winner was caught sending the documents to a reporter at the Intercept after digital forensics revealed unique identifiers hidden in the printed copy of the document.

In the middle of June we saw just how wrong unverified open source intelligence can go. At the height of the George Webb fever someone made a tenuous link between the Awan brothers, a Maersk container ship, and a dirty bomb which ended up with some poor citizen calling in a dirty bomb alert to Charleston port authorities.

DIRTY BOMB | Internet Conspiracy Gets Out Of Hand - Is This The End Of George Webb? - 06/15/2017

Crowd Source the Truth is a small group of online citizen journalists and investigators headed by George Webb and Jason Goodman. Today they did a livestream to You Tube and reported on a possible dirty bomb attack in Charlestown set up by the Awan brothers.

May presented us with the first ransomware attack of the year with Wannacry. After a month of the Wannacry and bitcoin being in the mainstream news I decided to take a look at how the recent ransomware attack effected the price of Bitcoin.

Next we had 2 Vault 7 dumps from Wikileaks called Brutal Kangaroo and Outlaw Country.

Another ransomware attack hit the internet in late June. This time though it was confirmed by some security researchers that it was in fact 'Wiperware' and not ransomware at all. June finished off with the release of Barrett browns Pursuance Project.

JULY

Following a DoD report on Russian interference which included comments about Kaspersky Labs antivirus software, the founder of the company responded by saying "Cyber-McCarthyism will get us nowhere". A decision has since been made to completely ban all Kaspersky software from every US government computer.

Early July saw the fascicle attempt by CNN to sensor a gif made by a Trump supporter depicting him beating up CNN. After Trump tweeted it the gif went viral leading CNN to track down the creator and blackmailed him into an apology.
Wikileaks then released 2 more Vault 7 CIA documents, Bothan Spy and Gyrfalcon. Both these implants were designed to intercept and exfiltrate SSH credentials. Not long after, Wikileaks was placed top of the news credibility ratings in a report by Cornell University.

July turned out to be a busy month for Wikileaks with the release of 3 more Vault 7 documents. On the 13th Highrise was released which detailed CIA android malware. Then on the 19th they published proof-of-concept work carried out by Rathyon, a US arms contractor. Finally on the 27th Imperial Project OSX and UNIX exploits, we released. Between these 3 Vault 7 dumps we also had the 2018 US Intelligence Budget. In the same week BTC-e, a crypto trading platform, was shut down, and Wikileaks officially hosted the Macron Leaks after verifying the legitimacy of the documents.

AUGUST

Straight out of the gates with another Vault 7 leak was Wikileaks with 'Project Dumbo', a tool that allows you to hack CCTV and webcams.

After a British security researcher was hailed a hero for single handedly stopping the Wanncry ransomware attack earlier in the year it was revealed he was also the author of Kronos, a piece of malware developed to steal banking credentials which he was arrested for after a trip to the US.

The biggest story in August was the one where Loretta Lynch was caught using her grandmothers name in official government emails by Reddit and 4chan. As you'd expect, little was actually reported on the news.

BUSTED | Loretta Lynch Caught Using Fake Name In Official Government Communications - 08/06/2017

Yesterday the combined efforts of 4chan and Reddit's weaponized autism was working overtime yet again. One 4chan user had discovered an inconsistency in a new batch of emails released by the State Department after a FOIA request was made by Judicial Watch. The emails relate to the meeting last year between Loretta Lynch and former President Bill Clinton on runway in Phoenix.

News of a kidnapping hit the headlines in August involving an aspiring glamor model who claimed to have been kidnapped by a darkweb organization known as the 'Black Death Group'. After digging around a little deeper it was soon revealed that it was a hoax, set up to help promote the models career.

Next up in August was another Wikileaks Vault 7 release. This piece of malware was called 'Couch Potato' and allowed the CIA to intercept and capture live video streams.

Then Anonymous hacked a KKK website ran by the United Northern and Southern Knights of the Ku Klux Klan exposing 100's of KKK members real names and addresses.

After seeing the amount of Etherium stolen in the 4 weeks leading up to August 22nd I decided to write this post about it. I go through and breakdown where, and how, nearly $50,000,000 worth of Etherium was stolen.

With the publications of Expresslane and Angelfire from Wikileaks, and the cracking down on You Tube censorship, August had already thrown us enough news to last us a year.

SEPTEMBER

I kicked off September with a piece on US backed bio-defense labs in the Ukraine. This research made a connection between US bio-defense labs and the unusually high rates of sickness in the Ukraine.

UKRAINE | Hack Reveals Pentagons Hidden Funding Of 16 US Backed 'Bio-Defense' Labs

Abnormal amounts Of People Are Dying From Rare And Strange Illnesses In The Ukraine Each Year. Are The Pentagon Funded 'Bio-Defense' Labs Killing Off the People Of Ukraine?

Over the past several years there have been numerous reported outbreaks of exotic and not so exotic diseases that have infected 1000s of people across the Ukraine. In the last 10 years both airborne and waterborne pathogens have been detected across the county in higher than average numbers. These deadly diseases range from bird and swine flu, measles and botulism.

This was followed by another Vault 7 release by Wikileaks codenamed Protego. Then came a post about a fake website which was set up after Equifax, one of the worlds bigest credit agencies, was hacked earlier in the month.

After finding someone online that had purchased Septembers monthly dump service of NSA exploits I decided to take a look inside. Much to my surprise, this wasn't just 1 or 2 hacking tools, this turned out to be a whole suite.

I discovered Java script browser miners and crypto currencies in September. As much as I could read about them I still couldn't work out if they were illegal or revolutionary. So I decided to write a post about them to gauge the view on Steemit.

After Wikileaks had published a steady flow of CIA documents throughout the year, it was a huge surprise for some when they published leaked documents relating to spying activities conducted by the Russian government.

OCTOBER

October 1st brought us Catalonias vote for independence. In the weeks leading up to the independence vote Catalan officials underwent harsh political pressure from Madrid and extreme censorship by the Spanish cyber police. Even after all the troubles on polling day itself, Catalonians voted independence.

CATALONIA | After A Day Of Bloody Violence 90% Vote Yes For Independence - 02/10/2017

After a long, violent, and bloody day that resulted in hundreds of people being unjustly and violently assaulted and hospitalized by the Spanish Civil Guard for simply wanting to vote the people of Catalonia have overwhelmingly voted yes to independence.

Next in October we have another great bit of investigative research by someone on the internet. In this post I go over the inspired bit of analysis that shows how there were more emails stolen from the DNC servers after Crowdstrike, a cyber security firm, installed their very own anti-virus software. Providing further evidence Russia didn@t hack the DNC.

10 days after the successful independence vote in Catalonia, Catalan officials choose to suspend independence in favor of dialog. Then we had a new undercover video from Project Veritas exposing the lies and corruption at the New York Times.

After Hillary Clinton lost the presidential race, she decided to write a book. Upon completion of her book she embarked on an international tour to promote her book. This eventually took her to the shores of Britain where she continued to poison the main stream media with her lies.

October ended with the official release of the long anticipated JFK files from the National Archives. Here I made a list of all the newsworthy stories I could find from across the net.

NOVEMBER

After a 2 month break from publishing Wikileaks was back with new documents showing how the CIA faked Kaspersky SSL certificates to help them with the deployment of malware.

More JFK files were released. With net neutrality a hot topic I decided to take a look at both sides of the argument.

DECEMBER

After seeing the price of Steem rise during the first 2 weeks of December I decided to take a closer look at the health of Steemit. All in, all the future looks bright.

Finally, after returning home from spending Christmas without the internet I saw a story circulating online about a data dump called the 'Deepstate Files'. Hunting around a little more I found the article was written by a well known group of trolls and pranksters, so decided to write this post in the hope of trying to clear everything up.

There we have it. A summary of all my major newsworthy posts of 2017. Its been an amazing year for me on Steemit. I've made friends with so many great people since signing up. I've also learned a ton about cryptocurrencies too which has been great.

At this point in the post I should try to make some predictions for the follwoing year. But after the year we've had I think any predictions would probably be straight out the window within the first week. If you were to ask me this time last year if 2017 would have been as crazy as it has been I would have said no. So with that i mind I believe 2018 is going to be crazier than 2017.

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