Late Edition Today, clouds giving way to sunshine, windy, high 61. Tonight, partly cloudy, breezy, low 43. Tomorrow, lots of sunshine, breezy, mild, high 56. Weather map is on Page C8.
VOL. CLXVI . . . No. 57,530
© 2017 The New York Times Company
$2.50
NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 8, 2017
Documents Said to Reveal Hacking Secrets of C.I.A. WikiLeaks Exposes Tools That Agency May Have Used on Smartphones and TVs This article is by Scott Shane, Matthew Rosenberg and Andrew W. Lehren.
ARIS MESSINIS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
Advancing Into Western Mosul Iraqi forces seized government offices and a museum on Tuesday in fierce fighting to take the city from the Islamic State. Page A6.
G.O.P. HEALTH BILL Trump’s Wiretap Claim? ‘Above My Pay Grade’ MEETS A REVOLT WHITE HOUSE MEMO
Doubts Abound in Party on Fast-Tracked Plan By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
WASHINGTON — After seven years of waiting longingly to annul President Barack Obama’s signature health care law, Republican leaders on Tuesday faced a sudden revolt from the right that threatened their proposal to remake the American health care system. The much-anticipated House plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act also drew skepticism from some of the party’s more moderate members, whose constituents have benefited from expanded coverage in recent years. The criticism came even before lawmakers knew the cost of the replacement plan and how many people might lose their health care if it were enacted. House Republicans were rushing the legSenator Mike islation through Lee wants a two powerful full repeal. committees — Ways and Means, and Energy and Commerce — with the hope of a full House vote next week, an extraordinarily compressed time frame considering that the legislation affects many parts of the United States economy and could alter the health care of millions of Americans. But the swift opposition from fellow Republicans signaled that they might have to drastically reconsider their approach, and the White House portrayed the bill as a work in progress. If more than a dozen House Republicans defect, the bill will be in jeopardy, with Continued on Page A14 TAX CREDITS Analysts say the
G.O.P. health plan may be unaffordable for millions. PAGE A15 CLIMATE SKEPTICS The E.P.A.’s
chief is stocking agency offices with like minds. PAGE A17
By GLENN THRUSH and MAGGIE HABERMAN
WASHINGTON — President Trump has no regrets. His staff has no defense. After weeks of assailing reporters and critics in diligent defense of their boss, Mr. Trump’s team has been uncharacteristically muted this week when pressed about his explosive — and so far proof-free — Twitter posts on Saturday accusing President Barack Obama of tapping phones in Trump Tower
during the 2016 campaign. The accusation — and the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, and the former national intelligence director, James R. Clapper Jr., emphatically deny that any such wiretap was requested or issued — constitutes one of the most consequential accusations made by one president against another in American history. So for Mr. Trump’s allies inside the West Wing and beyond, the tweetstorm spawned the mother of all messaging migraines. Over the past few days, they have executed what amounts to a
strategic political retreat — trying to publicly validate Mr. Trump’s suspicions without overtly endorsing a claim some of them believe might have been generated by Breitbart News and other far-right outlets. “No, that’s above my pay grade,” said Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary and a feisty Trump loyalist, when asked on Tuesday at an on-camera briefing if he had seen any evidence to back up Mr. Trump’s accusation. The reporters kept at him, but Mr. Spicer pointedly and Continued on Page A15
WASHINGTON — In what appears to be the largest leak of C.I.A. documents in history, WikiLeaks released on Tuesday thousands of pages describing sophisticated software tools and techniques used by the agency to break into smartphones, computers and even Internet-connected televisions. The documents amount to a detailed, highly technical catalog of tools. They include instructions for compromising a wide range of common computer tools for use in spying: the online calling service Skype; Wi-Fi networks; documents in PDF format; and even commercial antivirus programs of the kind used by millions of people to protect their computers. A program called Wrecking Crew explains how to crash a targeted computer, and another tells how to steal passwords using the autocomplete function on Internet Explorer. Other programs were called CrunchyLimeSkies, ElderPiggy, AngerQuake and McNugget. The document dump was the latest coup for the antisecrecy organization and a serious blow to the C.I.A., which uses its hacking abilities to carry out espionage against foreign targets. The initial release, which WikiLeaks said was only the first installment in a larger collection of secret C.I.A. material, included 7,818 web pages with 943 attach-
ments, many of them partly redacted by WikiLeaks editors to avoid disclosing the actual code for cyberweapons. The entire archive of C.I.A. material consists of several hundred million lines of computer code, the group claimed. In one revelation that may especially trouble the tech world if confirmed, WikiLeaks said that the C.I.A. and allied intelligence services have managed to compromise both Apple and Android smartphones, allowing their officers to bypass the encryption on popular services such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram. According to WikiLeaks, government hackers can penetrate smartphones and collect “audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.” Unlike the National Security Agency documents Edward J. Snowden gave to journalists in 2013, they do not include examples of how the tools have been used against actual foreign targets. That could limit the damage of the leak to national security. But the breach was highly embarrassing for an agency that depends on secrecy. Robert M. Chesney, a specialist in national security law at the University of Texas at Austin, likened the C.I.A. trove to National Security Agency hacking tools disclosed last year by a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers. “If this is true, it says that N.S.A. isn’t the only one with an Continued on Page A10
PERSONAL RISKS Revelations about C.I.A. hacking pose questions about the vulnerability of smartphones and other devices. PAGE A10 ASSESSING THE FALLOUT Trust among federal intelligence agencies
and Silicon Valley is dealt another serious blow. PAGE A10
Korea Tensions Present Trump With Early Test
A New Player In Dutch Vote: American Cash
This article is by David E. Sanger, Choe Sang-Hun, Chris Buckley and Michael R. Gordon.
By DANNY HAKIM and CHRISTOPHER F. SCHUETZE
When the United States began deploying a missile defense system in South Korea this week, it was to protect an ally long threatened by North Korean provocations. But it was instantly met by angry Chinese warnings that the United States is setting off a new arms race in a region already on edge over the North’s drive to build a nuclear arsenal. China condemned the new antimissile system as a dangerous opening move in what it called America’s grand strategy to set up similar defenses across Asia, threatening to tilt the balance of power there against Beijing. The tensions are testing the new Trump administration and its uneasy allies South Korea and Japan, which have complained for years that China has simultaneously chastised and coddled the North, refusing to enact stiff enough measures to force it to abandon its nuclear and missile programs. But with the beginning of work to install the antimissile system, the delicate international cooperation against North Korea is splintering: Beijing is expressing more concern about American intentions in the region than about the Continued on Page A8
TODD HEISLER/THE NEW YORK TIMES
A family traveling from Champlain, N.Y., was arrested last month but hoped for asylum in Canada.
Migrants Use Quiet Road as Offramp From U.S. By RICK ROJAS
CHAMPLAIN, N.Y. — Roxham Road is a quiet country road jutting off another quiet country road, where a couple of horses munch on soggy hay and a ditch running along the muddy pavement flows with melted snow. It cuts through a thicket of dormant trees, passing a half-dozen trailer homes, and after almost a mile runs into a line of boulders and a rusted railing with a sign: Road Closed.
Chris Crowningshiele has been driving a cab, on and off, for 30 years in this rural corner of upstate New York known as the North Country. He lives south of here in Plattsburgh, and his fares usually come from ferrying students from a state university there or picking up shoppers at a Walmart in his gray minivan. But in recent weeks, riders have been asking him — two, three, sometimes as many as seven times a day — to bring them to the end of Roxham Road.
He is carrying them on the last leg of their journey out of the United States. Just on the other side of that sign is Canada. Border officials and aid workers there say there has been a surge in people illegally crossing from the United States in the months since President Trump was elected, many of them natives of Muslim countries making bids for asylum. Roxham Road, just a brief detour from a major border crossing on Interstate 87, has become one of the Continued on Page A21
AMSTERDAM — The parochial world of Dutch elections is not often seen as a hotbed of foreign intrigue. But in recent months, an unexpected worry has emerged: the influence of American money. The country’s fast-rising farright leader, Geert Wilders, is getting help from American conservatives attracted to his anti-European Union and anti-Islam views. David Horowitz, an American right-wing activist, has contributed roughly $150,000 to Mr. Wilders’s Party for Freedom over two years — of which nearly $120,000 came in 2015, making it the largest individual contribution in the Dutch political system that year, according to recently released records. By American standards, the amount is a pittance. But to some Dutch, who are already fearful of possible Russian meddling in the election, the American involvement is an assault on national sovereignty. “It’s foreign interference in our democracy,” said Ronald van Raak, a senior member of Parliament in the opposition Socialist party, who has co-sponsored legislation to ban foreign donations. “We would not have thought that people from other countries would Continued on Page A9
INTERNATIONAL A4-10
NEW YORK A19-21
BUSINESS DAY B1-8
OBITUARIES B16
EDITORIAL, OP-ED A22-23
Christian Charity Exits India
Murder Charges Shock Town
Tax Troubles for Caterpillar
Lawyer for Revolutionaries
Thomas L. Friedman
Compassion International, which runs a “sponsor a child” program, is leaving India after 48 years, as the government cracks down on foreign aid. PAGE A4
Two men who helped search for a missing 19-year-old woman, their friend since grade school, are accused in her killing in New Jersey. PAGE A19
A government-commissioned report accuses the heavy-equipment maker of carrying out tax and accounting fraud to shield overseas earnings. PAGE B1
Lynne F. Stewart, who represented the poor and the reviled, self-described revolutionaries and a radical, blind Egyptian cleric, was 77.
PAGE A23
U(D54G1D)y+=!#!@!#!/