It was a leak ...

Rod Goldstein, Deputy Attorney General

For over two years, the dems have screamed the Russkies did it regarding the DNC data heist showing that Bernie got screwed by the dems in embarrassing emails showing this to be true. This "obvious" fact of spearfishing has been touted by Mueller, and significant others, to be the only way this info was garnered and subsequently given to Wikileaks to embarrass Clinton and to enable Trump to become president. While this Wikileaks/political conjecture remains outside the province of the blurb, the specifics regarding how the data dump went down is not, especially when it comes to intel pros like William Binney/NSA and Larry Johnson/CIA, senior spooks who know how events like this can happen.

If the Russians actually had conducted an internet based hack of the DNC computer network then the evidence of such an attack would have been collected and stored by the National Security Agency. The technical systems to accomplish this task have been in place since 2002. The NSA had an opportunity to make it clear that there was irrefutable proof of Russian meddling, particularly with regard to the DNC hack, when it signed on to the January 2017 “Intelligence Community Assessment,” regarding Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election:

We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence.

The phrase, “moderate confidence” is intelligence speak for “we have no hard evidence.” Thanks to the leaks by Edward Snowden, we know with certainty that the NSA had the capability to examine and analyze the DNC emails. NSA routinely “vacuumed up” email traffic transiting the U.S. using robust collection systems (whether or not anyone in the NSA chose to look for this data is another question). If those emails had been hijacked over the internet then NSA also would have been able to track the electronic path they traveled over the internet. This kind of data would allow the NSA to declare without reservation or caveat that the Russians were guilty. The NSA could admit to such a fact in an unclassified assessment without compromising sources and methods. Instead, the NSA only claimed to have moderate confidence in the judgement regarding Russian meddling. If the NSA had hard intelligence to support the judgement the conclusion would have been stated as “full confidence.”

It gets better

An examination of the Wikileaks DNC files shows they were created on 23, 25 and 26 May respectively. The fact that they appear in a FAT system format indicates the data was transfered to a storage device, such as a thumb drive.

How do we know? The truth lies in the “last modified” time stamps on the Wikileaks files.  Every single one of these time stamps end in even numbers.  If you are not familiar with the FAT file system, you need to understand that when a date is stored under this system the data rounds the time to the nearest even numbered second.  

We have examined 500 DNC email files stored on Wikileaks and all 500 files end in an even number—2, 4, 6, 8 or 0. If a system other than FAT had been used, there would have been an equal probability of the time stamp ending with an odd number. But that is not the case with the data stored on the Wikileaks site. All end with an even number.

The DNC emails are in 3 batches (times are GMT).

Date        Count       Min Time    Max Time FAT  Min Id Max Id

2016-05-23  10520  02:12:38      02:45:42 x    3800   14319

2016-05-25  11936  05:21:30       06:04:36 x    1         22456

2016-08-26  13357  14:11:36       20:06:04 x    22457  44053

The random probability that FAT was not used is 1 chance in 2 to the 500th power or approximately 1 chance in 10 to the 150th power - in other words, an infinitely high order. 

This data alone does not prove that the emails were copied at the DNC headquarters. But it does show that the data/emails posted by Wikileaks did go through a storage device, like a thumbdrive, before Wikileaks posted the emails on the World Wide Web.

This fact alone is enough to raise reasonable doubts about Mueller’s indictment accusing 12 Russian soldiers as the culprits for the leak of the DNC emails to Wikileaks. A savvy defense attorney will argue, and rightly so, that someone copied the DNC files to a storage device (Eg., USB thumb drive) and transferred that to Wikileaks.  

The question to ask here is ... why didn't Mueller ask guys like Binney and Johnson to get as much unbiased information as possible as to what actually went down in 2016 regarding the DNC and the data that was purloined at that point in time as this would absolve Mueller from any negative pushback regarding this very important part of his investigation.

Red scare anyone?

Last but not least ...

At the time I reported on the findings of VIPS and associated forensic scientists, that the most fundamental evidence that the events of summer 2016 constituted a leak, not a hack, was the transfer rate—the speed at which data was copied. The speed proven then was an average of 22.7 megabytes per second. That speed matches what is standard when someone with physical access uses an external storage device to copy data from a computer or server and is much faster than a remote hack, reliant on communications topology available at the time, could achieve.

Binney experimented into the autumn. By mid-autumn he had tested several routes—from East Coast locations to cities in eastern Europe, from New Jersey to London. The fastest internet transfer speed achieved, during the New Jersey–to–Britain test, was 12.0 megabytes of data per second. Since this time it has emerged from G-2.0’s metadata that the detected average speed—the 22.7 megabytes per second—included peak speeds that ran as high as 49.1 megabytes per second, impossible over the internet. “You’d need a dedicated, leased, 400–megabit line all the way to Russia to achieve that result,” Binney said in a recent interview.

Regarding Guccifer, the entity stating it was a hack ...

Binney visited Campbell in Brighton, England, early this past spring. They examined all the metadata associated with the files G–2.0 has made public. They looked at the number of files, the size of each, and the time stamps at the end of each. It was at this time that Binney and Campbell established the peak transfer rate at 49.1 megabytes per second.

But they discovered something else of significance, too. At some point G–2.0 had merged two sets of data, one dated July 5, 2016, which had been known, and another dated the following September 1, which had not been known. In essence, Campbell reverse-engineered G–2.0’s work: He took the sets of data G–2.0 presented as two and combined them back into one. “G–2.0 used an algorithm to make a downloaded file look like two files,” Binney explained. “Those two shuffled back together like a deck of cards.”

G–2.0 then took another step. Running another algorithm, he changed all the dates on all the files. With yet another algorithm, he changed the hours stamped on each file. These are called “range changes” among the professionals. The conclusion was then obvious: G–2.0 is a fabrication and a fabricator. Forensicator had already proven that the G–2.0 entity had inserted Russian “fingerprints” into the document known as the “Trump Opposition Report,” which G-2.0 had published on June 15, 2016. It is clear that no firm conclusions can be drawn at this point as to when or where G–2.0 did what he did.

“Now you need to prove everything you might think about him,” Binney told me. “We have no way of knowing anything about him or what he has done, apart from manipulating the files. We detected activity in the Eastern time zone. Now we have to ask again, ‘Which time zone?’ The West Coast copy operation [discovered by Forensicator] has to be proven. All the data has been manipulated. It’s a fabrication.”

Binney is right, all of this information has to be vetted without question 

Something's afoot - Sherlock Holmes.

 Addendum: VIPS: Mueller's Forensics-Free Findings promises to add fuel to the fire as to whether's Mueller's insistence on the Russians hacking the election is a valid assessment or is politically motivated. Either way, great theater, if nothing else, will be forthcoming as we move further into 2019.

Of fog & birds

Intersect

Tree Line

Aperture

Incoming

The Snow Moon Supermoon 2019 :)

Let's hope the weather cooperates. :)

Environs

From subways to reservoirs and all things in between, NYC has varied environs to the max. Enjoy

The 7 Worlds ...

Ridley Scott still has what it takes ...

Uncanny Valley yet again ...

This person does not exist

A person who says they created the site popped up on Hacker News to explain what was going on. The website cycles through the results of a type of algorithm called a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), which basically means that two AI systems duel each other to create a realistic imitation of something — whether it’s a caricature, a level of DOOM, or a person’s portrait.

In this case, the GAN was built by Intel researchers and trained on photos of people’s faces, according to research published to the preprint server ArXiv last week that the author shared in the Hacker News post. However, the same algorithm has also been trained on images of anime faces and paintings, resulting in terrifying animations.

It gets better.

IN 2015, CAR-AND-ROCKET man Elon Musk joined with influential startup backer Sam Altman to put artificial intelligence on a new, more open course. They cofounded a research institute called OpenAI to make new AI discoveries and give them away for the common good. Now, the institute’s researchers are sufficiently worried by something they built that they won’t release it to the public.

The AI system that gave its creators pause was designed to learn the patterns of language. It does that very well—scoring better on some reading-comprehension tests than any other automated system. But when OpenAI’s researchers configured the system to generate text, they began to think about their achievement differently.

“It looks pretty darn real,” says David Luan, vice president of engineering at OpenAI, of the text the system generates. He and his fellow researchers began to imagine how it might be used for unfriendly purposes. “It could be that someone who has malicious intent would be able to generate high-quality fake news,” Luan says.

Beyond our control seems to apply here, does it not?

Options/Snooping 101

Running out of options ...

Snooping 101

NYC @ Nite Yet Again

Reflection 2Step

Flatiron +

LCT @ Nite

LC Front & Center

Shades of Blue

Toons yet again :)

On your feet ... I stand corrected :)

Supersize me

On the road to perdition

 Monkey see, Monkey do

Put me in coach ...

Mailing it in ...

Straight Cuts of a Different Kind :)

Straight cuts of a different kind starts by combining electricity with a brass wire (EDM) to mill metal with the kind of precision impossible to achieve by traditional means.

Traditional milling involves the mechanical shaping of a material—“applying a mechanical force against the workpiece to physically make a chip or remove material,” says Brian Pfluger, EDM product line manager at Makino, a machine tool maker. “Whereas with EDM we're not physically touching the part—we're machining with lightning bolts.”

First of all, that’s metal as hell. But more specifically, we’re talking lots and lots of little sparks. The “blade” in an EDM machine is actually a superfine brass wire through which electricity courses. Even though the machine is cutting through extremely tough materials, such as carbide (which is so tough that traditional milling techniques use it to drill through other materials), the blasts of electricity it uses are relatively weak. But the blasts come with extremely high frequency, something like 20,000 sparks per second along the length of the brass wire.

Some specifics ...

The wire itself never actually touches the material. The rapid-fire sparks vaporize teeny tiny bits of the metal being cut, on the order of 5 microns wide. (A micron is a millionth of a meter. For context, a red blood cell in your body is between 6 and 8 microns wide.) This is known as sublimation.

1 Wire. 2 Electrical discharge erosion (Electric arc). 3 Electrical potential. 4 Workpiece.

Cool without question. :)

Undercurrents

Reality is all about the transformation and transferral of energy from one place to another with as much continuity as possible as nature hates gradients and tries her best to eliminate them to the max. Winter is a great time to see how undercurrents work, in this case, at small scales. Enjoy.

Tax Rates et al ...

Now when you look at this graphic, check out how healthy the economy really was under Eisenhower and Kennedy as under Eisenhower, the government was in the black. Taxing the rich at the levels of Eisenhower and Kennedy really makes sense doesn't it given the enormous debt America faces in 2019. Thanks Alex for turning me onto this. 

Opportunity has died AFAWK ...

The Opportunity rover looks back on its tracks on Mars.NASA / JPL-CALTECH

For 15 years, Opportunity traveled on Mars, sending back pictures and data, something truly incredible as the original mission was designed to last 90 days, let alone 15 years. The only other mission comparable to this, IMHO, is Cassini, another explorer that delivered invaluable research about Saturn in a mission lasting 13 years instead of 4. Needless to say, the scientists and engineers shepherding these guys grew to love them as they became, in a very real way, family, not just hardware, a sentiment yours truly understands without question. 

The rovers moved like migratory birds.

Opportunity and Spirit arrived on Mars within days of each other, at different locations along the planet’s equator, in January 2004, equipped with instruments to study the rust-colored soil. During the Martian winter, engineers directed the rovers to north-facing slopes, so that their solar panels could soak up as much sunlight as possible each day. When one of Spirit’s wheels stopped working, it kept going by driving backwards, dragging the defunct wheel behind it.

But in 2009, the rover’s wheels broke through some crust and slipped into a sand pit. Engineers tried maneuvering the wheels this way and that, but the rover was stuck. For the first time, Spirit couldn’t make its way to a sunny slope.

“We saw it coming,” Steve Squyres, the principal investigator for the NASA mission, told me. “I knew from day one, if Spirit has to spend a winter on flat ground, that was going to be Spirit’s last winter.”

Spirit entered hibernation mode and never woke up. The mission was declared over more than a year after the rover’s last message to Earth and months of attempts to restore contact.

Now it could be Opportunity’s turn. The rover hasn’t called home in 237 days.

Last June, an enormous storm swept across the planet, clogging the atmosphere with sunlight-blocking dust, and the rover, unable to charge its batteries in the darkness, slipped into a deep sleep.

“I haven’t given up yet,” Squyres said.

I really hope I'm wrong about this.

Ice Lines 2019