Good morning. 
Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-six Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 4:23 PM, for 9h 01m 41s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 27.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is both the one thousand five hundred second day and the forty-third day.
On this day in 1777, Washington and the Continental Army go into winter quarters at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.
Recommended for reading in full —
Bellingcat reports FSB Team of Chemical Weapon Experts Implicated in Alexey Navalny Novichok Poisoning:
Today, alongside investigative partners CNN, Der Spiegel, and The Insider, we identified a long-running FSB [Russia’s Federal Security Service] operation to trail Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny, including a number of chemical weapons experts involved in the research and development of Novichok. How did we find all of this information, and how did we verify the information? We’ll detail our investigative methodologies here, with some discussion on Russian data markets, cross-referencing data to be sure of its veracity, and other topics.
Bellingcat has previously investigated the role of a chain of Russian government-run scientific institutes in providing research into and manufacturing of nerve agent for GRU’s [a Russian military intelligence agency, now formally the GU, still often called the GRU] overseas assassination program, including the March 2018 Novichok poisoning of Sergey and Yulia Skripal and the earlier poisoning of Bulgarian arms manufacturer Emilian Gebrev.
In the course of a Belingcat investigation into Russia’s renewed chemical weapons project, we analyzed call metadata for the telephone numbers used by two senior executives of SC Signal, an entity that we found to be directly involved in the development of new variants and application methods for nerve agents. We had observed that in the months preceding Alexey Navalny’s poisoning, both of these executives – Arur Zhirov and Victor Taranchenko – had communicated with Stanislav Makshakov, and less frequently with his FSB superiors Kirill Vasilyev and Vladimir Bogdanov. Moreover, we had observed a surge in the communication between this group of FSB operatives.
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Tugging on one thread will unravel an entire tapestry of cross-referenced data, eventually revealing how Navalny’s poisoning was planned and carried out by a team of chemical weapon experts and FSB operatives. Much of this data is available due to the negligence of the Russian government — it’s hard to imagine an entire city’s vehicle registration database with passport numbers, addresses, license plate numbers, and other data to be leaked online annually for anyone to find in Germany or Canada — as well as the sloppiness of the security services themselves.
The FSB and GRU are as ambitious as they are dangerous in their operations, but the same cannot be said about their operational security practices. You do not need to look for dead drops in a park or trail people through alleyways to uncover the cover identities of spies, rather you just need a keen eye, patience, and the sense of knowing where to look for available leaked data sources.
Reporter Confronts Operative in Alexey Navalny Poisoning:
Watch what happened when this reporter confronted one of the secret operatives believed to be involved in the poisoning of Putin critic Alexey Navalny.