Yves Smith
Photo: DemocracyNOW
Yves here. It’s remarkable to see the way the claim that the DNC hack was the doing of America’s Enemy Number One is being flogged on thin to non-existence evidence. This is reminiscent of the Sony hack, which was attributed to North Korea, a claim that was widely debunked on tech sites. Sony apparently had such terrible security that getting into its systems was on the order of walking through an open door. Yet Obama himself fronted for this story, which was even more bizarre given that Sony is not a strategically significant concern (ie, not a defense or intel company, does not provide critical products or services).
The alleged Russia connection has also been debunked by FAIR. Here’s another debunking of the post that kicked this story off by someone who hates Trump. I have to add that there’s no evidence that Trump has trouble borrowing (particularly now when Manhattan residential and commercial real estate is trading at high values; he presumably could refi to tap equity appreciation if he needed to). A separate story pointed out that Trump’s primary banking relationships are with mid-sized players, and that makes sense too. He’s be a third-tier account at a too-big-to-fail banks (see here on how a much richer billionaire was abused by JP Morgan). Trump would get much better service at a smaller institution.
Lambert also provided this link on “computer forensics”.
I joked early on that in the Obama administration that its solution to every problem was better propaganda. What is troubling is how so many other players have emulated that strategy. It’s now so routine to spin-doctor aggressively that the elites have lost any sense of whether what they are saying is credible or not. And as a skeptical consumer of media, I find it uncomfortable to be living in an informational hall of mirrors.
The mainstream media alleges that Russia was behind the hack of the DNC’s emails.
The media is parading out the usual suspects alleged experts to back up this claim.
Washington’s Blog asked the highest-level NSA whistleblower in history, William Binney – the NSA executive who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information, who served as the senior technical director within the agency, who managed six thousand NSA employees, the 36-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency and the NSA’s best-ever analyst and code-breaker, who mapped out the Soviet command-and-control structure before anyone else knew how, and so predicted Soviet invasions before they happened (“in the 1970s, he decrypted the Soviet Union’s command system, which provided the US and its allies with real-time surveillance of all Soviet troop movements and Russian atomic weapons”) – what he thinks of such claims:
Edward Snowden says the NSA could easily determine who hacked Hillary Clinton’s emails:
Evidence that could publicly attribute responsibility for the DNC hack certainly exists at #NSA, but DNI traditionally objects to sharing.
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) July 25, 2016
Even if the attackers try to obfuscate origin, #XKEYSCORE makes following exfiltrated data easy. I did this personally against Chinese ops.
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) July 25, 2016
But mainstream media say it couldn’t: http://www.businessinsider.com/dnc-hack-russian-government-2016-7
The mainstream media is also trumpeting the meme that Russia was behind the hack, because it wants to help Trump get elected. In other words, the media is trying to deflect how damaging the email leaks are to Clinton’s character by trying to somehow associate Trump with Putin. See e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/26/us/politics/kremlin-donald-trump-vladimir-putin.html
Who’s right?
Binney responded:
Snowden is right and the MSM is clueless. Here’s what I said to Ray McGovern and VIPS with a little humor at the end. [McGovern is a 27-year CIA veteran, who chaired National Intelligence Estimates and personally delivered intelligence briefings to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, their Vice Presidents, Secretaries of State, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many other senior government officials. McGovern is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (“VIPS” for short).]
Ray, I am suspicious that they may have looked for known hacking code (used by Russians). And, I’m sure they were one probably of many to hack her stuff. But, does that mean that they checked to see if others also hacked in?
Further, do they have evidence that the Russians downloaded and later forwarded those emails to wikileaks? Seems to me that they need to answer those questions to be sure that their assertion is correct. Otherwise, HRC and her political activities are and I am sure have been prime targets for the Russians (as well as many others) but without intent of course.
I would add that we proposed to do a program that would monitor all activity on the world-wide NSA network back in 1991/92. We called it “Well-grounded.” NSA did not want anyone (especially congress) to know what was going on inside NSA and therefore rejected that proposal. I have not read what Ed has said, but, I do know that every line of
code that goes across the network is logged in the network log. This is where a little software could scan, analyze and find the intruders initially and then compile all the code sent by them to determine the type of attack. This is what we wanted to do back in 1991/92.
The newest allegation tying the Clinton email hack to Russia seems to be all innuendo.
Binney explained to us:
My problem is that they have not listed intruders or attempted intrusions to the DNC site. I suspect that’s because they did a quick and dirty look for known attacks.
Of course, this brings up another question; if it’s a know attack, why did the DNC not have software to stop it? You can tell from the network log who is going into a site. I used that on networks that I had. I looked to see who came into my LAN, where they went, how long they stayed and what they did while in my network.
Further, if you needed to, you could trace back approaches through other servers etc. Trace Route and Trace Watch are good examples of monitoring software that help do these things. Others of course exist … probably the best are in NSA/GCHQ and the other Five Eyes countries. But, these countries have no monopoly on smart people that could do similar detection software.
Question is do they want to fix the problems with existing protection software. If the DNC and OPM are examples, then obviously, they don’t care to fix weakness probably because the want to use these weaknesses to their own advantage.
Why is this newsworthy?
Well, the mainstream narrative alleges that the Clinton emails are not important … and that it’s a conspiracy between Putin and Trump to make sure Trump – and not Clinton – is elected.
But there are other issues, as well …
For example, an allegation of hacking could literally lead to war.
So we should be skeptical of such serious and potentially far-reaching allegations – which may be true or may be false – unless and until they are proven.
July 27, 2016