Anyways, I was a little surprised that this hadn’t gotten any attention here on the Dope. Did everyone miss it? Did no one think it was newsworthy or interesting or worth discussing?
It’s an interesting possibliity, and if true, would be a partial relief, in that the Russian effort to interfere with our election weren’t quite as extensive as we thought before.
There might have been a little bit less gasoline on the fire, but the Trump campaign was already so rife with scandals, outrage, headline-popping news, and bizarre-ness that it probably would have made little difference. The media already had more than it could chew.
I already addressed this on another thread but I’ll entertain this again.
First of all, it’s not uncommon to find some experts who challenge an official position. Just because Brennan, Clapper, and other senior experts conclude it was a hack, it’s not surprising that others reach a different conclusion. In any case, I rather doubt that they would have come to this conclusion without at least some credible evidence that the Russians or pro-Russian forces were trying to do the alleged deed. Even so, given the fact that intelligence is quite often far from certain, it’s actually a good thing to have people question intelligence conclusions.
I believe that there was at least some hacking and/or some efforts at penetration of the DNC, either by the Russians themselves or by forces that were sympathetic to their cause, or perhaps just people who really didn’t like the tradition of assertive American foreign policy and thought that the inexperienced and seemingly isolationist Donald Trump might be a welcome change. I’ve also suspected that someone could have leaked the information from within the DNC and Clinton campaign - that would not at all surprise me. It could have been a Trump plant (if you believe in wild conspiracy theories) or it could have been someone who grew disillusioned with the Democratic party and the Clinton campaign and acted on their own. But what does the evidence tell us at this stage? At some point, conspiracy theories have to have legs of evidence; otherwise, they’re just fiction.
It also doesn’t help the skeptics’ argument that Russia clearly had the motive to want to either defeat Hillary (best case scenario) or see her as a fatally weakened president (worst case scenario). Putin never directly criticized Trump during the campaign and the Russian government controlled RT gave Trump generally favorable coverage, particularly when compared to their coverage of Obama/Hillary.
The meeting set up for Trump Jr., Kushner, and Manafort with a Russian-only speaking lawyer with connections to Russian government officials and were promising dirt on Hillary, also hints at Russia’s involvement with the hacks and again underlines their motive. Given Russia’s proliferous hacking in the past, there is no question the have the capabilities.
So, you have a party with the motive, the capability, and there are numerous suspicious meetings and contacts that, while they do not explicitly show any coordination between Trump and Russia, clearly do indicate a much closer relationship than Russia had with Hillary’s campaign. Given this and the U.S. Intelligence agencies’ unanimous assessments based on the actual computer forensic analysis, it’s hard to see what other party would have a similar confluence of suspicious and incriminating factors.
Frankly, listening to to this group is just slightly more respectable than listening to InfoWars.
They don’t believe that Malaysia Airlines flight 17 was shot down by a Russian missile, even though only Russia disagrees. (They have also called the Russian invasion of Ukraine an “engagement,” for some reason.) They don’t believe that Assad has used chemical weapons on his own people. They claimed that Israel was going to attack Iran in August 2010. They said that Bush’s fragile mental state in 2007 was likely to result in war with Iran. They said the 2006 surge of troops to Iraq was leading to an independent Kurdistan.
I just don’t consider them credible, regardless of their past employment.
To be strictly fair, the OP did not express any belief or conviction. He is simply opening a line of conjecture. Proposing an inquiry. Just asking questions.
I’m open to being convinced on this – neither the idea that US intelligence agencies are never wrong, or that Russia must have been behind the DNC hack, are critical to my worldview.
That said – I’m not a forensic researcher, just a lowly web developer, but I know some things about computers. The source of the theory seems to be:
This is gibberish. He had access to metadata that others did not have because of his “Exceptional talent,” but if he got that talent from the FBI, then wouldn’t everyone in the FBI have access to that metadata? And then, it wasn’t the talent, it’s that the had a key (presumably a decryption key?). This whole paragraph is vague and hard to parse, and yet if we’re supposed to accept the theory, then we must accept that some random researcher named “Forensicator” has figured out something that nobody else has, without any details about why or how.
Moving on,
The crux of the the argument is that 22.7 Mb/s transfer rates were impossible in the prehistoric year of 2016. But, while I’m not an expert in transfer speeds, I did have a 35 Mb/s internet connection in college way back in 1998. Right now I have a 24 Mb/s connection in my house, and it’s pretty shitty in the grand scheme of things. Could I get a sustained 22.7 Mb/s from a DNC server? Probably not, but it’s not such a ridiculous number for US internet connections last year (especially corporate or collegiate) that I’m left with no other conclusion but it being a USB 2.0 transfer.
Furthermore, nobody in the article posits the entirely reasonable theory that the Russian hacker was operating from a VPN or a hijacked computer on the east coast. I’m not a hacker, but if I were trying to pull down a bunch of information without getting caught, I might very well do it from a computer with better throughput to my target and then download it from there at my leisure. That might reset the timestamps that Forensicator was looking at, but then, without knowing what these timestamps were or where he got them from, there’s no way to verify if his conclusions are the least bit reasonable.
tl;dr, gonna need more before I’m convinced one way or the other.
Well, he sort of implied that the Nation was reviewing the article for political reasons, as opposed to for the sake of accuracy. Or at least that’s how I read one of his comments.
It may not be true, the grand tale of Russian Hackers — and the left has generally been more sceptical than say liberals or conservatives who hate Trump — but it has become one of those essential lies that history finds necessary to keep. Politics is no place for abstract truth.
There are so many aspects that could eventually be disproved individually, yet even if in toto, the structure will still remain — just as with the birth of a religion, parts can be shown false and as with Cabell’s Manuel, all of the Redeemer’s tales untrue and his companions misremembering, yet the Legend is stone.
With of course the hazy bits unexplained. For True Believers, how did Dread Vlad and Donald communicate their plot ? What exactly assured Vlad that the Trumpists would be his sword and shield in the new world ? When did Vlad lose his mind ?
Of course, even discarding the essential element of the Belief, that Trump conspired with a Foreign Power to Commit Treason – which is kinda the whole point, even if like Mr. Van Jones said, it was a nothingburger — that doesn’t mean the Russians didn’t hack, for their own purposes to stop Hillary.
WikiLeaks have always maintained they were given the stuff by a DNC internal source ( which makes Believers think WikiLeaks are a Russian front ) and Mr. Seymour Hersh has been scathing about the Russian Hacking Conspiracy recently; and now we come, as in an Ambler or Le Carre, to the heart of the question:
What made the candidate, the DNC, and their actions so damn demented they did stuff that would repel voters if made public ?
On top of that, the VIPS theory seems to be that, after discovering some disgruntled staffer had leaked DNC emails to Wikileaks, the DNC created Guccifer 2.0 as a false flag operation to pin the attribution on Russia.
On top of the numerous bits of implausibility to this theory, I’m frankly amazed that anybody inside of the DNC would have the technical knowhow to either pull this off in house or find a team who could do this. This isn’t something political campaigns are typically set up to do.
Well, we know what the intelligence community based its conclusions on, because it told us. It relied on the report by CrowdStrike, the forensic analyst retained by the DNC, because the government’s request to conduct an independent examination of the DNC server was refused. And we know what CrowdStrike’s conclusion was based upon, because it’s in the report. It says that the relevant hack was carried out using a tool called X-Agent, which CrowdStrike says is exclusively in the possession of the GRU. I have no qualifications to assess the reliability of these conclusions, but it’s not a mystery what they are.
CrowdStrike’s conclusion that X-Agent is exclusively in the GRU’s possession has been challenged by some who say that other, anti-Russian hackers have it too. I also cannot assess this claim, nor is it clear whether the intelligence community has considered it. Crowdstrike’s accuracy has been challenged in other contexts as well; earlier this year, it retracted a conclusion that Russian hacking had enabled the destruction of 80% of Ukrainian artillery, settling instead on a revised conclusion of 15%. That’s not evidence as to the DNC hack, but it may figure into credibility about the company’s expertise.
None of which is to say that VIPS’s claim is credible, and conjecture based on one data point not seeming to fit is a hallmark of conspiracy theory.
Remember, we’re talking upload speed. I’ve seen some sources say that average US upload speed reached the twenties in the last year or so, while others say it’s more like 9 MB/s. I assume that an organization like the DNC would have a high-end system, so I agree that 22.7 doesn’t seem ridiculous.