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Everybody involved said it came from inside the DNC.
I recall seeing something similar a little while back – the time stamps showed a rate of file copying that had to be to a local device. If it was done over the Internet, especially internationally, it would have taken far longer to get the files.
It shouldn’t have taken a year for someone to notice this! But kudos to the Nation for publishing it – it’s kind of shocking that they did.
It has struck me as more than mildly amusing that ultimately the “Russian Hack” charge in no small part relies on the widespread knowledge that Hillary herself had a homebrew email server in her own home. The established fact of Hillary’s home server leads the public to believe that the DNC must have been just as negligent by way of correlation of the two. In other words, Hillary’s actual incompetence lends credence to the DNC’s alleged incompetence. As you illustrate above, this is a mistake, but one which suits the DNC’s Russian drum beating all too well.
The first rule of looking for massive, or even minor data loss is to always look for the insider. They have the best access and opportunity. And even if the data was siphoned off remotely, the odds are extraordinarily high that it was still an insider, just one who provided access to the outsiders. But it’s still easier to drop the data you want or need onto a USB stick and walk out the door.
I’m on record here as saying that Russiagate is baloney. They didn’t hack the election, they didn’t fix the election; even Dem bigwig David Axelrod said “Comey and Putin didn’t tell Hillary not to campaign in Wisconsin”.
Having said that, anyone who went on foreign affairs or politics sites is familiar with a certain kind of pro-Russian troll, and it’s clear that many of them do work in what amounts to a disinformation factory that seeks to influence American and western opinion. This is not “hacking the election” but it’s not pure as the driven snow either. Some of the most crackpot trilateralist fantasies out there were tirelessly posted (well, at least during weekday hours in Moscow) by sock puppets pushing the idea that Stanley Kubrick faked the Moon landing and Amazon would fake the 2016 election, or that half the US Senate own sex dolls. This is the sort of thing that is normally dismissed as childish “fun”, and it’s not exactly like the US never sought to influence a foreign election, but it means we can’t 100% say that Russia didn’t at least try to use the internet to mess with us. Let’s not be naive.
But let’s not be morons either. Russiagate, as the press describes it, is baloney.
Are you kidding me about that “Editors’Note”? So, uh, how many intelligence agencies reached this conclusion ,again? Well, maybe only 2: Clapper’s and Comey’s.
Why is Clapper still at large, after testifying under oath that he hadn’t spied on Congress, then having to admit, uh, yeah, we did. I forgot, ok?
Why is Comey stil showing his smug face? Remember his prepared statement for Congress? He didn’t disclose that he himself had leaked a conversation with Trump–he wasn’t gonna let us in on that unless he had to! After 3 weeks of leaving the country in the dark about it.
oh, but hey, the DNC is right. If we can’t trust those guys, who can we trust?
From Scott Adams:
Not “the press”, Gary:
“What’s disturbing to us is experts are telling us Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, and other experts are now saying the Russians are releasing these emails for the purpose of helping Donald Trump,” Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “I don’t think it’s coincidental that these emails were released on the eve of our convention here.”
He said that Sunday, July 24, 2016 and it is a lie. The MSM immediately picked it up and ran with it, added “Donald Trump colluded” to the
storyHoax later.None of this has anything to do with the usual tomfoolery that They Do To Us, and We Do To Them, and Everybody Does To Everybody around election time. I am talking about these liars who say that Hillary Lost because of Russian Interference. I personally believe that Russia would have preferred Hillary, since she is far closer politically to Putin than Trump, but I am not going to go out making up stories about my beliefs.
JcTPatriot, I agree with more than 99% of what you just said, and as Ronald Reagan put it, (at least on this issue) we’re 99 percent allies, not 1 percent opponents. I endorse the whole comment. I’d make a little exception for the last sentence. Putin hated Hillary’s moralistic foreign policy, and he has contempt for failure, which the architects of Libya and the Reset Button represented. Putin is not “left” in any meaningful way–Hillary’s and Mook’s pro-gay rights stands are poison to him–whereas it doesn’t take any sinister thinking to perceive Trump’s willingness to junk establishment views on globalism or nationalism as being welcome to a lot of people, Russian, American, or you name it. That doesn’t say anything bad about Trump, or uniquely opportunistic about Putin.
Why would the DNC have any credibility on this? Remember they did not call in any official investigative law enforcement or counter-intelligence agency. CIA or FBI would not be much better.
Precisely. Even their response to the hoax is fake. Just a vague “U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded” as their only backing up of their claims.
It’s just lies on top of lies on top of lies.
Good post, JcT. Thanks.
It just goes to show how evil those Republicans are; they got a mole inside the Democrat electoral machine who abused his trust.
That is the thing that pisses me off the most.
The “report” (if we can even really call it one), only said “it seems like some [redacted] they would do.” I maintain and have maintained since i read it that everybody involved should be fired for intellectual inadequacy and incompetence. They did a bad job. UNLESS there is something significant in the classified version.
Based upon a total lack of evidence, their “conclusions” lack a sound basis.
From the horses…… mouth
”
Van Jones: Russia is “Nothing burger”
At this point it seems to violate the COC rule on Conspiracy Theories.
(cough) Seth Rich!
I agree, Putin also hates Hillary for her DIRECT interference in Russia’s 2011 parliamentary elections. He was highly insulted by this brazen act of realpolitik stupidity. Other than being Marxists, they have few points of actual agreement.
I didn’t say Putin wants to sleep with Hillary, I said that it seems to me that he would prefer her politics to Trump’s politics, that’s all. So if he wanted to influence the election, it would be to help soft-on-communism Hillary win over hardcore Capitalist Trump.
Some things shouldn’t be mentioned even in passing.
The same Obama appointees/Deep Staters who helped concoct Russiagate “confirmed” without any physical inspection (recall the DNC forbade it) that there was a hack.
I see no reason why Congress, the White House and/or DOJ cannot identify the “intelligence agency” officials who told the DNC they were hacked and how they possibly knew that without any contact with the server or explanation how that volume of data could have been removed within the known time frame.
Putin’s view of the 2016 election was probably not that different from the consensus… It was an inverted primary – both parties selected everyone’s last choice to run. I agree that Putin would have slightly preferred Hillary because she’s soft on communism and corrupt. Trump has been on nearly every side of nearly every issue, predicting what his policies would be, years in advance, problematic for any intelligence service.
This is why I believe the Russians did nearly nothing to interfere in the election – from their viewpoint there wasn’t a candidate that was clearly preferable. IF they had carried out any projects, it would be designed to keep the government divided. So that the Hillary administration would have to be domestically focused, rather than to endure more of Hillary’s “Internationalist Interventionist Excellent Adventures” … They saw that movie in Libya, and didnt need a sequel.
Hillary would have kept the anti-fracking regime in place. She wouldn’t have okayed selling LNG to Eastern Europe. In addition to all that there is the little matter of all the stuff the FSB downloaded from her private server ( a far more lucrative target than DNC emails). Putin figured like everyone else figured that Hillary was a shoo-in.
The forensic analysis upon which this is based is flawed. The Forensicator contends that just under 2GBs of data was moved in a short period of time, based purely upon time stamps on files stored in .rar files. While he might be correct, you have to make a lot of assumptions about how the data was moved to come to that conclusion.
I think it is important to recognize the difference between three notions:
A – The Russians hacked the DNC
B – They did so to affect the outcome of our Presidential election
C – Trump, or someone in the Trump campaign, helped them.
For my part, I am confident that A is true, if for no other reason than they are a prime state actor when it comes to international cybercrime. They are hacking everyone, and everyone within the cybersecurity community knows it.
There is no evidence for B or C, so we can say that it they untrue until there is.
But let’s not blindly suggest that A is not true just because we don’t think B and C are true.
Gosh, that’s about equal to the evidence available to and the level of confidence expressed by the CIA. Now if we could get the NSA to say ‘Yes, we have records of this hack and it was the Russians’, we then would have a legitimate cause for confidence.
We have legitimate cause to worry about state actors involved in cyber crime. China, North Korea, and Russia are the primary offenders. This is well known in the cyber-security community. It is unfortunate that many have trouble separating this from their political opinions about the current President.
As I’ve said many times: however seriously we take the threat of cyber crime, from any source, we don’t take it serious enough.
I agree. I wish we had a definitive statement from the NSA on this specific DNC intrusion.
Maybe. I had a conversation with a local FBI agent (out of Seattle, actually, so reasonably local) and we talked about why firms don’t release information regarding these sorts of attacks. The simple fact is, they don’t want other hackers to know that the methods and tools have been compromised. They want others to use the same techniques so they can be caught. That’s why we will get rudimentary information at most: “Malicious Actor A used Spearphising technique B to accomplish Y.” You add to that how hyperpoliticized this specific issue is (by everyone, not just the media, not just the Trump supports. Everyone), and it’s impossible to tell up from down unless you are willing to set your prejudices aside.
So maybe at some point in time we’ll get a lot more detail. But it probably won’t be for years, when the techniques used have become obsolete and nobody cares about it. Some former NSA muckedy-muck will write a book or something.
Trying to analyze Putin’s actions as “a man on the left” would make no sense. He’s a Game of Thrones thinker who sees America’s continuing dominance as an eternal thorn in Russia’s side. That’s our issue with him, pretty much the only one. He and his supporters are pro-business, comfortable with capitalism (crony capitalism, to be sure…but we’re not exactly simon-pure either), and enthusiastic about private property.
On the social issues: You’re not going to find any affirmative action in today’s Russia. He thinks women have their place–in the kitchen and the boudoir. Putin’s the most prominent anti-gay rights politician in the world. He’s committed to his tacit deal with the Russian Orthodox Church.
He’s no natural ally of Clinton’s. We should leave that theory out of our list of likelihoods.
For my part, Iam completely certain that A is untrue. The data that leaked out of the DNC was a traditional whistle-blower leak not a hack. IF A is not true, then B and C are moot. But to humor you, B – I dont think Putin (or the Russian state) had a clear preference in the election, as I said earlier I think they viewed the election as a mud war between 2 undesirable candidates. Other than being Marxists, Clinton and Putin have few points of agreement, and Putin is known to carry grudges, He hates Clinton for her OVERT interference in Russia’s 2011 election. (C) After a year of looking there is no evidence of collusion and only a few meetings… I wonder how many meetings the Clinton campaign had with foreigners? or Obama/McCain in 2008? How many meetings are normal? I think Trump had fewer than average meetings, as most people thought he would loose nobody really tried to lobby him.
The media is playing a game of “6 Degrees of Separation” with Russia. If you look hard enough you can tie any presidential campaign or party to (almost) any country in the world. (Iran and NKorea maybe the exceptions)
Spin, they don’t want anybody to know their methods because gubmint employees are sensitive about being laughed at. Their methodology was that they asked Crowdstrike. No government investigator has examined the DNC servers. Crowdstrike maintains that they have detected “malware” that is the hallmark of Cozy Bear/Fancy Bear/Papa Bear/Mama Bear and Baby Bear. (No word on international criminal mastermind “Goldilocks” yet.) Call these weasels in and ask them — under oath — when they first heard of Imran Awan, and whether his proximity to so many computers being used by Democratic members of Congress might just maybe affect their confidence in Russian hackers being behind all this.