By Kurt Nimmo

The establishment media routinely blames Russia and China for hack attacks and malware distribution. The latest propaganda effort claims Russia is responsible for the DNC hack and Vladimir Putin is attempting to influence the 2016 election.

Last week whistleblower Edward Snowden released a document revealing an arsenal of cyber weapons used by the NSA. On Monday, the hacker group Shadow Brokers announced they are holding an auction of cyber weapons created by the agency. The shadowy group “dropped 300MB of stolen data onto the open Web, including live exploits for some of the Web’s most crucial network infrastructure, apparently stolen from the NSA in 2013,” according to The Verge.

The hack of an NSA malware staging server is not unprecedented, but the publication of the take is. Here’s what you need to know: (1/x) — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) August 16, 2016

Sam Biddle, writing for The Intercept, breaks it down.

According to TechCrunch “expert analysis of the data suggested that the NSA and the Equation Group are one and the same.”

The Equation Group is a group of hackers discovered by Kaspersky Labs and characterized as one of the most sophisticated cyber attack outfits in the world. Ars Technica described the operation as “the most advanced… we have seen… with technical skill and resources that rival the groups that developed Stuxnet and the Flame espionage malware.”

Flame espionage malware and the Stuxnet virus infected computers in Iran. Flame “achieved mathematic breakthroughs that could only have been accomplished by world-class cryptographers,” note two of the world’s foremost cryptography experts. Stuxnet is a jointly built American-Israeli cyber weapon.

Kaspersky researchers have documented 500 infections by Equation Group in at least 42 countries, with Iran, Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Syria, and Mali topping the list. Because of a self-destruct mechanism built into the malware, the researchers suspect that this is just a tiny percentage of the total; the actual number of victims likely reaches into the tens of thousands.

Snowden suggests the raid on the NSA’s servers is political:

7) Why did they do it? No one knows, but I suspect this is more diplomacy than intelligence, related to the escalation around the DNC hack.

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) August 16, 2016

9) This leak is likely a warning that someone can prove US responsibility for any attacks that originated from this malware server. — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) August 16, 2016

10) That could have significant foreign policy consequences. Particularly if any of those operations targeted US allies.

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) August 16, 2016

The CIA has a long track record of adversely influencing elections, overthrowing democratically elected governments, and sponsoring coups in Italy (1948), Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), North Vietnam (1954-1958), Hungary (1956), Laos (1957-1973), Haiti (1959), Cuba (1961; the grand failure of the Bay of Pigs revealed the CIA’s modus operandi), Dominican Republic (1961), Ecuador (1961), Congo or Zaire (1961), Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965; a particularly bloody coup resulting in the death of a million people), Greece (1965), Cambodia (1970; meddling here resulted in the rise of the Khmer Rouge, which massacred millions of civilians), Chile (1973), Australia (1975), and dozens of other covert ops, designer wars, and general mayhem and chaos.

Now the United States is more sophisticated. It utilizes foundations to do its dirty work influencing elections and overthrowing governments. The foundations include the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), International Republican Institute (IRI), National Democratic Institute (NDI), and Freedom House—all supported to various degrees by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) at the State Department.

“Protests and destabilization actions are always planned around an electoral campaign and process, to raise tensions and questions of potential fraud, and to discredit the elections in the case of a loss for the opposition, which is generally the case. The same agencies are always present, funding, training and advising,” writes Eva Golinger.

The following countries have experienced “color revolutions”: Portugal, Philippines, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Georgia, Ukraine, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Kuwait, Belarus, Myanmar (formerly Burma), Moldova, Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, China, and Macedonia.

The “Arab Spring” color revolution launched in Syria resulted in a “civil war” (more precisely a US and Gulf Emirate sponsored proxy war) that has thus far resulted in nearly 500,000 deaths.

The latest example is Ukraine where the State Department worked with the Euromaidan movement to overthrow the democratically elected government of Viktor Yanukovych. The US has used the ongoing political and military tensions in that country to put pressure on Russia and heighten the possibility of a catastrophic conflict between the two nations.

Kurt Nimmo is the editor of Another Day in the Empire, where this article first appeared. He is the former lead editor and writer of Infowars.com.