As my loyal readers know, I detest Trump but, at the same time, will give him credit where credit is due, in this case, trying to reestablish a viable relationship with Russia, a nation equipped with really powerful weapons and the means to deliver them with great efficiency against us without question, something the deep state seems to ignore at OUR peril due to their endless pursuit of money based on generating fear of our never ending enemies trying to get us with Russia as bete noire No. 1.
With this in mind, the Dems continue to flog the Russia hacking venue in support of the 2016 Trump election with the latest salvo of Mueller indicting 12 Russian intel operatives who allegedly gamed the system to the max for the orange yam but there are problems with this latest foray in blaming the Russkies based on government access to the hardware in question and the size of the files purloined from DNC headquarters back in 2016. i.e.
US courts will indict a ham sandwich, goes the proverb. Mueller indicted 13 Russians linked to the “troll farm” Internet Research Agency in February, hoping that they wouldn’t bother to appear in court, not being bound by US law or having anything to gain by participating in his show trial. But a few sent their lawyers and demanded discovery, which would have forced Mueller to reveal the evidence he had against them. Finding his own indictments riddled with errors – one of the companies named didn’t even exist at the time of the election – Mueller quietly backpedaled. Score one for the Russians.
But this time he has evidence, right? Surely he wouldn’t make that mistake again. And this time it’s Russian military operatives, not some two-bit troll-farmers! The indictment accuses them of spear-phishing Democratic staffers and using those login credentials to access the party’s servers, stealing the famous documents and leaking them to the public through Wikileaks and DCLeaks (though they seem unsure whether DCLeaks is a person or a website). Isn’t this what we’ve all been waiting for?
Perhaps it would be, if the FBI had actually encountered the servers firsthand. Government investigators (from both the FBI and the DHS, which also wanted in on the action) never even laid eyes on the “hacked” servers belonging to the DNC and DCCC, instead relying on the assessment of a computer security firm headed by a Russian expat with an ax to grind against his former government. Dmitri Alperovitch’s CrowdStrike specializes in attributing malware attacks to state actors – a no-no in the computer security industry, and something he was discouraged from doing by former employer McAfee (whose founder has personally commented on the lack of evidence implicating Russia in the DNC hack). Alperovitch launched CrowdStrike to offer his attribution services to clients like the US government which might care more about blaming a hack on a government than finding out how to protect against such hacks in the first place.
It gets better.
Mr. Trump’s visit to confer with Russian President Putin in Helsinki seems to have provoked a kind of last-gasp effort to keep the increasingly idiotic Russian election meddling story alive — with Robert Mueller’s ballyhooed indictment of twelve “Russian intel agents” alleged to have “hacked” emails and computer files of the DNC and Hillary’s campaign chairman John Podesta. The gaping holes in that part of the tale have long been unearthed so I’ll summarize as briefly as possible:
1) the bandwidth required to transfer the files has been proven to be greater than an internet hack might have conceivably managed in the time allowed and points rather to a direct download into a flash drive device. 2) the DNC computer hard drives, said to be the source of the alleged hacking, disappeared while in the custody of the US Intel Community (including the FBI). 3) the authenticity of the purloined emails by Mr. Podesta and others has never been disputed, and they revealed a lot of potentially criminal behavior by them. 4) Mr. Mueller must know he will never get twelve Russian intel agents into a US courtroom, so the entire exercise is a joke and a fraud. In effect, he’s indicted twelve ham sandwiches with Russian dressing.
I'll have mine with pickles on the side.
As tech backup, https://consortiumnews.com/tag/veteran-intelligence-professionals-for-sanity/
is a great resource to learn what hacking is all about in this era of fake news and bloviation.
Blurb 2. check out Ray McGovern's approach to the Russian Hack scenario here. Most illuminating to say the least. Here's an excerpt from his article.
This time around, on the off-chance I do get the nod, I have taken the time to prepare the agenda for my first few days as CIA director. Here’s how Day One looks so far:
Get former National Security Agency Technical Director William Binney back to CIA to join me and the “handpicked” CIA analysts who, with other “handpicked” analysts (as described by former National Intelligence Director James Clapper on May 8, 2017) from the FBI and NSA, prepared the so-called Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) of Jan. 6, 2017. That evidence-impoverished assessment argued the case that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his minions “to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton.”
When my predecessor, CIA Director Mike Pompeo invited Binney to his office on Oct. 24, 2017 to discuss cyber-attacks, he told Pompeo that he had been fed a pack of lies on “Russian hacking” and that he could prove it. Why Pompeo left that hanging is puzzling, but I believe this is the kind of low-hanging fruit we should pick pronto.
The low-calorie Jan. 6 ICA was clumsily cobbled together:
“We assess with high confidence that Russian military intelligence … used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets and relayed material to WikiLeaks.”
Binney and other highly experienced NSA alumni, as well as other members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), drawing on their intimate familiarity with how the technical systems and hacking work, have been saying for a year and a half that this CIA/FBI/NSA conclusion is a red herring, so to speak. Last summer, the results of forensic investigation enabled VIPS to apply the principles of physics and the known capacity of the internet to confirm that conclusion.
Any questions as to why Mueller's take on this affair is somewhat questionable?
Finally, here is a short excerpt from the year and a half Intel Vets Challenge link detailing some rather interesting details regarding the alleged hack into DNC hardware.
Forensic studies of “Russian hacking” into Democratic National Committee computers last year reveal that on July 5, 2016, data was leaked (not hacked) by a person with physical access to DNC computer. After examining metadata from the “Guccifer 2.0” July 5, 2016 intrusion into the DNC server, independent cyber investigators have concluded that an insider copied DNC data onto an external storage device.
Key among the findings of the independent forensic investigations is the conclusion that the DNC data was copied onto a storage device at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack. Of equal importance, the forensics show that the copying was performed on the East coast of the U.S. Thus far, mainstream media have ignored the findings of these independent studies [see here and here].
Independent analyst Skip Folden, who retired after 25 years as the IBM Program Manager for Information Technology, US, who examined the recent forensic findings, is a co-author of this Memorandum. He has drafted a more detailed technical report titled “Cyber-Forensic Investigation of ‘Russian Hack’ and Missing Intelligence Community Disclaimers,” and sent it to the offices of the Special Counsel and the Attorney General. VIPS member William Binney, a former Technical Director at the National Security Agency, and other senior NSA “alumni” in VIPS attest to the professionalism of the independent forensic findings.
The recent forensic studies fill in a critical gap. Why the FBI neglected to perform any independent forensics on the original “Guccifer 2.0” material remains a mystery – as does the lack of any sign that the “hand-picked analysts” from the FBI, CIA, and NSA, who wrote the “Intelligence Community Assessment” dated January 6, 2017, gave any attention to forensics.
Interesting is it not?
Last but not least, who is Guccifer? Maybe the FBI knows because we don't. Here is yet another post supporting the leak theory by the same intel vets who know how intel is done without the need for partisan politics.
BRIEFING FOR: The President
FROM: Ray McGovern, former CIA briefer of The President’s Daily Brief, and William Binney, former Technical Director at NSA
SUBJECT: Info Your Summit Briefers May Have Missed
We reproduce below one of our most recent articles on “Russia-Gate,” which, in turn, draws from our Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity Memorandum to you of July 24, 2017.
At the time of that Memorandum we wrote:
“Forensic studies of “Russian hacking” into Democratic National Committee computers last year reveal that on July 5, 2016, data was leaked (not hacked) by a person with physical access to DNC computer. After examining metadata from the “Guccifer 2.0” July 5, 2016 intrusion into the DNC server, independent cyber investigators have concluded that an insider copied DNC data onto an external storage device.
Key among the findings of the independent forensic investigations is the conclusion that the DNC data was copied onto a storage device at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack.”
“We do not know who or what the murky Guccifer 2.0 is. You may wish to ask the FBI,” we wrote. However, we now have forensic evidence that shows the data provided by Guccifer 2.0 had been manipulated and is a fabrication.
We also discussed CIA’s cyber-tool “Marble Framework,” which can hack into computers, “obfuscate” who hacked, and leave behind incriminating, telltale signs in Russian; and we noted that this capability had been employed during 2016. As we pointed out, Putin himself made an unmistakable reference to this “obfuscating” tool during an interview with Megan Kelly.
Our article of June 7, 2018, explains further:
“Still Waiting for Evidence of a Russian Hack”
If you are wondering why so little is heard these days of accusations that Russia hacked into the U.S. election in 2016, it could be because those charges could not withstand close scrutiny. It could also be because special counsel Robert Mueller appears to have never bothered to investigate what was once the central alleged crime in Russia-gate as no one associated with WikiLeaks has ever been questioned by his team.
The truth is out there if we know where to look. Read the piece, you will learn a lot without question.
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