To date, the only public evidence that the Russian government was responsible for hacks of the DNC and key Democratic figures has been circumstantial and far short of conclusive, courtesy of private research firms with a financial stake in such claims. Multiple federal agencies now claim certainty about the Kremlin connection, but they have yet to make public the basis for their beliefs.
Now, a never-before-published top-secret document provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden suggests the NSA has a way of collecting evidence of Russian hacks, because the agency tracked a similar hack before in the case of a prominent Russian journalist, who was also a U.S. citizen.
People hold pictures of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya during a rally in central Moscow on Oct. 7, 2007.
Photo: Dmitry Kostyukov/AFP/Getty Images
Russian Federal Intelligence Services (probably FSB) are known to have targeted the webmail account of the murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. On 5 December 2005, RFIS initiated an attack against the account annapolitkovskaia@US Provider1, deploying malicious software which is not available in the public domain. It is not known whether this attack is in any way associated with the death of the journalist.
Although the NSA document does not specify the account, Anna Politkovskaya was known to use the email address annapolitkovskaia@yahoo.com.
In response to a query from The Intercept about the hacking of Politkovskaya’s account, Yahoo replied in a statement: “We can only disclose information about a specific user account pursuant to our terms of service, privacy policy and law enforcement guidelines.”
The year after her email was hacked, Politkovskaya was murdered, a crime that was widely suspected, though never proven, to be a Kremlin reprisal for her reporting on Chechnya and criticism of Vladimir Putin.
This hack sounds more or less like a very rough sketch of what private firms like CrowdStrike allege the FSB perpetrated against the DNC this year, and presumably what entities like the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence have, behind closed doors, told President Obama took place.
What’s particularly interesting here is the provenance of NSA’s claims: The section is classified TS/SI, meaning Top Secret Signals Intelligence, the interception of signals (broadly construed) as they pass from one point to another, including anything from tapped phone calls to monitored internet traffic. That is to say, the NSA knew Russia hacked Politkovskaya because the NSA was spying. Thanks to the Snowden revelations, we know there are many powerful, overlapping government spy programs that could allow the NSA to observe communications as they unfold.
Unfortunately, in the case of this wiki there’s no indication of exactly what sort of SIGINT was collected with regard to Politkovskaya, or how it incriminated Russian intelligence — all we have is the allusion to the evidence, not the evidence. The NSA declined to comment.
But that this evidence existed at all is important, and more so today than ever. Simply, the public evidence that the Russian government hacked the Democrats isn’t convincing. Too much of what’s been passed off to the public as proof of Kremlin involvement is based on vague clues and educated guesses of what took place. Signals intelligence could bridge the empirical gap.
Adm. Mike Rogers, the current NSA chief, has already publicly claimed that Russia was behind the attack. “This was a conscious effort by a nation state to attempt to achieve a specific effect,” Rogers said in November, without specifically mentioning Russia.
NSA whistleblowers have so far given the best idea of what the NSA’s signals intelligence on Russia, today or in 2005, could look like. Earlier this year, Snowden tweeted that if the Russian government was indeed behind the hacking of the Democrats, the NSA most likely has the goods, noting that XKEYSCORE, a sort of global SIGINT search engine, “makes following exfiltrated data easy. I did this personally against Chinese ops.” Snowden went so far as to say that nailing down this sort of SIGINT hacker attribution “is the only case in which mass surveillance has actually proven effective.”
The ex-U.S. intelligence personnel who comprise the group Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, including fellow high-profile NSA whistleblower William Binney, echoed Snowden’s assessment earlier this month:
The bottom line is that the NSA would know where and how any “hacked” emails from the DNC, HRC or any other servers were routed through the network. This process can sometimes require a closer look into the routing to sort out intermediate clients, but in the end sender and recipient can be traced across the network.
Signal interception can take many different forms, and again, there’s no way to know exactly what the NSA had intercepted surrounding Anna Politkovskaya. But we know intelligence is being gathered on a fine enough level to pin the breach of a single inbox on the Russian government. If the NSA could use signals intelligence to track a specific hack of an American email account in 2005, it’s not too much to assume that, 10 years later, the agency possesses the same or better capability. And signals intelligence is the type of evidence that the American people are owed from the federal government today, as we contemplate a possible confrontation with Russia for interfering in our most important of democratic processes.
“And signals intelligence is the type of evidence that the American people are owed from the federal government today…”
They don’t owe you zhit. You and I don’t matter. Period.
The NSA did it themselves, says Judge Napolitano, because sHillary is such an incompetent, lying, corrupt POS.
Neither the NSA nor the CIA would be able to tell you whether or not AppRiver leaked them… or if the FBI had a 100% collection warrant and then leaked from inside the FBI.
I’ve probed AppRiver… and my conclusion: AppRiver leaked… and only the FBI can say whether or not they helped.
This article is a good example of why the Intercept is not doing so well. The author is buying into the idea that the Russians hacked into the DNC servers, the government in general–and it’s bunk. Even the title of the article is click bait, just get more hits for this decidedly mediocre website. Besides the occasional Glenn Greenwald article, there ain’t much worth reading here. They just don’t seem to have enough good writers to keep you coming back.
Mr. Biddle, what are you talking about? None of this could have happened. The Russians are really cool dudes. They’d never do anything like this. Anna Politkovskaya is probably still alive somewhere. This was likely a CIA false flag op to discredit Vladimir Putin, who is also a really cool dude. Read Glenn Greenwald’s recent piece and you’ll see how unfair and irrational criticism of Putin is.
What matters more was the truth of the emails. I can’t accept the Russia narrative, how could they know about a server out there, cloaked in anonymity?
So president obama is concerned about the potential of Russian hackers. Swell. If Russia wants information, HACKING NOT REQUIRED! The Dumb&Dumbers are giving the data away!
US government subcontractor leaks confidential military personnel data
The leak exposed personal data including Social Security numbers to the assigned posts of critical members of the US military, some of whom hold the highest levels of security clearance.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/us-government-subcontractor-leaks-confidential-military-personnel-data
Potomac Healthcare Solutions, a subcontractor brought on board to supply healthcare professionals to the US government and military organizations through its Washington, DC.-based contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, was the source of the data leak.
USG, complacency corruption incompetence
Mr. Snowden may have some input with the boozing connection.
abbra cadabra, russia did it, Seth Rich is not an issue, so sayeth dod gam sionista msm.
? Thanks for the Information
Imagine! (just imagine!, as Lennon would say) if theIntercept’s “ethical” journos had the ovaries, balls and healthy brains connected to a sturdy spine to speak truth with teeth to power as Assange, the Yes Men and some other do!
RCL
msm avoiding the murder of Seth Rich like the plague.
stuxnet…
no furor, no story, never happened.
keep moving.
The very sad and funny thing is to believe that: if Russia had the capability and had done, why would they waste time with the dnc? The CrookdClintos are shells, empty, mean greedy people that time has finally revealed. It does not take russia to smell dishonest.
a cyber gulf of tonkin ‘incident’.
Another fake false flag event just like Iraq WMDs….
Bullsh*t
No evidence:
http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/12/did-russia-tamper-with-the-2016-election-bitter-debate-likely-to-rage-on/
How about it’s just politics as usual?
This from @ThomasDrake1
Hyper US gov’t hypocrisy. Click on gov’t filter & check out ALL hacks against US over past 11 yrs. mirror #crickets
http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/12/did-russia-tamper-with-the-2016-election-bitter-debate-likely-to-rage-on/
The CIA has morphed into a “deep state” that uses disinformation and propaganda to align decisions of Congress, the executive branch, and foreign governments with secret behind-the-scenes agendas. Many books, such as Stephen Kinzer’s The Brothers and Douglas Valentine’s CIA As Organized Crime have described some of these secret agendas.
In order to deter Trump from restoring normal relations with Russia, an incident would have to be severe and irreversible. Rather than accept defeat for their agenda of US world hegemony, the neoconservatives are prepared to take high risks. The willingness to take risks is demonstrated by the public effort of the CIA Director to discredit the president-elect.
Yes.
you say ‘morphed’ i say ‘mutated’
“Multiple federal agencies now claim certainty about the Kremlin connection, but they have yet to make public the basis for their beliefs. …
Now, a never-before-published top-secret document provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden suggests the NSA …”
This is total bullshit. Snowden’s shit is way, years, before this current “russian hack” crap. The Intercept fucking just adds to the massive amounts of shit/mis/dis/information re this.
Son of a fuckin bitch
You seem to have missed the point of this article. It describes the USA’s ability to identify what happened to a single mailbox, suggesting that if the intelligence services can find out what happened to a Russian mailbox over 10 years ago, then it is very likely they could do the same with a US-based mailbox now.
Following this line of reasoning, it then suggests that the US intelligence services would actually have hard evidence – that is IF the allegations were true. So, on that basis, they could release some or all of that evidence to prove conclusively that the Russians had hacked the mailbox.
So why haven’t they released this hard evidence?
Here is their “hard” evidence:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_department_of_homeland_security_and_fbi_claim_of_russian_20161029
“Fake news” from the DHS/FBI??
to maintain status as a safe searchable result, it would have to be –
son of a buckin fitch.
tyia
This is prep for a trillion dollar nuke “upgrade”. There has to be a boogie man to help sell the night lights. So the gummit points finger at Putin for “rigging” the election while the Judges block recount efforts??
Giggle.
Another fake news story. A laptop, not connected to the utility’s network, had malware in an email similar to that in the DHS “report”. But it turns out that particular malware has been publicly available for 5 years and is not even Russian; it’s from Ukraine.
According to Mr. Assange, Wikileaks did not receive the emails that they released from a Russian hack. In fact, he all but named murdered DNC worker Seth Rich as their source, which would have been via a leak not a hack. Why would Mr. Assange lie?…
https://youtu.be/b6qlc3lStM4
https://youtu.be/Kp7FkLBRpKg
So where’s the beef? Maybe I’m missing something but even the redoubtable Snowden isn’t providing any evidence of what he claimed to be able to do.
What was the upshot of the Chinese hacking he solved? China doesn’t do that any more, or China doesn’t get caught anymore? 60 Minutes sent a news team to the address in China that was claimed to be ‘hacking HQ’. The only reason they didn’t go into the building is because they didn’t want to. The only thing stopping them from going inside and buttoning a spy or two was a janitor sweeping up out front. Try that in Fort Detrick …… and we don’t really do any hacking ourselves.
I would hope they know more about the information that was lifted than they ‘seem’ to do about who dunnit. For tracking down that information – and where it went next and how – might be a better clue to the guilty parties.
Sadly we’re still at square two, listening to how convinced the good guys are they they’ve really got it right. After Obama told them to ‘cut it out’, the Russians stopped? Or they haven’t been caught again?
Bottom line:Dazzle us with the metadata. The proof is yet to come.
I can’t believe Sam Biddle actually works for the Intercept. What a hack.
173 comments in and nobody has yet suggested… what if the hackers encrypt the exfiltrated data? Oh, I understand that if the data is coded at the source the NSA can learn what it looks like on the way out … but if it disappears into a TOR node, theoretically, the communication should get hard to trace, and harder with every node that every possibility goes through. With enough coding and re-coding, it ought to be pretty much impossible for the SIGINT to recognize the file in question without access to the airgapped computer it gets decrypted on – though as the Intercept has pointed out, they sure have a lot of sneaky ways to try to do that. But the Russians probably know most of them.
“SI” is Special Intelligence, not “Signals Intelligence” – not confidence inspiring journalism for basic mistakes.
Actually, you’re both wrong. TS/SI is a security clearance. It stands for Top Secret/Sensitive Information.
HTML Dog
The FSB hacked a Yahoo email account? I hear that’s real hard.
Who hasn’t hacked Yahoo mail?
We hack the Russians and they hack us. Now, if one side were innocent of hacking there would be clear grounds for moral outrage. As it is however, both sides are guilty of mutual infringement. Since both sides are basically “dirty,” it is hard to take sides on a cyber issue of this nature.
This must be the first time that Edward Snowden says the opposite of what Glenn Greenwald says, as GG strongly doubts the hacking story.
As for Vladimir Putin, the problem with him isn’t something that he may or may not have done. The problem with him is that he’s a homophobic theocrat.
I wonder how Reagan and his allies would’ve responded thirty years ago had anyone told them that a future president would adore Russia.
He doesn’t doubt it, he’s just not falling in line with the mainstream narrative. He’s been calling them out on their lack if evidence. This article STRENGTHENS his point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dh1zvsTb9_U&t=11s
the founders of the DOI & Constitution were very cognizant of human potential and that power and people go from good to bad. Knowing the design was to prevent the bad from happening, they enacted a BILL OF RIGHTS – a firewall from lawyers and laws gone bad. We are at that time where building good has been replaced by bad things to protect us from other bad things. NEWSFLASH – TWO BADS DONT MAKE A GOOD.
@barabbas-BRILLIANT!
Since the JAR report was mentioned, a non-partisan technical analysis of the data:
https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2016/12/russia-malware-ip-hack/
Overall Conclusion
The IP addresses that DHS provided may have been used for an attack by a state actor like Russia. But they don’t appear to provide any association with Russia. They are probably used by a wide range of other malicious actors, especially the 15% of IP addresses that are Tor exit nodes.
The malware sample is old, widely used and appears to be Ukrainian. It has no apparent relationship with Russian intelligence and it would be an indicator of compromise for any website.
” Great move (by V. Putin) – I always knew he was very smart!”
Obama has turned the US Government into a farce.
He is fighting both Russia and the incoming POTUS.
“He is fighting both Russia and the incoming racist buffoon masquerading as the current POTUS.”
Fixed it
I’m glad that there is a way for information to be revealed about the candidates and the lies they tell, and which are being hidden from the public during an election. If it has to be Wikileaks through the Russians, so be it. Interfering in elections by revealing the truth is to be applauded IMO.
well maybe if the Dumb&Dumbers did not use such notoriously weak operating systems that are always full of holes..
And hire people, at every level, who are cluelessly ready to “Click here and change your password immediately!”
People hire people like themselves . It human nature .
Marketing types hire marketing types .
Engineers will hire engineers .
When the marketeers are put in charge of hiring&firing every type
you wind up with a marketable hiring&firing algorithm .
VIOLA !! WINDOWS 10 !!
Everything is just four clicks away !!! But every click will bring four new options for the next click . Tower of Babel ,,anyone ?
BTW : Didja know that Microsoft’s Windows 10 automatic update sends all you stuff to the cloud and then resets your BIOS config so their OS starts first ?
Try and legally get that changed . This happen even though I have not registered my new setup with HP or Microsoft .
Yes, I did know that. You have two issues.
First, you need to disable “secure boot” in UEFI BIOS:
http://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c04784866
Search for “disable” and make sure you’re in a section that applies to your machine.
You should then be able to select whichever boot options you prefer.
Now, to get back to a local login when you do run Win 10, see here:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-tip-switch-back-to-a-local-account-from-a-microsoft-account/
Of course, the bastards are still spying on you in more ways than we can count, but you can do some things to take back control of the machine you supposedly own, since you paid for it.
Doug ,,
I’m interacting with you over Ubuntu’s Linux OS .
The first thing I did with my new machine was establish a dual boot .
This HP/Microsoft update issue became apparent to me yesterday . I had not gone into Windows until then since I dual booted , which was 4 months ago .
I refuse to go on the net to reach HP ( God only knows what they do at support level ) and had to figure out how to disable the eufi locally . And like I said it’s 4/5 options –click–>4/5 options–click–>4/5options—>click–4/5–click–>
The SOBs have completed eliminated the old F2 at bootup option .
Been there ! Done that . I no longer have the problem . But thanks for the thought . Hang in there Doug . We engineer/math/physics types will have our day !!
At 78 years it becomes a child’s game again . After 3 Corona’s I’m making the bells ring and the lights flash !!
Got it. Jack Daniel’s, in medicinal doses, works well, also.
Doug ,,
I’m an old Gizzer ,, two shots of Jack’s and it’s Beddy Bye Time .
I can do Coronas till the cows come home .
Gizzer
s/b
Geezer
I would say that almost nobody involved in the dissemination of the “Russia hack” story is capable of knowing if the story is true. I know enough about the subject matter to know how complicated it is. Suffice it to say that the only thing that would prove it for me personally would be access to the servers allegedly hacked along with a security expert to help me through the details. There is never going to be any proof given. The federal government will snub their noses at it’s citizens once again. It makes no matter if this effort fails. There are going to be more efforts in the future. Unless/until the trust level of the federal government falls below very some low threshold the beatings will continue. Let’s just hope that trend does continue: http://www.people-press.org/2015/11/23/1-trust-in-government-1958-2015
Are you besmirching the integrity of the United States Government ? Oh for shame !!
Lord ,, what has happened to this country ? Where is that blind allegiance of yore ? Doesn’t the rabble understand that they will wander aimlessly in the existence of reality without guidance ?
SO IT GOES !
” along with a security expert to help me through the details ”
——————————————————————————————
It would therefore be 2nd hand info !!
” Unless/until the trust level of the federal government falls below very some low threshold —–”
—————————————————————————————
The Trust Level is now lower than sea level , that’s why the Pentagon is weaponizing the COPS .
“Signals intelligence could bridge the empirical gap.”
and
“signals intelligence is the type of evidence that the American people are owed from the federal government today, as we contemplate a possible confrontation with Russia for interfering in our most important of democratic processes.”
Just about everything else here is a distraction from making this very basic and very necessary point.
Bad evidence leads to bad decisions.
Matt Taibbi explains that writing murkily about it doesn’t help.
Thanks for the link! I might have missed Matt’s excellent piece if you hadn’t posted it.
Sillyputty’s link is to highly recommended reading, folks:
Something About This Russia Story Stinks
Nearly a decade and a half after the Iraq-WMD faceplant, the American press is again asked to co-sign a dubious intelligence assessment
here’s a link
href= “https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQLv7CG10B4″
re: Something …. Stinks
“I have no problem believing that Vladimir Putin tried to influence the American election. He’s gangster-spook-scum of the lowest order and capable of anything.” -taibbi
next..
Highly irresponsible reporting, no better in its total lack of substantiation of smear claims than the so-called “Pizzagate” movement’s declarations against John Podesta. The West uses Politkovskaya’s assassination propagandistically to claim that since her death “free media” in Russia died with her, yet as Assange himself has recently perceptively indicated: “In Russia, there are many vibrant publications, online blogs, and Kremlin critics such as [Alexey] Navalny are part of that spectrum. There are also newspapers like “Novaya Gazeta”, in which different parts of society in Moscow are permitted to critique each other and it is tolerated, generally, because it isn’t a big TV channel that might have a mass popular effect, its audience is educated people in Moscow. So my interpretation is that in Russia there are competitors to WikiLeaks.”
If this highly politicized aspect of the Western press’s claims regarding Politkovskaya’s death are false, as they almost certainly is, then the logical and Occamic procedure to follow regarding any of their most incendiary claims about Russia is to doubt, doubt, doubt, and never cease to doubt. The Western press have amply demonstrated over the recent years that with regards to Russia’s government and leadership they simply “can do no other.” The Western media have unnamed masters, as surely do those of other non-Western societies: BIddle’s master is an ideology that is bankrupt, his map does match the territory, quite the contrary it wishes and incessantly does epistemic violence to it. His writings are nothing but a meta-newsletter for how the leading “liberal” ideology would have its (chronically incurious) subscribers think for reasons of continued cultural, social, and political affinity. Actual historical truth is a concept they have been thoroughly, indeed reflexively, trained to find repugnant.
I’m trying to find a critique of the article in your comment…
Even if all the NSA material would be released, it can only show info on the the hacks themselves, not on the intention of Putin and co. So the repeated demand to see that info is pointless, if not misleading.
The only conclusive evidence can be either informants and spying on Russian communication which, if exists, making it public would expose these sources to a dangerous, if not complete obliteration.
At this point, it comes down to the question ‘whom do you believe’?
After 8 years of BS, lies, misinformation [and attacks on the American people] from the current administration; this antagonistic American believes Putin. No contest.
ditto
more likely that since israel got a better deal from Trump than 2-faced hillary, the mossad did it
And that’s why we have a Putinesqe president, because for sure Putin, and Trump, has Americans’ best interests at heart.
that’s only true if you believe anonymous intelligence officials quoted in outlets like the washington post or new york times. remember the iraq war?
For me, it’s almost all my life. (I am over 30.) I have not trusted the President since high school, and before that I was naïve.
Putin has turned the table on Obama and his loser Clintonite friends and left them looking like the childish fools they are with their petty sanctions.
Instead of responding in kind to Obama’s petty provocation he is not expelling any US spies and has invited them all with their families to the big New Years’ Eve party at the Kremlin.
Ignoring the weak flailing behavior of the dying Obama/Clintonite regime is a wise position while waiting for real leadership to replace the incompetent.
Putin is a statesman. Besides Rand Paul, Bernie Sanders, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, it is safe to say I trust Putin more than any 2016 candidate- especially Trump and Clinton.
interesting
Yeah, William Binney, one of the architects of the programs came out WEEKS ago and stated this is the reason he and other TOP CIA VETERANS know that the DNC data was LEAKED and not hacked. Little late to the party. And, now the corporate media is using this ‘evidence’ which is not asserted by the CIA or provided (the fact they discuss this does not have consensus among the CIA shows they do not HAVE the tangible proof to conclude the EXACT OPPOSITE of what CIA expert veterans are asserting. I am really DONE with this b.s. We have the DNC sabotaging their own election, colluding with the corporate media to elevate Trump as a candidate as a campaign strategy to blackmail voters, and the corporate media is tripping over themselves to give legitimacy to a fabricated piece of b.s. that should be addressed with – Give us proof or get off the pot! This is pathetic https://consortiumnews.com/2016/12/12/us-intel-vets-dispute-russia-hacking-claims/
Noam Chomsky had it wrong.
The corporate owners are not “Manufacturing Consent,”
they are Manufacturing Hysteria and the herd
(including Mr. Biddle) are rushing through the pre-planned
gateway to more militarized aggression as if that is the
way to escape,
just as the owners want the herd to do.
All of the suppositions are NOT proofs of anything except
how the same old program of manipulating hysteria is central
to the faking U$A.
Innuendo is not proof.
There is ONE proof associated with all of this hysteria.
The fact that the democrats are liars and devious manipulators
of their own supporters,
just like the republicans,
but they are determined that
that FACT must not be allowed to get in the way
of more hysteria for more aggression.
The theory is that some dastardly people influenced the American elections by revealing the truth. The US response? Lie harder!
Anyway, the recent anti-Russian hysteria may be about the US losing in Syria. Billions of dollars sunk, hundreds of thousands of people dead and Assad still hasn’t gone. In fact, Assad has outlasted most Western leaders and in less than a month, Assad will have outlasted Obama. So, the Empire is miffed.
Oh well, everyone’s got an agenda.
Except these guys.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvImTQMkuLo
America hacks, Russia hacks blah blah blah
Honestly, who gives a rats……….oh yet that right, some patriots.
The rule of law long left the shores of America time to get over it and realise we are in the ubend waiting to be flushed down the toilet of history.
greater than Trump’s
s/b
greater than Trumps peccadilloes *
* Is a peccadilloe equal to a war crime ?
‘* Is a peccadilloe equal to a war crime ?’
It doesn’t get better repeating such nonsense –
or we have to ask: Is Tucker Carlson the bigger peccadilloe or Glenn Greenwald?
obviously trump has done nothing yet on the level of clinton’s war crimes. he very well may later, but i’m watching what he does, just like i watched clinton.
Sam Biddle writes –
“Adm. Mike Rogers, the current NSA chief, has already publicly claimed that Russia was behind the attack. “This was a conscious effort by a nation state to attempt to achieve a specific effect,” Rogers said in November, without specifically mentioning Russia.”
Now how did Mike Rogers claim that Russia was behind the attack when he specifically chose not to mention Russia in his claim. Perhaps Biddle can explain.
What Mike Rogers said (if you click on the link provided by Biddle) is this –
“There shouldn’t be any doubts in anybody’s mind: This was not something that was done casually, this was not something that was done by chance, this was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily,” Rogers said at a Wall Street Journal election forum on Tuesday. “This was a conscious effort by a nation state to attempt to achieve a specific effect.”
and he also said
“The host of hackers is “so large and diverse,” Rogers said, that it’s difficult to identify perpetrators.”
So would this mean that Sam Biddle has presented at least one demonstrably false fact in his article.
“But the mystery to me is how his voters turned a blind eye to his many peccadilloes while holding Clinton to a strict standard. ” ——–GeorgeNotBush
______________________________________________________
Can’t you get it through your thick partisan skull that Clinton’s greed and sociopathic psyche resulted in worldwide deaths , poverty , and corruption on a scale that’s magnitudes greater than Trump’s .
A lot of the voters were able to see this and simply voted for The Lesser of Two Evils .
GET OF THAT DEBBIE RAH-RAH-TEAM-TRAIN !!! IT HAS CRASHED !!!
BTW : Tell Mr. Revolution, aka Bernie Sanders, I want my $575 back !!!
greater than Trump’s
s/b
greater than Trump’s peccadilloes
It should hardly require pointing out that Trump has never held public office and, thus, has not yet had the same opportunity that Clinton has had to immiserate, displace and cause the deaths of huge numbers of people. I say we should give Trump some time in office before concluding that he is the lesser of two evils. Based on his public statements/tweets and his cabinet nominees, I see little cause for optimism. His narcissistic, sociopathic traits will come to the fore, sooner rather than later.
Why are we still talking about any Russian hacking?
A ex-UK ambassador has gone public that he was involved in the transfer of the leaked material to Wikileaks.
As an old IT professional with many decades experience I early on spotted this as just another CIA disinformation campaign very much like what they did to feed lying narratives to the people in the 1950’s to ramp up the first Cold War hysteria and spending on expensive but unnecessary munitions.
It is the same old CIA playbook updated to use the internet.
The CIA is engineering another Cold War at minimum. They want the US to have a go at Russia and China before (they think) they are too strong.
This new Cold War will be much more dangerous. The US has renounced a no-first use of nuclear weapons and there is not an operating MAD doctrine to stay the nuclear trigger. I think we are in great danger.
I share the sense that we are in great danger as well. I think your post captures some of the sub-conscious (or not) motivations of the US military industrial complex gone amok in the world. I think they are seemingly trying to provoke a reaction that will provide the justification to go nuclear and play the good guy card at the same time.
Now that ISIS is on the way down it’s about time for our new collective enemy.
Everybody let’s get hopped-up against the Russians !!
Thanks DNC and fellow “Democrats”…
Make Democracy Great Again
“Simply, the public evidence that the Russian government hacked the Democrats isn’t convincing. Too much of what’s been passed off to the public as proof of Kremlin involvement is based on vague clues and educated guesses of what took place.”
Translation to factually correct news –
“Simply, the evidence that the Russian government hacked the Democrats isn’t there. Too much of what’s been passed off to the public as proof of Kremlin involvement is based on vague speculation and unsubstantiated theories of what took place.”
“This hack sounds more or less like a very rough sketch of what private firms like CrowdStrike allege the FSB perpetrated against the DNC this year, and presumably what entities like the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence have, behind closed doors, told President Obama took place.”
The above is nothing more than complete and utter speculation on the part of Sam Biddle.
Sam’s argument goes, Anna Politkovskayawas hacked by the Russians in 2005, therefore this shows that the DNC was hacked by the Russians in 2016.
“TO DATE, THE only public evidence that the Russian government was responsible for hacks of the DNC and key Democratic figures has been circumstantial and far short of conclusive, courtesy of private research firms with a financial stake in such claims.”
Translation to factually correct news –
“TO DATE, THE evidence that the Russian government was responsible for hacks of the DNC and key Democratic figures has been absent.”
good article by Professor Juan Cole:
http://www.juancole.com/2016/12/sanctions-russia-democrats.html
Thank you!
At least an effort of correcting Tucker Carlson.
– and if I may add some comic relief?
Could Snowden check who hacked Glenn Greenwald’s brain?
there is about as much evidence that greenwald’s brain has been hacked as there is that the dnc was hacked by putin. in other words, none.
“If the NSA could use signals intelligence to track a specific hack of an American email account in 2005, it’s not too much to assume that, 10 years later, the agency possesses the same or better capability.”
Well, unless the Russians knew about this and have since taken appropriate countermeasures. Snowden is their guest, after all.
For evidence, here’s the FBI / DHS report:
https://www.us-cert.gov/sites/default/files/publications/JAR_16-20296A_GRIZZLY%20STEPPE-2016-1229.pdf
ROFLMAO
has the contents of this report been review by ANYONE OF ESTABLISHED EXPERIENCE AND COMPETENCE like Oracle, Owasp, Norton, E-eye, Google or https://www.schneier.com/ or, are we stuck with the SFB J’OFFs who perpped WMD on the Dumb&Dumbers club who run the country (into the ground)?
Yeah Barb , except it’s the Newer , Improved , SFB J’OFFS . Still the same friggin product ,,, new label .
Hey Barb ,,, Thanks for the link .
Not to sound crass but did you even read this carefully? This is evidence of nothing. It outlines a few nice flow charts of how known Russian actors carry out spear phishing attacks which are pretty generic and by no means some Russian signature move. Next it lists some atrack fingerprints associated with Russian actors which any malware analyst worth their salt can find and stick in their payload. The remaining 8 pages is threat detection and mitigation.
I appreciate you posting the link but this is evidence of nothing. It’s a 13 page guideline.
John thanks for posting such a civil response. If only everyone here was as polite…
i was being polite.
thank you very much for you post and link.
my words were not critisicism but an addendum.
i am mildly outraged that the dumb&dumbers are presenting the “guideline” – which is all it is – to the American people – it’s an outright swindle.
The GOP establishment got the candidate it didn’t want while the Democratic establishment ended up owned by Clinton, who paid for her tin ear for the plight of the Rust Belt Left Behinds.
But it was a tight race. With 100,000 out of 130,000,000 (. 077%) voters flipping the race, it’s hard to count just how many were swayed by Putin or Comey.
Clinton’s baggage was rich fodder for Trump. He’d have had a much harder time with Bernie.
But the mystery to me is how his voters turned a blind eye to his many pecadillos while holding Clinton to a strict standard. To wit I offer my First Law of US politics:
Rules are only enforced against Democrats.
Corollary: GOP gets a free pass.
A war waged on a contest of pecadillos is an irrelevant distraction. What matters is the policies that the candidates extol and whether they are in the electorate’s perceived interests.
It so happens that the WikiLeaks documents confirmed uncomfortable truths about the corrupt fixing of a political party’s campaign. Such will always be more uncomfortable to an incumbency, particularly one with a sense of entitlement become out of touch with a large portion of the electorate.
The likely source for the leak was a disgruntled Bernie Bro, not the psychologically handy Bear bete noir of the military industrial financial complex. But the deception now entrenched in our politics and the routine mendacity of our ruling elites will be in support of what’s expedient for them in maintaining power.
The billions of dollars that were invested in regime continuation guarantee that Hell hath no fury like a soreloserwoman scorned.
“But the mystery to me is how his voters turned a blind eye to his many pecadillos while holding Clinton to a strict standard. ” –GeorgeNotBush
______________________________________________________
Can’t you get it through your thick partisan skull that Clinton’s greed and sociopathic psyche resulted in worldwide deaths , poverty , and corruption . The results of her actions are magnitudes greater than Trump’s .
A lot of the voters were able to see this and simply voted for The Lesser of Two Evils .
GET OF THAT DEBBIE TRAIN !!!
“And signals intelligence is the type of evidence that the American people are owed from the federal government today, as we contemplate a possible confrontation with Russia for interfering in our most important of democratic processes.”
I absolutely agree! Unfortunately we allow a handful of people to drag us into their madness. Enough!
Thank you for this article, keep up the great work @ The Intercept team.
At least at the Guardian’s “Comment is Futile,” when the mod bunker put someone in pre-mod that person was told. As this thread discuses, here there’s this vague announcement that “some comments” are pre-moderated, while at the same time there is a technical problem delaying many comments, or blocking them altogether. No one knows which is the situation for them at any given time.
I do, however, know of one instance in which the person placed in pre-moderation here was alerted by email: That person posted the email telling them that at their blog. Any others in pre-mod, in addition to this individual, should be given the courtesy of being so advised. (Some behaviors do, of course, justify going straight for a ban.)
Finally, pre-mod destroys one’s ability to synchronously participate in the discussion. It should be reserved only for severe abuse of commenting privileges, ideally after a warning. Any others in pre-mod, in addition to the individual alluded to above, should be given the courtesy of being so advised.
+100
the intercept and greenwalds are a scam and a fraud
Thanks for this fake news.
Anyone whose head isn’t completely buried up their own ass will recognize that this is just Obama’s effort at protecting the Democratic Party from radical restructuring over their gross electoral failure this past election season. Blame it on Russia, sure. . . But if Obama hadn’t been such an ardent advocate of the TPP, maybe Trump wouldn’t have won??? Don’t wanna talk about it!
P.S. Don’t the talking heads on CNN reporting on this “story” look like bug-eyed propaganda monkeys caught in the headlights?
Amen!
The Koch Brothers hacked the election with Crosscheck purges and more, not Russia. Wikileaks denied it was Russia.
Geez !! Semites don’t cheat !!!
Why didn’t NSA find out that Hillary Clinton was leaking all the secrets through her bathroom server? That should have been fairly easy, no? Even good and kindly hacks like Mona will agree.
The NSA folks are a bunch of fake, overrated hacks. We will get rid of most of them soon as this particular hack in White House departs in a few weeks.
Someone’s ignoring the fact the incoming POTUS elected a sharp-right headcase to lead the NSA and all its highly invasive tools.
The Podesta hack was done with a completely traceable technique that any low hacking knowledge kid could have done from the bedroom in his parents house (email phishing).
The DNC hack is a different story. However, note that once malware is “in the wild” as these tools obviously are, they can be disassembled, functionally analyzed and potentially reused by anyone who has a copy of them. Examples of analysis:
Findings from Analysis of DNC Intrusion Malware
http://www.threatgeek.com/2016/06/dnc_update.html
Unit 42 Technical Analysis: Seaduke
http://researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com/2015/07/unit-42-technical-analysis-seaduke/
The problem with claiming “the Russians did it” is that malware code which is obviously “in the wild” or it never would have been found and analyzed in the first place could have been analyzed by anyone with a copy of it to see how it works and, therefore, how to reuse it and could then have easily been used it to frame the Russians. Think about it – WHY would the Russians want to use code that could be so very easily traced back to THEM?
Now, what nation absolutely loves Trump, Trump loves them, but doesn’t at all like Iran or Assad in Syria nor the Russians who are helping them both? Hint: they are widely believed to have worked with the US to develop the Stuxnet malware used to attack Iranian centrifuges. “The Russians did it” line would be heartily endorsed by US pols and neocons not wanting a rapprochement between the US and Russia and by the losers of the election looking to excuse their loss.
Ha, ha, ha, fucking ha.
Obama has announced his sanctions against Russia: expulsion of 35 diplomats claimed to be intelligence operatives, sanctions on GRU and GRU officials (what? no more Christmas cards from the CIA?), etc.
In support of these actions, the following has been released:
I strongly encourage all technically savvy readers to review this 13-page nothingburger and for those who do not feel qualified to judge for themselves to consult friends and associates who are.
In summary: There is not a shred of solid evidence in this silly document to support the claims it and the Obama administration and the MSM, and the Hillarybots and The Intercept have made, supported or advanced.
The title is at least slightly creative, although just as silly.
While Obama’s actions will, no doubt, further strain US-Russian relations, the real target here is Donald Trump and his incoming administration. You may confidently expect that “Trump is a Russian stooge” will take the place of “Obama is a Kenyan Muslim socialist” in the upcoming round of intramural fake wrestling between elements of the One Party with Two Right Wings.
And, while the plebs are distracted by the scripted match between the costumed “opponents” in the ring, the Owners will keep right on laughing — and banking their ever-increasing wealth.
Lots of lovely diagrams, though! Someone worked hard on those.
Already this rubbish PR job is being reported as “bolstering” claims, “making it official”, “declassified intelligence” etc. Sigh.
Probably the same guy who supplied Colin Powell with the IRAQ-WMD cartoon UN Presentation . Who says Disney is dead ?
Yes, the graphics quality has improved significantly over the stuff we saw in the early Snowden material.
I guess it’s easier to hire talented graphics artists than it is to find honest spies and politicians. ;^)
But, hey! “You can fool most of the people most of the time.” (Uncle Doug’s corollary to Lincoln’s — maybe Lincoln’s — famous observation.)
There is nothing specific enough in that document to point to anyone in particular. In fact, the entire thing boils down to them saying, “they were the targets of a phishing campaign.” The paper posits that the campaign was carried out by 2 actors, but gives no details on why they think that, or who they were associated with.
Well, once you get rid of the diagrams and the long table of RIS actors, you end up with a page and a half (maybe 2 pages) of information related to the Russians, and about 10 pages of IT advice from US Intelligence.
I also see a lot of claims, but no “evidence” presented in the report.
Am I missing something?
It’s a good thing that the JAR states that their assessment (it was the Russians) “is supported by technical indicators from the U.S. Intelligence Community, DHS, FBI [DHS + FBI = JAR], the private sector, and other entities”…otherwise, I would’ve had my doubts :/
Thanks for the link. I read the document. Amazing. You are over-stating the case by calling it a nothing burger.
Yeah, well, I didn’t want to show too much disrespect for the valiant protectors of our democracy. ;^(
This OWASP styled “how not to get hacked” description which provides 10+ year old info is the dumb&dumbers basis for concluding the Russians did it?
If that is how the US gov makes decisions, ABANDON SHIP!!
PS. Has Mr Snowden seen this? When he does, he will need an oxygen mask handy as laffing too hard can cause one to suffocate.
You know this piece has pushed me to scream to Trump, “JUST START ARRESSTING AND THEN INCARCERATING MEMBERS OF THE DNC UNDER THE LAWS FOR TERRORISTS, PROSECUTE THEM FOR TREASON OR ANY OTHER LAWS FOR CRIMES AGAINST THE UNITED STATES!”
I want the DNC dirt bags to be executed! I’m so disgusted with them! They are the enemy within! C’mon I challenge anyone everyone lawyers non-lawyers read the Declaration of Independence and think about what the DNC has done. We should be thanking whoever made those emails public because it’s proof of them doing exactly what our government shouldn’t be doing.
Haven’t we had our heads up our asses long enough? Stand up for something!
On it!! Of course it could not be the Russians!
What NSA Rogers says “This (here announcemnts) was a concious effort by a nation state (the USA potusa) to attempt to achieve a specific effect (geting his dem party reelcted bc he owes the CrookedClintons)”.
Like we can get Saddam and Osama, but we cannot get this?
…what? What is the treason that you would charge them under? What have they done?
Does any of the staff of this website visit the comments? Are they embarrassed by the type of reader they have? The comments are a step above Zero Hedge…a very tiny baby step…
(I only say a step above because there are maybe 3% who don’t seem like insane conspiracy theorist nutjobs…but the rest? Like this Phil guy? If this was my site, I’d be embarrassed that this was my reader).
lol, nevermind, this picture and article answer my question:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/12/glenn-greenwald-tucker-carlson-unite-to-dismiss-russian-hacking-allegations.html
Glenn smiling long with “journalist” Tuker Carlson…i guess these nutjobs are who Glenn wants as readers.
there’s still no evidence that the russians hacked the dnc. i don’t see treason by the dnc, just corruption, and now warmongering to distract from the corruption.
quote “What have they done?”unquote
Says one still stuck on page one of Tying Shoes for Dummies.
sheeezusfuckingchrist. I suggest you ask Debbie Wasserman why she quit as Chairperson of the DNC, if they had done “nothing wrong”.
DSW…OK, she quite the DNC. Now tell me, what did she do, or the DNC do, that constitutes treason, which is what I was asking about.
No rush, I know this will be a tough conspiracy theory to spin.
@Kped-I have never seen you on this site before and I have been reading this site since the beginning, so welcome. I don’t believe we will see much of you because you will be shown how much of a complete idiot you are. I will first address your question about treasonous acts by members of the DNC.
“Treason requires overt acts and includes the giving of government security secrets to other countries, even if friendly, when the information could harm American security”-http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Treason
I know a Chinese national, a family member of Jiang Zemin, who was R&D director of a US defense satellite company in the late 1990’s. There is absolutely no way this person could be working in that position unless the White House was involved, no way. Guess who was in the White House during that time? The Clintons! The Clintons allowed the Chinese to know what our satellite capabilities are. Also, I’m confident that this treasonous act(s) wasn’t done in a vacuum. There are more members of the DNC who helped this take place. That doesn’t include anything recent. Nothing recent needs to be used to charge these pieces of un-American shit. I would be just as happy to see members of both party’s at the end of a rope.
Back to the Declaration of Independence. You don’t know what that is do you Kped? Before we get to treason the Declaration of Independence applies to our government. Prove to me you are not a complete idiot and incorporate the Declaration of Independence into your response. This will be interesting…
Russia did not hack the DNC
what the NSA do got is a wild imagination, a fantasy, a need to get paid billions a year for didley squat and the illusion of being impo_tent. Blocking IP’s outside the US is a cakewalk.
That was 2013! The DNC, congress, media and nsa is full of hors crack.
Perhaps the mossad hacked the dnc. After all, Hellary was a losing candydate. Trump has a better deal for israel. Given the track record of the congress and wallstreet media selling America wmd for breakfast lunch and dinner, getting these whores to blame russia is just another job.
Likely, also fragments of code in cyrilc (unrelated to emails) is consistent with Israeli hackers since half of them are Russian Jews Israeli citizen. Also Bibi hates Obama and Hillary and feeling is mutual.
bingo!
Obama intends to leave a mark in history that is due not only to melanin!
Obama intends to leave a mark in history that is due only to melanin!
Have the Russians voted for Trump in these elections?
I don’t think it is polite to invite others onto your cart wagon of confusion.
This is simply embarrassing — or it should be.
Biddle and the TI editors take a totally-unrelated snippet from the Snowden archive to lend credence by implication to the “Russian election hacking” story.
Certainly, this sort of manipulative journalism isn’t as bold and brazen as the Jacobs piece in the Graun, which Glenn properly and impeccably savages here. However, given that it is published by the caretakers and editors of the material Snowden risked so much to share, it may be even more shameless.
Bingo…..unrelated material to muddy and confuse readers into accepting the headline as truth.
so because we think the russkies might have maybe perhaps hacked into an email account a decade ago, we can conclusively state that they absolutely definitely probably might have coulda …
but wait, ths wasn’t a hack. dnc/clinton emails were handed over manually by an insider. podesta fell for the oldest trick in the underoo-wearing, basement-dwelling nigerian prince spearfishing catalog.
but wait. did the russians hack into the dnc and rnc networks? of course they did! just like the chinese and the germans and the israelis and the french intelligence services hack networks. that’s what they do. (except for our guys, of course! truth justice and the american way, y’know!)
Yeah, all Sam Biddle has got is that the NSA claims it knows that the Russians hacked Anna Politkovskaya’s yahoo account in 2005 and that therefore the NSA ‘might’ also know that the Russians hacked the DNC and Podesta in 2016. According to Sam Biddle the NSA is engaged in spying and therefore potentially has access to relevant signals intelligence and should be able to definitively trace the hacks back to Russia.
This still does not establish if the NSA has the ability to use signals intelligence to pin these hacks on Russia. Or whether these were hacks or leaks.
With absolutely nothing, Biddle makes three statements that falsely suggest that some evidence put out in public points towards Russia as the hacker and he then claims that “Signals intelligence could bridge the empirical gap.”
So Biddle uses mere speculation to try and pass off the Russian hacking claim evidence as credible when there is absolutely nothing there to begin with.
If this Hack occurred, it divulged truthful information about the Democrats.
The USA has interfered in many countries elections. Israel and AIPAC routinely interfere in US elections.
How is whistle blowing the truth a bad thing?
It wouldn’t be bad if it was not one sided. If you think the RNC, Mr Mercer and the Koch brothers are lily white, then I have some waterfront property in Iowa to sell to you. But since this was completely one sided and meant to increase the rift in the political process, then it needs to be thoroughly investigated and whoever is responsible needs to be held accountable. My family didn’t help free this country from the tyranny of Britain just to become subject to Russian rule.
A) When it is done by a nation hostile to the United States.
B) When said nation wants a candidate who will be an ally or chump.
C) When they hack both the DNC and RNC servers, but only release information from one side.
D) When that information doesn’t contain any information pertaining to real crimes, just stuff that some people might find greasy.
E) When said hostile nation also uses their troll/bot army to help keep the manufactured scandal alive on social media.
in many respects this outlet is starting to lose creditability on this particular issue. starting from the point of suggesting oblique evidence cannot be conclusive. Especially since the two oblique data points in public domain push the “russia did it” premise into a certainty or at the very least near certainty. under such circumstances throwing mud at the people who provided the data points is an invalid rebuttal unless you can actually demonstrate the motive, bias or even dishonesty. furthermore at this point if your going to dispute the conclusion you must start demonstrating others did it beyond the trump argument of a fat guy in NJ.
last this article sort of smells of a stinky herring because your suggesting that the only valid evidence is evidence that we certainly know will never make it into public domain
“Creditability” while a word, is the wrong word in this context, which makes me think English is not your native tongue … could you be another Russian troll?
Also, dear Comrade, for your education, native English speakers say that something ‘smells fishy’ and not ‘smells of a stinky herring’. Herring, while technically a fish, is normally used in the expression ” a red herring” … which means a red flag or something suspicious… and well ‘red’, well we all know what that means. :)
actually not russian because the syntax of “the people who provided the data points is an invalid rebuttal unless you can actually demonstrate the motive, bias or even dishonesty. ” does not match russian lingo at all.
Did Yahoo mail even use SSL/TLS for mail transport in 2005? I do not remember definitively, but I think the answer is “no”. The same was also true of Google’s Gmail. It wouldn’t be too hard to jmagine that NSA could have had access to copies of emails, particularly those from overseas IP rangez. But this says nothing about NSA accesses inside of Russia. Dive deeper please.
Hi Sam.
Since you mention VIPS, maybe you could quote the part that says it was a leak?
Unless it serves some agenda, I mean.
Would also be interesting to learn precisely how the DNC server and Podesta’s email account are construed as among “our most important of democratic processes.”
Neither of these private services are official functions of government or in any way related to counting votes in precincts, the “democratic process” we were repeatedly assured was not tampered with.
Indeed. John Podesta needs to be immediately put under greater security than the president. Because it seems that the entirety of American democracy depended on whether or not his private emails were exposed. Americans depended on one inside influence peddler and Italian cook to hold up centuries of American democracy. Read his emails and all is lost.
very good. You have identified the ultimate fulcrum.
So The Snowden Archive has come to this.
Well, if you had read them, you’d know of NSA capabilities of tracking sent packets.
If you read the hs/FBI report you’de know it’s utter rubbish. Or the VIPS plea for that matter.
I tune in every now and than, it still feels like the clinton foundation press dept in here. Except for Glenn.
test test, are comments being held
okay where is the longer comment that asked for a distinction or explanation about the two different e-mail addresses that are the subject of this article?
test test
Yeah, I have one being held in queue also. Perhaps the mods are at lunch?
This place is starting to embarrass itself. Seriously. If it continues this way hopefully Glenn abandons this endeavor before his reputation gets tainted with some of the low quality journalism and opinion pieces being published here by a small group among some of The Intercept’s otherwise decent investigative writers/journalists.
They fist had virtually no moderation, and now it’s turning into CiF. Shutting down comments would be better than these extremes of bullshit.
You shoulda seen comments in Jilani’s UN/Israel thread over the Xmas holidays. About 1/3 of comments didn’t post, with no discernible rhyme or reason to it. Then, on the 26th a flood of them were released.
People cannot have fluid, synchronous discussions like this.
Some comments are automatically held for moderation. (This is mentioned in our comments policy.) We check them periodically throughout the day to manually approve them. This process tends to be slower in the evenings, weekends and over the holidays. Thanks for your patience.
Ah, but what is not mentioned, in your “comments policy” (scare quotes because it is — no doubt deliberately — so vague as to be no policy at all) or in your reply to rrheard is even a hint at which comments are “automatically held,” or why they might be.
As for patience, let me assure you, Rubina, that Glenn’s and TI’s most-dedicated and longstanding readers and commenters have no more patience for your arbitrary and apparently incompetent attempt at moderation. So, don’t kid yourself.
You should probably have closed the above reply with, “We’re sorry so many of you are so utterly disgusted with us.”
I don’t know what to think. Rubina tells a good commenter like rr that this is all about some vague “we are holding some comments” (his, mine, yours Doug?) but Glenn just told me many are due to some technical issue.
Whatever. This ongoing inability to properly and reasonably moderate is destroying the platform. Just shut them down if something sensible and predictable for the commenters can’t be managed.
in that case i would recommend that the curse words that keep the articles and posting out of the *safe search* results be made known and possibly automatically abbreviated.
and thanks for the open forum and provocative articles and reports no matter how slanted.
When did you marketing doublespeak aholes change your label from censors to moderators ?
@ Mr. Biddle
I’m not understanding something, and maybe you could explain it as maybe it is unclear to others as well (particularly people like me that only have rudimentary understanding of how internet works at a technical level):
vs.
What does the e-mail address “annapolitkovskaia@yahoo.com” have to do with the e-mail address “annapolitkovskaia@US Provider1″?
Are both provided/hosted (or whatever the proper term is and as a technical matter in physical world) by the same ISP and/or Yahoo’s e-mail service?
I thought @yahoo.com vs. @US Provider1 meant these are two different e-mail “services” like the difference between @yahoo.com vs. @gmail.com?
And if that’s the case, what does the NSA’s speculation that “FSB probably” targeted the e-mail account “annapolitkovskaia@US Provider1″ have to do with someone “knowing” that Ms. Politkovskaia also used the e-mail address annapolitkovskaia@yahoo.com?
Are you simply seeking to confirm through Yahoo whether or not they were aware if some identifiable agency, individual or entity ever tried to attack or target Ms. Politkovskaia’s @yahoo.com account?
Or are you simply arguing that because “US Intelligence agencies [probably the NSA” have the technical capacity to know that “Russian Federal Intelligence Services (probably FSB)” targeted or attacked one or more of Ms. Politkovskaia’s e-mail accounts, that “US Intelligence [probably NSA]” has the capacity to “probably” attribute the DNC hack to some “probable” member of the “RFIS”?
This article is really confusing, at least to me. And I’d really appreciate if you could be clear about what it is you are arguing.
And I’m somewhat concerned when you do things as follows:
Do you know that it is not “proof” of something to phrase it as “X sounds like more or less like Y” and then follow it up with something purely speculative or assumptive but unproved using the word “presumably this is what was said or passed along to Z”. That’s not even “hearsay” it’s speculation on your part.
Moreover,
The very “proof” that the NSA “knew” something or didn’t was, as a function of the “top secret” reference you cited, is that “Russian Federal Intelligence Services (probably FSB)” . . . .
And here’s my problem with that is “Russian Federal Intelligence Services” the same as saying “US Intelligence Services” which could be the name we give to collectively the 17 or so different government agencies that comprise “US intelligence agencies”, and if so, all the “top secret” statement you are referencing is really saying is that “the NSA believes it is probable that the FSB [and without being able to state that definitively with proof] hacked X”.
Again, that is not, and never could be definitive proof that “X agency of the Russian Government/RFIS specifically hacked Y target on such and such a date and time–without “here’s the documentable definitive proof as a technological matter.”
Look either the NSA possess the capacity to definitively identify any intruder’s identity/specific intrusion or it doesn’t—not “probably” not “likely” or not “more likely than not”. It either an or it can’t and every other “speculative probability” of someone being behind some event, is “lesser proof” and should be given “lesser weight” as a function of basic principles of valid “evidence” theory.
Are you willfully this obtuse? “US Provider1″ is the NSA code for a specific ISP. The mention of Yahoo was speculation and identified as such.) Just like the NSA doesn’t refer to AT&T or Verizon by their official names in documents that may get leaked, the NSA didn’t officially name the provider here.
Do you know what plausible deniability is? It is helped by using code words, etc.
And you know this how? Got a citation?
Actually, the practice of law enforcement and intelligence agencies is to arbitrarily assign references like this (Source A, Confidential Informant 3, Country Y, Unindicted Co-conspirator N, Internet Provider X, etc.) on a per-report or indictment or whatever basis.
In other words, Kenneth, it’s very unlikely that what you claim is true, very unlikely that you would or could know if it were true, and quite likely that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Probabilistically speaking I would put your last estimate of this gentleman’s knowledge of the tcp/ip protocol layer at about 99.999999999999 % correct . Well over the 5 sigma point . People that try and crap higher than their ahole are fun to watch ,,No ?
way to go Heard! Take’m apart. What i see with the speculators is lying prosecutors with false and non-existent evidence. Circumstantial conviction based on a contrived profile that relies on the presumption that Russia is an enemy that wants to rob or harm the US, which is more the rantings of a paranoid delusional overprescribed drug patient.
my estimate, given the murder of Seth Rich, the meeting between Trump and Adelson, and the 2-faced Hillary trust issues, is that the mossad and israel had more to gain by sinking Hillary than anyone.
And I might add that Israel , in my estimate , has hacked more US government correspondence than the CIA !!!
yup
fyi the izzy hacksters work out of HAIFA
Interesting read. Maybe a government of the future would have a mechanism to provide the public with technical details to provide empirical evidence for significant claims about national security, but we have an establishment political system that intentionally keeps the people in the dark or misinformed. The chances of seeing authentic proof of Russian complicity from this captured government are is slim to none. Do I think the Russians may have been involved? Yes. Do I think our government may be lying to us about Russian involvement? Yes.
I noticed that Obama, in his Russian sanctions address, the other day was already laying a trail back to this unverified nonsense as a prepositioned excuse for the continuing democrat party defeat in 2018.
A very important point. As long as the democrats cling to the story that it was Putin who defeated them, there will be no possibility for the kind of reform they desperately need if they wish to play an important role in US politics. Smart people treat a defeat as a learning experience, and look back objectively to see what they could have done to produce a different outcome. I see none of that on the part of the democrats, and in fact think it has become something of an American tradition to not learn anything from defeats. It’s why we keep getting into trouble with our military escapades, except in extremely rare cases such as Grenada, where we outnumbered the opposition 10,000 to 1.
The democrats know exactly why they lost, they supported a nondemocratic candidate whose only goalwas to pedestal herself as Potusa with no concern for governing! She had already relinquished her presidency to Obama and he had promised to make her Potusa in exchange.
Now she had lost the chance of even being VP?
The clintonemail.com was a tool to talk to criminals and get money and support for her presidency as she courted the world as SOS.
Only CrookdBill could pull that off– “wanting to do such good” in such an elaborate, contrived and expensive way, when it simply would have been more effective to join up and volunteer at the redcross and some other charities! Having a xpotusa on heir boards would have certainly helped “do good!” Why duplicate all that structure and time, when they are already existing??
But no, the money was for them .
“And signals intelligence is the type of evidence that the American people are owed from the federal government today, as we contemplate a possible confrontation with Russia for interfering in our most important of democratic processes.” – Biddle
? Really ? This is somewhat naive on a number of levels, but then some of us never got beyond 8th grade civics.
? Really ? This is somewhat naive on a number of levels, but then some of us never got beyond 8th grade civics.
Those of us who didn’t stop learning with 8th grad civics can recall all the instances of our intelligence services either getting it wrong or lying as well. Remember the Iraq intelligence? Anyone who lived through that but still bows and scrapes to get in line every time our government makes an assertion is a fool. Or, perhaps, was still in 4th grade (or thereabouts) when that happened.
This is the ideal, not the observed actions. Goal or ideal to be strived for.
Best to let the guilty until proven innocent wave keep washing over the public without any real evidence from the CIA or NSA. By the time that the evidence equivalent to “Saddam’s WMD” either shows up or doesn’t no one will care and the case against Putin will be accepted as God’s truth.
more or less …
Seems like more Russia-did-it.
WTF happened to the DNC other than they backed a losing horse?
We know they torpedoed Bernie. They’ve been exposed as incompetent; Podesta was warned 8 years ago about email security.
It is probably a short list of countries that did not hack the DNC.
Hillary was the most pathetic candidate EVER to run for President. She could not beat a lunatic because of who she is and not because the Russians hacked the DNC just like they did to a journalist who was murdered a year later.
Regardless of your thoughts regarding whether or not it effected the outcome, don’t gloss over the fact that it is absolutely appalling it was attempted and only slightly less appalling that we have yet to be apprised of the evidence.
I hope that you will acknowledge that it is equally appalling that the United States secret services hacked Iranian computer systems and murdered Iranian nuclear scientists.
So let’s say we only get to be appalled once. What should be appalled at? The unproved assertion that the Russians gave Assange Podesta’s emails? Or what the emails showed in terms of content?
Me personally, my appall-ed-ness is over the content. Except for the cheating of Sanders, nothing salacious except that it revealed that Clinton was even more a duplicitous DINO when among other items, it revealed she supported the Cat Food Commission which was sounded rejected by the party base.
the DailyBeast has TI on their cheat sheet.
Hours earlier I posted this hyperbole
Once inoculated It spreads like a toxic bio-film.
The contents of the emails are what is important…the truth…these emails were not what caused voters to cast their votes to who they thought was the lesser disaster…those email are not what caused the Democrats to loose so many seats…Clinton stole the primary from Sanders using many methods,why is that not a concern…the Intercept is spreading pro-corrupt establishment propaganda…is this a way to not get caught up in the “fake-news”/NeoMcCarthyist sweep,by bootlicking that corrupt establishment?
“the Intercept is spreading pro-corrupt establishment propaganda…”
Unless there is something much bigger at play.
I think this is a contest. We are being exposed purposefully to propaganda to see who recognizes it as such. Most importantly, it is the response to propaganda that is being measured.
I am going to try and win this contest.
I expect a full confession from the likes of Biddle, Bob, and Matty, at the conclusion of this game.
Glenn Greenwald please this report is so mediocre. If you gonna let the infiltrators write a piece make sure they stop vilifying the Russian people and Vladimir putin for standing for wat is right while the USA categorically and unilaterally Ben ratified by USA congress aided abetted and funded terrorist groups while cloaked under the term “moderates”” and such colluding is the epitomy without doubt, an attack against humanity and perpetrating criminal regime change while cloaked in democracy clothing. Just take a look at the the USA kosher media delegitimization of narratives of peddling fake news of the USA government with weapon of mass destruction is the epitomy of attacks against humanity. — Alejandro Grace Ararat
Um – “Alejandro” – assuming that you actually read the above article before composing your . . . comment . . . where is it exactly that you see Glenn Greenwald’s name listed as being the author of the foregoing article? Best of luck with your reading comprehension studies.
Yeah, Glenn Greenwald. I like to read pro-Putin propaganda on this site, but this piece, – although it obviously demands the level of public evidence from intelligence agencies which will never be released for legitimate reasons, and thus attacks them, and US state in general, from a comfortable pseudoconcerned position – is not as pro-Putin as I’m used too.
Please make Intercept great again, Glenn. For Russia, Glenn. Thanks.
Mustn’t what is true of NSA be equally true of FSB?
That is, more sophisticated spying techniques imply more sophisticated hacking techniques.
I have neither the knowledge nor the resources to build a rocketship.
However, both the US and Russia governments have the knowledge and resources. I might be a skeptic, but when a rocketship blasts off, that proves the capability of the entity claiming the knowledge and resources to build a rocketship.
But the reverse isn’t true. That is, no rocketship doesn’t prove anything about the knowledge and resources to build a rocketship.
In other words, in this case of suspected Russian hacking, lack of public evidence means nothing. Assurances by rocket scientists (professionals) carries weight.
Although it isn’t right, accusing Russia ” of meddling in foreign elections” is the height of hypocrisy. Chile anyone? Nicaragua? El Salvador? Panama?
How long is that list?
Hmmm. It may be hypocrisy but it isn’t necessarily BAD hypocrisy.
I always thought the NSA would know who hacked in the DNC. Especially in the case of the DNC emails as that appears to be a lot of information going into servers in Russia–which I assume the NSA would notice. However, because Anna Politkovskaya ‘s emails where hacked, that does not constitutes proof she was murdered by the Russian state presumably on the orders of Putin. This would be grounded in the unchallenged assumption that Putin kills (many) media critics on a regular basis. Stephen Cohen has stated that he has spoken to a number of family members of murdered journalists and none of them believe Putin was responsible,
“Stephen Cohen has stated that he has spoken to a number of family members of murdered journalists and none of them believe Putin was responsible,”
Oh, please. Stating that one thinks “Putin” was responsible paves a quick trip to quite a bit of surveillance, if not a disappearance. Every person associated with Russian journalism in any way knows this.
Any accusation against Putin is immediately believed especially if repeated enough times. There is no proof but the accusation seems to be proof it happened, I actually looked at the list of journalists which a website once published which were Putin’s victims. Sorry don’t have link. One thing I did notice is that about a third of them were from Southern Russian where various sorts of terrorist jihadists had operated. And in the short descriptions of them, they all appeared to be secular anti-jihadists. No basis in any skepticism that Putin had them killed.
When one the most used anti-Putin/Russian propaganda techniques is used, and what I call “mind reading to suit the agenda” as in “Every person associated with Russian journalism in any way knows this.””–you know, time to be skeptical, A rather neat trick you should take to nightclubs the uncanny ability to read so many minds.
But I have known several Russian journalists and their fears were not Putin, but local mobsters. One wrote an article exposing some bad health practices in a food processing plant. Within several months he fled to Moscow (Putin central) to avoid being hurt. There was the case of the killing of the editor of Russian edition of Forbes who was killed not long after he drew up a list of the richest Russians. Some of the names on the list were totally unknown. before the exposure. Use your mind reading skills to tell us why the guy might have been killed.
Russia is a very big place and in many ways provincial areas outside St. Petersburg and Moscow are controlled by sorta warlord gangsters. Putin has no control over these warlords and what they do. Now, from what I gather, if they fuck with Putin, then Putin fucks them back. A lot of propaganda against Putin/Russians is a easy because the land and language is remote than say Western Europe. And it can be a very rough place. And the propaganda has been ingrained. When ISIS attacks in Europe they are terrorists and leaders hold hands with each other. When children are killed in mass in Russian, the people doing it are called “rebels” and imply the Russians brought it onto themselves.
It is an incredible assumption that exposed emails must be gained by hacking rather than by an inside job. A thumbdrive, for example, requires physical access and administrative privileges, but no super-high-tech “hacking” skills or specialized equipment.
It would be a dirt simple task for local admins in virtually any private organization with (typically) lax standards.
Indeed, Occam’s Razor suggests that’s the simplest explanation which satisfies all the known facts. Any other prominently promoted “explanation” therefore seems a rather smelly red herring.
Snowden did not “hack” the NSA. He simply secreted a thumbdrive out the front door of one of the most closely controlled security environments on the planet. He gained these contents on his own authority and simply smuggled them out.
Are we really to disregard the possibility of a similar act (and similar motive) to people with inside access in a private, politically driven organization which imposes far more lax standards for access?
Very good points. In most non-commerical revelations, it has been insiders such as Snowden and Manning. The worst security breaches in American history have been done by Americans such as Aldrich and Hanssen. In looking at the situation, I also try to imagine if the charges were true, what would be the implication. And one implication is that the NSA should have seen a good deal data across the network going into Russia. Unless there is some direct proof of that, then yes, the charge is suspect.
We shouldn’t treat “SI” as something magical. It can mean various types of evidence and can be good, bad or indifferent evidence. Obama officials have already hinted that they have intercepts or human intelligence that puts the case beyond doubt. If they do they need to reveal it. If they withhold it because of the need to protect sources and methods it has zero probative value to me. This entire episode stinks to high hell of the politicisation of intelligence.
Another misleadingly titled, content free article by Sam. The attentive reader will note that the e-mail account was at Yahoo, a US firm, and so the NSA had access to it just as they had and have access to all other Yahoo e-mail accounts. That they were able to assess the nature of the attack is small potatoes, and has nothing to do with the DNC hack.
“Attentive reader”? It’s written in the article itself. Did you read it?
i would think that’s how the poster knows that an attentive reader would spot it.
Exactly.
I have to take issue with the statement, “courtesy of private research firms with a financial stake in their claims.” I recall reading something similar to this from Glenn Greenwald, based on the fact that the DNC hired CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, to investigate the hack.
It is the norm for private firms to be hired to investigate hacks; simply put, there is no one else sufficiently qualified or interested. The implication of your statement, I suppose, is that the firm has an incentive to “hype” the hacks so as to sell security products or services to the client. I can assure you, any cybersecurity firm that operates this way does not stay in business very long.
To discount CrowdStrike’s findings because they were hired to investigate casts aspersions on the entire cybersecurity field.
Skepticism is essential for any attribution coming from the cybersecurity field, whether it be the government or the private sector. The latter does have clear commercial incentives to produce certain conclusions – these reports are valuable marketing tools, for example. In addition there is little or no independent oversight of commercial cybersecurity work, and the companies are not truly independent. In this case they had a brief from a political party that was fighting an election and urgently need to delegitimize damaging revelations. Skepticism and caution are very much warranted: I’m not accepting Crowdstrike’s word for it.
and one must wonder why such evidence is not forthcoming considering the level of Putin and Russia bashing that exists from the politicians….