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Dec 20, 2018 | disobedientmedia.com
The CrowdStrike Connection
CrowdStrike is a high-profile cybersecurity firm that worked with the DNC (Democratic National Committee) in 2016 and was called in due to a suspected breach. However, CrowdStrike appears to have first started working with the DNC approximately five weeks prior to this and approximately just five days after John Podesta (Hillary Clinton's campaign manager for the 2016 election) had his Gmail account phished. Nothing was mentioned about this until after the five weeks had passed when the DNC published a press release stating that CrowdStrike had been at the DNC throughout that period to investigate the NGP-VAN issues (that had occurred three months before Podesta was phished).
Upon conclusion of those five weeks, CrowdStrike was immediately called back in to investigate a suspected breach. CrowdStrike's software was already installed on the DNC network when the DNC emails were acquired but CrowdStrike failed to prevent the emails from being acquired and didn't publish logs or incident-specific evidence of the acquisition event either, the latter of which is odd considering what their product's features were advertised to be even if they were just running it in a monitoring capacity .
There are additional questions to be asked about why Guccifer 2.0 went to the effort he did to fabricate Russian-themed evidence (discovered in 2017 and 2018 but largely ignored by the press), bizarrely supporting some of the most significant claims made by CrowdStrike just one day earlier.
If Mueller's attribution of Guccifer 2.0 to the GRU is correct, why would the GRU want to fabricate evidence to support CrowdStrike's allegations against Russia when another one of CrowdStrike's directors conceded they had no hard evidence at the time? This issue has not yet been adequately explained.
All of these oddities are relevant because one of the two CrowdStrike executives that had helped push the story to the press was a former department director at the FBI serving under Robert Mueller , and, judging on the fact they were dining together at an executive retreat after that individual had retired , it would seem that they are friends too.
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Dec 20, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
Elizabeth Lea Vos Tue, 12/18/2018 - 22:43 45 SHARESEditorial Note: The Forensicator recently published a report, titled " Guccifer 2 Returns To The East Coast ." Forensicator provided the following introduction to his latest findings, reproduced here with the permission of the author.
In this post, we announce a new finding that confirms our previous work and is the basis for an update that we recently made to Guccifer 2's Russian Breadcrumbs . In our original publication of that report, we posited that there were indications of a GMT+4 timezone offset (legacy Moscow DST) in a batch of files that Guccifer 2 posted on July 6, 2016. At the time, we viewed that as a "Russian breadcrumb" that Guccifer 2 intentionally planted.
Now, based on new information, we have revised that conclusion: The timezone offset was in fact GMT-4 (US Eastern DST) . Here, we will describe how we arrived at this new, surprising conclusion and relate it to our prior work.
A month/so after publication, Stephen McIntyre ( @ClimateAudit ) replicated our analysis. He ran a few experiments and found an error in our original conclusion.
We mistakenly interpreted the last modified time that LibreOffice wrote as "2015-08-25T23:07:00Z" as a GMT time value. Typically, the trailing "Z" means " Zulu Time ", but in this case, LibreOffice incorrectly added the "Z". McIntyre's tests confirm that LibreOffice records the "last modified" time as local time (not GMT). The following section describes the method that we used to determine the timezone offset in force when the document was saved.
LibreOffice Leaks the Time Zone Offset in Force when a Document was Last Written
Modern Microsoft Office documents are generally a collection of XML files and image files. This collection of files is packaged as a Zip file. LibreOffice can save documents in a Microsoft Office compatible format, but its file format differs in two important details: (1) the GMT time that the file was saved is recorded in the Zip file components that make up the final document and (2) the document internal last saved time is recorded as local time (unlike Microsoft Word, which records it as a GMT [UTC] value).
If we open up a document saved by Microsoft Office using the modern Office file format ( .docx or .xlsx ) as a Zip file, we see something like the following.
LibreOffice , as shown below, will record the GMT time that the document components were saved. This time will display as the same value independent of the time zone in force when the Zip file metadata is viewed.
For documents saved by LibreOffice we can compare the local "last saved" time recorded in the document's properties with the GMT time value recorded inside the document (when viewed as a Zip file). We demonstrate this derivation using the file named potus-briefing-05-18-16_as-edits.docx that Guccifer 2 changed using LibreOffice and then uploaded to his blog site on July 6, 2016 (along with several other files).
Above, we calculate a time zone offset of GMT-4 (EDT) was in force, by subtracting the last saved time expressed in GMT (2016-07-06 17:10:58) from the last saved time expressed as local time (2016-07-06 13:10:57).
We've Been Here Before
The Eastern timezone setting found in Guccifer 2's documents published on July 6, 2016 is significant, because as we showed in Guccifer 2.0 NGP/Van Metadata Analysis , Guccifer 2 was likely on the East Coast the previous day, when he collected the DNC-related files found in the ngpvan.7z Zip file. Also, recall that Guccifer 2 was likely on the East Coast a couple of months later on September 1, 2016 when he built the final ngpvan.7z file.
We believe that in all three cases Guccifer 2 was unlikely to anticipate that this Eastern timezone setting could be derived from the metadata of the documents that he published. However, one vocal critic with significant media reach objected to our East Coast finding as it related to our analysis of the ngpvan .7z file. This critic concluded instead that Guccifer 2 deliberately planted that clue to implicate a DNC worker who would die under suspicious circumstances a few days later on July 10, 2016.
Further, this critic accused the Forensicator (and Adam Carter ) of using this finding to amplify the impact of Forensicator's report in an effort to spread disinformation. He implied that Forensicator's report was supplied by Russian operatives via a so-called "tip-off file." The Forensicator addresses those baseless criticisms and accusations in The Campbell Conspiracy .
Now, we have this additional East Coast indication, which appears just one day after the ngpvan.7z files were collected. This new East Coast indication is found in a completely different group of files that Guccifer 2 published on his blog site. Further, this East Coast finding has its own unique and equally unlikely method of derivation.
If we apply our critic's logic, what do we now conclude? That Guccifer 2 also deliberately planted this new East Coast indication? To what end? We wonder: Will this new evidence compel our out-spoken critic to retract his unsubstantiated claims and accusations?
Closing Thought: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. ~ Ian Fleming
tion , 12 hours ago link
Bastiat , 12 hours ago linkIt is curious how those running vpn's often don't bother appropriately setting their device time zones.
Regarding the closing thought, that was my thinking regarding the Byzantine Vegetable 'ally' at /qr in a non-American time zone who repeatedly attacked me.
Perhaps I have shared some harsh words with you and William, but I do sincerely care for your well being and my appreciation for the work you both have done remains. The Optics have been understandably difficult to swallow for many, but I hope that in your own time, you both will be willing to take another look at Q.
Q is Stephen Miller, and Q+ is POTUS.
Best Wishes to you both.
Q's tion
Etymology , 21 hours ago linkInteresting to see Fleming -- as time goes on, it is pretty clear that he was telling us a few things about how power really works--psychopathic oligarchs with private wetworkers. Of course now we have governments competing to hire the same mercenaries -- and the uniformed mercenaries working oligarchs with government complicity.
boattrash , 13 hours ago linkIn short, not a Hack by "Ruski's" a leak by an insider due to the impossibility to data transfer rates.
When will we see a rational investigation and prosecution of these criminals?
" When will we see a rational investigation and prosecution of these criminals? "
40 years from now, when **** gets declassified, and the Globalists up in Yanktown have accomplished their mission of destruction.
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Nov 25, 2018 | www.antiwar.com
Twit:Adam Schiff doesn't believe DHS saying ISIS or MS-13 are real threats but he DOES believe a Russian Oligarch who told him Medvedev was followed everywhere he went by a man called "The Pillow Carrier" who's job was to smother Medvedev in his sleep if he made Putin mad.
(hat tip to Rosie Memos @almostjingo for tweeting)
Rep. Adam Schiff, who takes the chair of the House Intelligence Committee in January, has a nose for hot tips about his bete noire, Russian President Vladimir Putin, as well as a strong bent toward credulousness. On October 23, 2018, Schiff solemnly told a young audience at the old Hillary Clinton/John Podesta Center for American Progress Action Fund that he had been told that Putin has one of his henchmen follow Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev around with a pillow to smother him in his sleep if he ever gets out of line.
No, the video contains no hint that Schiff was speaking tongue in cheek. Perhaps worse, no one in the audience laughed (where do they recruit such credulous young folks?).
Be sure to scroll down for images of the pillow-carrier caught in action. :-)) He apparently has no reason to fear "identification," since, according to Schiff's source, "Medvedev is nothing."
On a more serious note, it was 22 months ago that I challenged Schiff as the "Russian hacking" accusations were proliferating. In the 2-minute clip , Schiff recites language highly relevant today as the Deep State tries desperately to brand Julian Assange a "known participant" – that is, an active conspirator with Russia, and not merely Russia's "useful idiot."
Some of our "Justice" officials today apparently think they can detour around 1st amendment hurdles if they can dredge up, or manufacture, "evidence" enabling them to use the Espionage Act of 1917 against Assange.THAT'S BOGUS! Ray McGovern PWNS Congressman Schiff On Russian Hacking Fairy Tale - YouTube
At think tanks like the Center for American Progress, hope springs eternal. Impatience too. As poor Schiff knows, Mueller has been at it for a year and a half – and FBI super-sleuth Peter Strzok for a half-year before that, after which he complained to FBI lawyer/girlfriend Lisa Page that "there is no big there there." But when Schiff takes the chair in January, God knows what they'll find!
Meanwhile back at the ranch, President Donald Trump and his chief advisers give no indication they are aware of what to expect, if Trump continues to allow the Justice Department to slow-walk his order to declassify crucial documents that could – in a lawful world – land ex-FBI Director James Comey, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, former CIA Director John Brennan, et al. behind bars.
The stakes are very high. By all indications Trump is afraid – and not only of pillows.
Those wishing more background on the rudderless Schiff may wish to click on:
- http://raymcgovern.com/2017/01/25/ray-was-face-to-face-with-adam-schiff-ranking-member-house-intelligence-committee-this-morning-january-25-2017/
- http://raymcgovern.com/2017/01/31/thats-bogus-ray-mcgovern-pwns-congressman-schiff-on-russian-hacking-fairy-tale/
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President's Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). William Binney worked for NSA for 36 years, retiring in 2001 as the technical director of world military and geopolitical analysis and reporting; he created many of the collection systems still used by NSA. Reprinted with permission from Consortium News .
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Nov 07, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
Zanon , Nov 7, 2018 7:06:33 AM | link
Daniel Good
Hopefully the Democrats will be intelligent enough to stop the Russian collusion investigationAdam Schiff: Russia 'Collusion' Investigation Top Priority If Democrats Win
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/11/06/adam-schiff-russia-collusion-investigation-top-priority-if-democrats-win/Erelis , Nov 7, 2018 7:57:01 AM | link
The House dems will create even more severe sanction bills against the Russians looking to gain politically by making Trump and gopers look pro-Putin and anti-patriotic, plus serving business interests in pushing out euro and Russian competitors. Domestically House dems may work with gopers to cut social security and medicare much as Obama tried to do. Russian xenophobia will go through the proverbial roof.
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Aug 17, 2018 | consortiumnews.com
Paul N August 14, 2018 at 2:36 pm
I don't believe the Russians did this. I think there are perhaps millions of people in the US capable of carrying out this action and many more with motive. Furthermore, if they did, I am happy that the information was made available so I can't see why I would care.
That said, I am unconvinced by this evidence. I am quite familiar with file systems on different operating systems and I would at least need to know what device we are talking about here. Did it come from Assange? Why doesn't somebody say so? What sort of device is it? The simple fact that it was copied from a computer doesn't prove that the computer was the DNC server. It might have been copied from Putin's iMac. I believe in one reading the writer acknowledged that the dates on the drive could be manipulated and I am certain that this is true. While this may still leave it above the level of evidence that the FBI or "intelligence" agencies have presented (or even claimed to have) it is not conclusive. Reply
GM , August 14, 2018 at 5:10 pm
GM , August 14, 2018 at 5:12 pmWhat is definitely conclusive is the Gucci 2 entity forged the inclusion of Russian fingerprints in the leaked version of the documents by pasting it into a Russian language Word template. With 70 years of experience in espionage, there is no way Russian spy agencies are that sloppy and moreover, and if they were it would be absolutely unprecedented.
Furthermore, I have no reason to disbelieve Craig Murray that the docs were handed to him directly and transferred by him to Wikileaks. Quite the contrary, in fact, since his reputation would undoubtedly be irreconcilably demolished for all time if the Russiagaters ever came up with hard proof to support their conspiracy theory.
j. D. D. , August 14, 2018 at 2:21 pmPlease forgive all the typos, posted on my little bitty phone :)
paul g. , August 14, 2018 at 3:03 pmThe crucial premise of the ongoing British-instigated coup against President Trump and the chief legal ground for Robert Mueller's operation against the President, is the claim that the Russians hacked the emails of the DNC and, John Podesta, and provided the results to WikiLeaks which published them. The authenticity of such emails showing Hillary Clinton to be a craven puppet of Wall Street who had cheated Bernie Sanders of the nomination were never disputed, by Clinton, or anyone else.
Nor has the central conclusion of William Binnery's forensic analysis: that Gucifer 2.0 was a fabrication, and that the DNC emails were downloaded, not hacked by Russia.
Furthermore, the only people who really know where and by whom the download occurred are Julian Assange, whose life is now in peril, and former British Ambassador Craig Murray.
Were Assange be allowed to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee later this month, the lid could be blown off the entire sordid operation.
David G , August 15, 2018 at 8:27 amCraig stated he was merely a go between, who was given the data in the woods by American University by probably another go between. Lots of cut outs here but the data was transferred physically by thumb drive(s).
Bob In Portland , August 14, 2018 at 1:25 pm"The crucial premise is the claim that the Russians hacked the emails of the DNC and, John Podesta, and provided the results to WikiLeaks which published them."
Don't forget about the Facebook puppy videos. https://consortiumnews.com/2017/10/04/the-mystery-of-the-russia-gate-puppies/
GM , August 14, 2018 at 5:16 pmI would like to call attention to a little slice of history of US the destabilization of Eastern Europe and the USSR that would help to explain what is happening today.
From before the CIA's formation the US intelligence activities have been the province of the Republican Party (there are plenty of exceptions, but please follow). Allen Dulles and his ilk were friends with and shared goals with German industrialists long before World War II. These relationships continued through WWII and afterwards. The CIA has functioned as an international coal and iron police, overthrowing governments around the world that have stood in the way of corporate profits.
Russ Bellant's book, Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party, points to the political relationship between the Republican Party and fascists around the world. You can read a short article by Bellant here: https://archive.org/details/CovertActionInformationBulletinNo35TheCIAInEasternEurope
This edition of Covert Action Information Bulletin, in 1990, happened just before a shift in Washington. Almost all of the operations run by our government to destabilize Eastern Europe and the USSR in 1990 were organized by the political right and run by people such as Paul Weyrich. But the nineties showed a rise in Democratic activity in these settings. I would guess that a mental image of this would be our then-First Lady lying about dodging bullets on an airstrip during the destruction of Yugoslavia. It marked the successful CIA takeover of the Democratic Party.
The 2016 Russiagate hysteria has been an intelligence operation which has been by all measures successful. I presumed initially that the scam was done to put Hillary into the White House, but now wonder if having Trump as President was part of the long-term strategy.
Please note that the DNC backed over fifty new candidates for Congress who have intelligence backgrounds. How do you think they will vote for the coming war resolution against Russia?
Diana Lee , August 14, 2018 at 8:52 pmNot sure about the theory of installing Trump in the WH is part of a long term strategy of the deep state, but the latter seems to be adapting to the disruption quite well.
michael , August 15, 2018 at 6:33 amAdditional info: Stephen Kinzer's "The Brothers" which documents the Dulles brother's creation of the Cold War mentality and activities.
Shouldn't we add Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski.jeff montanye , August 17, 2018 at 7:45 amCiting a book from almost 30 years ago that implicated ONLY the Republicans in the CIAs machinations ignores LBJ and the CIA's involvement in Vietnam and possibly in the JFK assassination. Later, Carter was the only Democrat President who may or may not have been heavily involved with the CIA. The Clintons were likely involved with the CIA early on in their Mena, Arkansas drug-smuggling schemes, and the CIA was definitely closely involved in their presidential anti-Slavic foreign policy. The Clintons' neoliberal agenda fit well with the older neocons and consolidated the Duopoly support for the crazed think tank ideas in DC.
Dan Kuhn , August 14, 2018 at 1:19 pmall perhaps true, but the cia, etc. have terribly neglected their republican base (ftr: registered democrat, sanders and trump voter) and it is baying at their heels, drool swinging from gnashing fangs. that is a political change as profound and radical as anything i observed around the tear gas and batons of the sixties.
GM , August 14, 2018 at 5:19 pm"They have passed the point of no return; there is no walking it back now. If it fails heads will roll, but most importantly these trusted institutions will have flushed their last vestiges of credibility down the drain. Then what?"
Then nothing. It puts one mind of the comment made by one of the Robber Barons when they were caught with their hands in the cookie jar. His comment " All that was lost was honour" In the present mess even if eventually it all comes to light no one is going to be held answerable. No one is going to jail. Truth does not matter. The propaganda is what matters. if it is proven wrong it is merely swept under the rug. With the short attention spans of Americans it would be forgotten in a New York Minute.
David G , August 15, 2018 at 8:29 amPerhaps this explains the need for the likely false flag poison attack in Britain and the fake Douma nerve gas attack. Russiagate hasn't really been panning out so well and too much info has been emerging to challenge the narrative.
Peter de Klerk , August 14, 2018 at 1:06 pmI fully agree.
AnthraxSleuth , August 14, 2018 at 1:27 pmIf Russian hacking is a hoax, why has it not been exposed by all the Trump appointed intelligence and FBI heads? Trump's people could shut it down with a public single statement. Y'all are deep into a conspiracy theory that makes no sense.
Peter de Klerk , August 14, 2018 at 2:19 pmPffft!
It was shown to be a hoax by Clinton's own campaign staff in their book released after the election titled "shattered".
"Within 24 hours of her concession speech, [campaign chair John Podesta and manager Robby Mook] assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn't entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument."
The plan, according to the book, was to push journalists to cover how "Russian hacking was the major unreported story of the campaign," and it succeeded to a fare-thee-well. After the election, coverage of the Russian "collusion" story was relentless, and it helped pressure investigations and hearings on Capitol Hill and even the naming of a special counsel, which in turn has triggered virtually nonstop coverage.
https://nypost.com/2017/10/26/how-team-hillary-played-the-press-for-fools-on-russia/
Guess the only conspiracy theororist here is you. Goebbels would be so proud. You drank the kool-aid bruh!
AnthraxSleuth , August 14, 2018 at 4:28 pmMy comment applies equally well to your response. Why doesn't Nunes, Pompeo, or Coates, etc ever say anything about these theories?
Peter de Klerk , August 14, 2018 at 6:18 pmIt's no longer a theory when the conspirators confess to it in their own writing. Which I demonstrated to you in the previous post.
jdd , August 14, 2018 at 2:30 pmThis very slanted article amplifies a few post-election statements. I'm sure Podesta and Mook wanted to play this up. Some of that was sour grapes but most people are inclined to think it was also true. These guys controlling most media outlets and most of the intelligence community seems absurd to me. But I guess we all believe what we want to believe now.
jeff montanye , August 17, 2018 at 7:54 amOne suspects that the President has revealed far less than he knows, perhaps wary of being accused of "obstruction" by Mueller in concert with the controlled media. He actually requested that William Binney present his analysis to then CIA Director Pompeo, who has since sat on it.
But actually, to your point, the reverse is true. If the DNC and Podesta were hacked by Russians, the NSA would have been able to demonstrate that fact through evidentiary proof, a point made repeatedly by Binney.
No such proof was or has ever been offered. Instead the main document presented to the American public was the January 6, 2017 "assessment" by analysts hand-picked by John Brennan, who has played a key role in the illegal operation against President Trump.
Herman , August 14, 2018 at 1:03 pmAnd Donald Trump has more training in show business than most politicians or even internet commenters. I suspect there is a fall premiere of quite an extravaganza leading up to the midterm elections.
Modawg , August 14, 2018 at 3:28 pmRead half the most intelligent commentary and had to quick. I was struck by one comment particularly, why not ask Assange about the leak. Too simple but too much to ask, I guess. Keeping him incommunicado certainly serves the leaders of the lynch mob and thanks goes to the new Ecuadorian President. He was asked to shut the guy up and he did.
alley cat , August 14, 2018 at 4:44 pmI think he has been asked and has politely refused to reveal. But his innuendo is that it was from inside the US and definitely not the Russkies.
Andy Wilcoxson , August 14, 2018 at 12:36 pmHerman, Assange has been asked about the identity of the leaker and replied that he couldn't comment because Wikileaks has a strict policy of maintaining sources' confidentiality. No potential source would ever trust Assange if he violated that policy. Instead, Assange offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Seth Richards' murderer. So this was his way of answering the question indirectly.
A Solomonic solution that is technically not a violation of confidentiality
Desert Dave , August 14, 2018 at 6:09 pmCan I play devil's advocate and ask a question. Can we rule out the possibility that a hacker in Russia, China, or wherever had remote control of a computer in the United States that they used to hack the DNC?
49.1 megabytes per second is almost 400 mbps, which is a very fast transfer speed, but there were one gigabit (1000 mbps) connections available in several US markets when these e-mails were stolen. You might not have been able to transfer the files directly from Washington D.C. to Russia at those speeds, but you certainly could have transferred them between computers within the United States at those speeds using gigabit internet connections.
Is there something I'm missing? How does the file transfer speed prove this was a USB download and not a hack when gigabit internet connections existed that could have accommodated those transfer speeds -- maybe not directly to Russia or Europe, but certainly to another US-based computer that foreign hackers may have have remotely controlled.
AnthraxSleuth , August 15, 2018 at 1:11 amActually a byte is 10 bits total because there is overhead (start and stop bits). So 49.1 MBps is about 491 Mbps. The question of whether the DNC server was attached to a network that fast would be easy to answer, if the FBI or anybody else wanted to check.
A byte is 8 bits.
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Jul 31, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com
The Comey, Brennan, Mueller claim - indeed a central one upon which the recent indictment rests- that Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian State agent that hacked the DNC- was discredited and put to rest last year by the forensics conducted by Bill Binney and his colleagues. The Guccifer 2.0 metadata was analyzed for its transmission speed, and based on the internet speeds to and from numerous test locations abroad and in the U.S., it was determined to have been impossible for the so-called Guccifer 2.0 to have hacked the DNC computers over the internet. The transmission speed however did correspond to the speed of the transfer to a thumb drive. Additionally, it was found that the data had been manipulated and split into two parts to simulate a July and a September transfer, when in fact the parts merge perfectly as single file, and where, according to Binney, the probability of the split being a coincidence would be 100 to the 50th power.mlnw -> mlnw , 11 days agoAs for the crude trace fingerprints (e.g. the referencing of Dzerzinsky), one of the Wikileaks data dumps (Vault 7 Marble) during a period when Assange was negotiating with the Administration - there were two at the time (Vault 7 Marble and Vault 7 Grasshopper), the release of which apparently enraged Mike Pompeo- was designed to obfuscate, fabricate and frame countries such as Russia, Iran or North Korea by pretending to be the target country, including in the use of target's alphabet and language.
VIPs has written numerous articles on this in Consortium News. See also the report by Patrick Lawrence Smith in The Nation at: https://www.thenation.com/a... . (It was apparently so hot at the time- and disputed by several other VIPs members- that The Nation sought an independent assessment by third party, though those comments were easily addressed and dismissed in seriatim by Binney in an annex to the article.)
Binney has explained his forensic analysis and conclusions at numerous forums, and in a sit-down with Secretary Pompeo in October, 2017- though Mueller, the FBI, and mainstream and some of the alternative press seem either deaf, dumb and blind to it all, or interested in discrediting the study. The irony is, I'd venture to guess, that Binney, with his 40 years of experience, including as Technical Director and technical guru at the NSA, is, even in retirement, more sophisticated in these matters than any one at the Agency, or the FBI, or CIA, or certainly, the Congressional Intelligence Committees. So, it is astounding that any or all of them could have, but did not, invite him to testify as an expert.
Moreover, the NSA has a record of every transmission, and also would have it on backup files. And, the FBI has been sitting on Seth Rich's computer and his communications with Wikileaks, and presumably has a report that it has not released. And of course, as Trump asked in his press conference, where's the DNC server, any or all of which would put this question to rest.
A recent interview with Binney can be found at:
Play HideThe last clause of the first paragraph should have said: "according to Binney, the probability of the split being a coincidence would be one over 100 to the 50th power
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Jul 31, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com
If you look at the 'Lawfare' blog, in which a key figure is James Comey's crony Benjamin Wittes, you will find a long piece published last Friday, entitled 'Russia Indictment 2.0: What to Make of Mueller's Hacking Indictment.'
Among the authors, in addition to Wittes himself, is the sometime GCHQ employee Matt Tait. It appears that the former head of that organisation, the Blairite 'trusty' Robert Hannigan, who must know where a good few skeletons are buried, is a figure of some moment in the conspiracy.
(See https://www.lawfareblog.com... .)
It was Matt Tait who, using the 'Twitter' handle @pwnallthethings, identified the name and patronymic of Dzerzhinsky in the 'metadata' of the 'Guccifer 2.0' material on 15 June 2016, the day after Ellen Nakashima first disseminated the BS from 'CrowdStrike' in the 'WP.'
The story was picked up the following day in a report on the 'Ars Technica' site, and Tait's own account appeared on the 'Lawfare' site, to which he has been a regular contributor, on 28 July.
(See https://arstechnica.com/inf... ; https://www.lawfareblog.com... .)
According to the CV provided in conjunction with the new article:
'Matt Tait is a senior cybersecurity fellow at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin. Previously he was CEO of Capital Alpha Security, a consultancy in the UK, worked at Google Project Zero, was a principal security consultant for iSEC Partners, and NGS Secure, and worked as an information security specialist for GCHQ.'
How does the objective truth get disclosed in an environment of extreme deceit by so many parties?richardstevenhack , 13 days agoHow to trust western intelligence when they have such a long and sordid track record of deceit, lies and propaganda? At the same time there is such a long history of Russian and Chinese intelligence and information operations against the west.
Then there is the nexus among the highest levels of US law enforcement and intelligence as well as political elites in both parties and key individuals in the media complex.
We are living in a hall of mirrors and it seems the trend is towards confirmation bias in information consumption.
Excellent post, especially the debunking of the 'Gerasimov doctrine' which I always thought was more hand-waving and Russian mind-reading.Barbara Ann , 13 days agoIt's important to realize that there are a number of people in the infosec community who have biases against Russia, just as there are in the general population. Then there are more cautious people, who recognize the difficulty in attributing a hack to any specific person absent solid, incontrovertible, non-circumstantial and non-spoofable (and preferably offline) evidence.
Tait doesn't appear to be one of the latter. Thomas Rid would be another. There are others.
Jeffrey Carr is one of the latter, and his familiarity with intelligence matters is clear from his organization of the annual "Suits and Spooks" Conference. I believe he was the first to raise questions about the DNC hack which didn't pass his smell test.
There are also a number of companies in infosec who rely on latching onto a particular strain of hacker, the more publicly exploitable for PR purposes the better, as a means of keeping the company name in front of potential high-profile and highly billable clients. CrowdStrike and its Russia obsession isn't the only one that's been tagged with that propensity.
Mandiant could be referred to as the "Chinese, all the time" company, for example. Richard Bejtlich was at Fireeye and the became Chief Security Officer when they acquired Mandiant. He spent quite a bit of effort on his blog warning about the Chinese military buildup as a huge threat to the US. He's former USAF so perhaps that's not surprising.
Bottom line: Confirmation bias is a real thing.
Glad David's comment has been reproduced as a post in its own right, this is a critically important topic.mlnw , 13 days agoIMO Matt Tait plays the role of midwife in this conspiracy. His Twitter thread
View HideThe Comey, Brennan, Mueller claim - indeed a central one upon which the recent indictment rests- that Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian State agent that hacked the DNC- was discredited and put to rest last year by the forensics conducted by Bill Binney and his colleagues. The Guccifer 2.0 metadata was analyzed for its transmission speed, and based on the internet speeds to and from numerous test locations abroad and in the U.S., it was determined to have been impossible for the so-called Guccifer 2.0 to have hacked the DNC computers over the internet. The transmission speed however did correspond to the speed of the transfer to a thumb drive. Additionally, it was found that the data had been manipulated and split into two parts to simulate a July and a September transfer, when in fact the parts merge perfectly as single file, and where, according to Binney, the probability of the split being a coincidence would be 100 to the 50th power.mlnw -> mlnw , 11 days agoAs for the crude trace fingerprints (e.g. the referencing of Dzerzinsky), one of the Wikileaks data dumps (Vault 7 Marble) during a period when Assange was negotiating with the Administration - there were two at the time (Vault 7 Marble and Vault 7 Grasshopper), the release of which apparently enraged Mike Pompeo- was designed to obfuscate, fabricate and frame countries such as Russia, Iran or North Korea by pretending to be the target country, including in the use of target's alphabet and language.
VIPs has written numerous articles on this in Consortium News. See also the report by Patrick Lawrence Smith in The Nation at: https://www.thenation.com/a... . (It was apparently so hot at the time- and disputed by several other VIPs members- that The Nation sought an independent assessment by third party, though those comments were easily addressed and dismissed in seriatim by Binney in an annex to the article.)
Binney has explained his forensic analysis and conclusions at numerous forums, and in a sit-down with Secretary Pompeo in October, 2017- though Mueller, the FBI, and mainstream and some of the alternative press seem either deaf, dumb and blind to it all, or interested in discrediting the study. The irony is, I'd venture to guess, that Binney, with his 40 years of experience, including as Technical Director and technical guru at the NSA, is, even in retirement, more sophisticated in these matters than any one at the Agency, or the FBI, or CIA, or certainly, the Congressional Intelligence Committees. So, it is astounding that any or all of them could have, but did not, invite him to testify as an expert.
Moreover, the NSA has a record of every transmission, and also would have it on backup files. And, the FBI has been sitting on Seth Rich's computer and his communications with Wikileaks, and presumably has a report that it has not released. And of course, as Trump asked in his press conference, where's the DNC server, any or all of which would put this question to rest.
A recent interview with Binney can be found at:
Play HideThe last clause of the first paragraph should have said:David Habakkuk , 11 days ago
"according to Binney, the probability of the split being a coincidence would be one over 100 to the 50th powerAll,David Habakkuk , 12 days agoMore evidence for the at least passive complicity of GCHQ – for which Matt Tait used to work, and which Robert Hannigan used to run – in corrupt 'information operations' comes in a report yesterday on CNN.
(See https://edition.cnn.com/201... )
It opens:
'Police have identified two suspects in the poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, a source with knowledge of the investigation told CNN on Thursday.
'The pair left the UK in the wake of the attack on what is believed to have been a commercial flight, the source added.
'Their departure was revealed in a coded Russian message to Moscow sent after the attack, which was intercepted by a British base in Cyprus, the source said. The British government blames the Skripals' poisoning on Russia.'
The base in question is high up in the Troodos mountains, and is formally run by the RAF but actually a key resource for both GCHQ and NSA in monitoring communications over a wide area. According to an internal document from the former organisation, it has 'long been regarded as a 'Jewel in the Crown' by NSA as it offers unique access to the Levant, North Africa, and Turkey'.
(See https://theintercept.com/20... .)
That the quote comes a report in 'The Intercept' in January 2016 revealing that one of the uses of the Troodos facility is to intercept live video feeds from Israeli drones and fighter jets brings out how paradoxical the world is. For it also appears to have emerged as an important resource in 'information operations' in support of 'Borgist' agendas.
The claim about intercepts incriminating the Russians over the Salisbury incident was first made in a piece by Marco Giannangeli in the Daily Express on 9 April, which followed up the claims which Colonel de Bretton-Gordon had been instrumental in disseminating, and was then widely picked up by the MSM.
(See https://www.express.co.uk/n... .)
It was headlined: 'REVEALED: The bombshell Russian message intercepted on DAY of Skripal poisonings,' and opened: 'AN ELECTRONIC message to Moscow sent on the day former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with a nerve agent in Salisbury included the phrase "the package has been delivered".'
Supposedly, this 'prompted a young Flight Lieutenant to recall a separate message that had been intercepted and discounted on the previous day.' The messages were 'understood to have formed "just one part" of the intelligence packet which later allowed Prime Minister Theresa May to state it was "highly likely" that Russia was behind the attacks.'
As it happens, the same writer – Marco Giannangeli – had disseminated a parallel piece of palpable fiction on 1 September 2013, in the 'Sunday Express', in relation to the Ghouta 'false flag.'
(See https://www.express.co.uk/n... .)
This one was headlined, even more melodramatically, 'Senior Syrian military chiefs tell captain: fire chemicals or be shot; BRITISH intelligence chiefs have intercepted radio messages in which senior Syrian military chiefs are heard ordering the use of chemical weapons.'
Part of the story of how bogus claims about 'smoking gun' evidence from 'SIGINT' were used to support the attempt to use the Ghouta 'false flag' to inveigle the British and Americans into destroying the Syrian government was told in my SST post on the incident. However, to mix metaphors, I only scratched the surface of a can of worms.
In a report on the 'Daily Caller' site on 29 August 2013, Kenneth Timmerman claimed that the sequence had started with an actual intercept by Unit 8200 – the Israeli equivalent of GCHQ and NSA.
(See http://dailycaller.com/2013... .)
Claiming to base his account on Western intelligence sources, he suggested that:
'According to these officers, who served in top positions in the United States, Britain, France, Israel, and Jordan, a Syrian military communication intercepted by Israel's famed Unit 8200 electronic intelligence outfit has been doctored so that it leads a reader to just the opposite conclusion reached by the original report.'
While I am not in a position to establish whether his claim is or is not accurate, an AP report on the same day quoted 'U.S. intelligence officials' explaining that 'an intercept of Syrian military officials discussing the strike was among low-level staff, with no direct evidence tying the attack back to an Assad insider or even a senior Syrian commander'.
(See https://www.salon.com/2013/... )
Meanwhile, Timmerman's claim that 'The doctored report was picked up on Israel's Channel 2 TV on Aug. 24, then by Focus magazine in Germany, the Times of Israel, and eventually by The Cable in Washington, DC' is supported by links to the relevant stories, which say what he claims they say.
Moreover, it seems clear that the 1 September 2013 report was an attempt to counter a – somewhat devastating – critique made in a 31 August post entitled 'The Troodos Conundrum' by the former British Ambassador Craig Murray, who had been closely involved with the facility during his time at the Foreign Office (and has written invaluable material on the Salisbury incident.)
(See https://www.craigmurray.org... .)
Precisely because of the closeness of the GCHQ/NSA collaboration, Murray brought out, there was indeed a major problem explaining why claims about 'SIGINT' had been central to the case made in the 'Government Assessment' released by the White House on 30 August 2013, but not even mentioned in the Joint Intelligence Community 'Assessment' produced two days before.
The answer, Murray suggested, was that the 'intelligence' came from Mossad, and so would not have been automatically shared with the British. But, given the superior capabilities of Troodos, if Mossad had it, the British should have also. So his claims 'meshed' with those by Timmerman and the AP, and the 'Express' report looks like a lame attempt at a cover-up.
Again however, one finds the world is a paradoxical place. As I noted in my SST post, detailed demolitions of the claims about 'SIGINT' in relation to Ghouta were provided both Seymour Hersh, in the 'Whose sarin?' article, and also on the 'Who Attacked Ghouta?' site masterminded by one 'sasa wawa.'
Later, it became clear that this was likely to be the Israeli technology entrepreneur Saar Wilf, a former employee of Unit 8200. So this may – or may not – be an indication of deep divisions within Israeli intelligence.
Between 18 March and 31 April, a fascinating series of posts on the Salisbury incident appeared on the 'Vineyard of the Saker' blog. The author, who used the name 'sushi', was a self-professed IT professsional, who had however obviously acquired an extensive familiarity with 'chemical forensics' and appeared to have some experience of 'SIGINT.'
(See https://thesaker.is/tag/sushi/ .)
In a 14 April post, 'sushi' produced a dismissal of the claims about 'SIGINT' implicating the Russians over the Salisbury incident quite as contemptuous as that which 'sasa wawa' had produced in relation to the claims about it incriminating the Syrian government over Ghouta. Pointing to the implausibility of the story disseminated by the 'Express', he remarked that:
'It is doubted that any message traffic is processed on Cyprus. It is more likely that the entire take is transmitted back to GCHQ in Cheltenham via a fibre optic link. There exabytes of take are processed, not by a bored flight lieutenant, but by banks of high speed computers.
'Clearly someone in Cheltenham has committed a programming error. Anyone with any knowledge of secret communications knows that the code phrase used to confirm a murder in Salisbury is "small pizza, no anchovies." '
Interestingly, another paper in the 'Express' group made a parallel claim in relation to the Khan Sheikhoun incident to that about the Ghouta incident, but the story was not picked up and may indeed have been suppressed.
On 9 April, the paper published a report headlined 'Brit spies' lead role in Syrian air strikes; RAF BASE IS 'WEAPON.' This claimed that 'within an hour of the airstrike', Troodos had intercepted communications revealing that nerve gas had been used, and had been delivered by jets from the Syrian Arab Air Force's Shayrat Air Base.
(See
View HideAll,Jack -> David Habakkuk , 12 days agoI was drafting a response to the comment by 'Barbara Ann' – thanks for the link to the recent posts by Adam Carter – before going out. Returning and reading some very interesting comments, I think what I wanted to say has more general relevance.
One reason I am reading so much into 'this Dzerzhinsky thing' is the body of accumulating evidence that people like Tait are part of a system of networks which combine sanctimoniousness, corruption and stupidity in about equal measures. So some more examples may be to the point.
Different cases in which I have taken an interest come together in a post by Tait on the 'Lawfare' site on 13 March, entitled 'U.K. Prime Minister's Speech on the Russian Poisoning of Sergei Skripal: Decoding the Signals.'
(See https://www.lawfareblog.com... .)
In support of the claim that in accusing Russia of a pioneering act of chemical terrorism Theresa May was relying upon accurate analysis from the 'U.K. intelligence community', Tait wrote that:
'May then explained that Skripal was poisoned by a "military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia one of a group of nerve agents known as 'Novichok.'" She is laying out the basic groundwork for the government's attribution to a nation state and, more specifically, Russia. At Porton Down, the U.K. has one of the world's best forensic labs for analyzing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. With the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, this lab not only established that Polonium-210 was used but also which reactor in Russia it came from.'
In the event, as is by now well know, Boris Johnson's claim that Porton Down scientists had told him that the agent which poisoned the Skripals came from Russia was specifically repudiated by the head of that organisation, Gary Aitkenhead, on 3 April. Our Foreign Secretary told a flagrant lie, and was exposed.
(See https://www.craigmurray.org... .)
As I have shown in previous posts on this site, the 'Inquiry' conducted by Sir Robert Owen into the death of Litvinenko was patently corrupt. Moreover, it seems highly likely that, in fabricating 'evidence' to cover up what actually happened, Christopher Steele was doing a 'dry-run' for the fabrication of material in the dossier published by 'BuzzFeed.'
In fact, however, Owen's report made quite clear that the role of Porton Down was marginal. Furthermore, 'Scientist A1' from the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston quite specifically rejected the claim that 'impurity profiling' made it possible to establish that the source of the polonium was the Avangard facility at Sarov, her arguments being accepted by Owen. Either Tait has not bothered to read the report or very much of the coverage, or he is lying.
(For the report, see http://webarchive.nationala... . For some of the mass of evidence which Owen chose to ignore, see my discussions at http://turcopolier.typepad.... ; http://turcopolier.typepad....
What Porton Down did do was to use 'impurity profiling', which can produce 'spectra' identifying even the tiniest traces of substances, to frustrate the attempt to use the 'false flag' attack at Ghouta on 21 August 2013 to inveigle the American and British governments into destroying the Assad 'régime' and handing the country over to jihadists.
It may well be that this display of competence and integrity led to a 'clampdown' at the organisation, which encouraged Boris Johnson to believe he could get away with lying about what its scientists told him.
(See my defence and development of the crucial reporting by Seymour Hersh, at http://turcopolier.typepad.... .)
A general pattern which emerges is that the same small group of 'disinformation peddlers' resurfaces in different contexts – and the pattern whereby 'private security companies' are used to create a spurious impression of independence also recurs.
As I bring out in my piece on Ghouta, two figures who were critical in shaping the 'narrative' acccording to which Syrian government responsibility for the atrocity had been conclusively proved, were Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, formerly the former commanding officer of the UK Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Regiment, and also NATO's Rapid Reaction CBRN Battalion, and Dan Kaszeta.
Immediately after the story of the poisoning of the Skripals on 4 March broke, the same duo reappeared, and have been as critical to shaping the 'narrative' about the later incident as they were to that about the former.
(For the piece by Kaszeta on 'Bellingcat' which introduced the 'Novichok' theme four days later, see https://www.bellingcat.com/... .)
This makes it particular interesting to look at the website of Kaszeta's consultancy, 'Strongpoint Security Limited', in conjunction with the 'Companies House' documentation on the company.
(See http://strongpointsecurity.... ; https://beta.companieshouse... .)
One would have thought from the website that his company was a small, but hardly insignificant, player, in the field of 'physical and operational security.' As it happens, having filed 'Total exemption small company accounts' since its incorporation in May 2011, last December it filed 'Micro company accounts' for the year to 31 May 2017.
With a turnover of £20,000, staff costs of a bit more than half of that, and a profit of £394, we can see that although unlike Matt Tait's, Kaszeta's company did trade, if indeed it was his sole source of income, this pivotal figure in Anglo-American 'disinformation operations' was living on something less than $15,000 a year, at current exchange rates. (Pull the other one, as we say in Britain.)
This is all the more ironic, as the website brings out quite how critical a figure Kaszeta has been in obscuring the truth. From the bio he gives, we learn that having started as a Chemical Officer in the U.S. Army, he worked for 12 years in the White House, dealing with CBRN matters, before moving to Britain in 2008.
Among the articles to which he links on the site, we see his response in 'NOW Lebanon' in December 2013 to Hersh's original 'Whose sarin?' piece on Ghouta, -- in which Kaszeta first introduced the famous 'hexamine hypothesis.'
This – patently preposterous – suggestion that the presence of a single 'impurity' is a 'smoking gun' incriminating the Syrian government has echoed on into the clearly corrupt OPCW documents purporting to demonstrate that it was responsible for the 4 April 2017 Khan Sheikhoun attack.
Of some interest in understanding where Kaszeta he is coming from is what he describes as his 'oldest (and most footnoted on Wikipedia)' piece, which is an article published in 1988 on a site called 'Lituanus', on 'Lithuanian Resistance to Foreign Occupation 1940-52.'
(See http://www.lituanus.org/198... .)
As to Colonel de Bretton-Gordon, it is of interest to look at the attempt to 'finger' the GRU over the Skripal poisoning published under the title 'UK Poisoning Inquiry turns to Russian Agency in Mueller Indictments' in the 'New York Times' last Sunday, and the response by the Russian Embassy in London to a question about it.
(See https://www.nytimes.com/201... ; https://www.rusemb.org.uk/f... .)
The response objects that 'while the British authorities keep concealing all information concerning the investigation into the Salisbury incident, the newspaper has quoted "one former US official familiar with the inquiry".'
It also asserts that that crucial evidence which has not been made available to the Russians – and here, as with Ghouta and Khan Sheikhoun, the results of 'impurity profiling' are critical – appears to have been shared not just with inappropriate Americans, but with all kinds of others.
And indeed, the Embassy is quite right in suggesting that the claim made by the supposed creator of 'Novichok', Vladimir Uglev, to the BBC in April about 'all the spectrum data I was sent recently' has neither been confirmed nor denied. This seems a general pattern – the 'spectra' which may actually be able to provide definitive answers to questions of responsibility are only provided to people who can be relied upon to give the 'right' answers.
The Embassy response also quite fairly refers to a report in the 'Times' also in April, about the 'intelligence' which had been 'used to persuade world leaders that Moscow was behind the poisoning' and that the 'Novichok' had been manufactured at the Shikhany facility at in southwest Russia, which stated that de Bretton-Gordon, 'who had seen the intelligence, called it very compelling.' He has a long history of lying about CW in Syria – so is obviously the right person to lie about them in the UK.
(See https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/... ; https://www.thetimes.co.uk/... .)
It thus becomes interesting to probe into what lies behind the opening of de Bretton-Gordon's entry on the 'Military Speakers' website ('Real Heroes; Real Stories.') According to this, he is 'Chief Operating Office of SecureBio Ltd a commercial company offering CBRN Resilience, consultancy and deployable capabilities.'
(See http://www.militaryspeakers... .)
From 'Companies House', we learn that the liquidation of 'Secure Bio', which started in in June 2015, was concluded in August last year. The really interesting thing about the records, however, is that at the time of the liquidation the company had very large debts, which were written off, of a kind and in a manner which suggested that de Bretton-Gordon's activities may have been largely funded by loans from untraceable sources which were not meant to be repaid.
(See https://beta.companieshouse... – in particular the 'Statement of affairs' dated 30 June 2015.)
Actually, with the 'NYT' report we come full circle. Among those quoted is Mark Galeotti – apparently his admission that he had totally misrepresented the thinking of the Russian General Staff has not him made more cautious about making extravagant claims about its Main Intelligence Directorate (misreported as Main Directorate by the 'NYT.')
Also quoted are two figures who play key roles in Owen's Report – the Soviet era-GRU defector 'Viktor Suvorov' (real name 'Vladimir Rezun') and the former KGB operative Yuri Shvets. Both of these feature prominently in the posts on the Litvinenko affair to which I have linked, and both were key members of the 'information operations' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky. This now seems to have taken control of American policy, as of British.
The role of 'Suvorov'/Rezun in attempting to defend the interpretations of Stalin's policy put forward by MI6 in the run-up to the Second World War, and those asserted later by General Keitel, and the way he was demolished by the leading American historian of the War in the East, Colonel David Glantz, and the Israeli historian Gabriel Gorodetsky, is too large a subject to go into here.
(For a brief review, see https://networks.h-net.org/... .)
However, it provides further reason to wonder whether the misreadings of Stalin's policy which caused MI6 to give advice to Chamberlain which helped destroy the last chances of preventing the Nazi-Soviet Pact, may still be the 'house view' of that organisation. It was, obviously, the Pact which spelled 'curtains' both for Poland and the Baltics.
DavidFred -> Jack , 12 days agoThere is a pattern of abuse of formerly well regarded institutions to achieve the propaganda aims of the Deep State establishment. The depths that were plumbed to push the Iraq WMD falsehoods are well known. Yet no one was held to account nor was there any honest accounting of the abuse. There have been pretenses like the Owen inquiry that you note.
We see the same situation of sweeping under the rug malfeasance and even outright criminality through obfuscation and obstruction in the case of the meddling in the 2016 election by top officials in intelligence and law enforcement. Clearly less and less people are buying what the Deep State sells despite their overwhelming control of the media channels.
It seems that we are marching towards a credibility crisis similar to what was experienced in the Soviet Union when no one trusted the contents in Pravda.
What is to be gained by the leadership in Britain in promoting these biological weapons cases since Litvinenko? In the US it is quite apparent that the Deep State have become extremely powerful and the likelihood that Trump recognizes that resistance is futile is very high. Schumer may be proven right that they have six ways from Sunday to make you kowtow to their dictats.
Jack,"Yet no one was held to account"
That was one of the changes being hoped for when Obama was first elected. Instead we got little, except for things such as bailed out bankers and the IRS scandal which lasted until the end of his 2nd term. The panic from the left over the 2016 election issues the are still going on is that the expected candidate isn't in office and they are being exposed. Whether they get prosecuted is another story.
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May 23, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
Disobedient Media recently reported on discoveries made by the Forensicator in their report, Media Mishaps: Early Guccifer 2 Coverage . In our previous coverage of the Forensicator's work, we discussed the essential role played by the media in ensuring that the Guccifer 2.0 persona received wide recognition by successfully linking Guccifer 2.0's documents with the DNC's claims that Russian state-sponsored hackers had breached their servers.
This report will focus on an unreported story: After the fact, the DNC quietly changed an important theme in their Russian hacking narrative. Initially, the DNC passively supported the notion that Guccifer 2.0 stole a copy of a Trump opposition report by penetrating the DNC at the behest of the Russian state. Then over a year later, an un-named ex-DNC official tells us that this document in fact came from Podesta's emails, not the DNC. This single statement by a DNC official invalidated the circumstantial evidence that had been used to support the DNC's Russian hacking claims, and represents a groundbreaking contradiction that has gone unobserved by establishment press outlets.
This report will also discuss numerous mistakes made by various legacy press outlets in their obsessive focus on the Russian hacking narrative and their rush to judgment in the matter.
A Late (and Quiet) Change in the DNC Russian Hacking Narrative
In November 2017, the DNC changed their Russian hacking narrative via their proxies in the legacy media. The Associated Press published, Inside story: How Russians hacked the Democrats' emails ; they cite an anonymous former DNC official who asserts that Guccifer 2.0's first document (the Trump opposition report) did not originate in the DNC as initially reported.
The importance of this contradiction, combined with earlier allegations of hacking the DNC made by Guccifer 2.0, cannot be overstated.
The Associated Press wrote in November 2017:
" There were signs of dishonesty from the start. The first document Guccifer 2.0 published on June 15 came not from the DNC as advertised but from Podesta's inbox, according to a former DNC official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press."
By classifying Guccifer 2.0's claim to have obtained the Trump Opposition Report through a breach of the DNC as a sign of dishonesty, the Associated Press uses the Guccifer 2.0 persona's widely held claim as an example of contradiction with their new version of the 'official' Russian hacking narrative. In so doing, the AP makes the hacking allegations entirely nebulous: a fantasy narrative that can be neither proven nor disproven but easily edited and rearranged when convenient. Incredibly, the AP's article also contradicts the claims made by the DNC themselves, and so-called papers of record, including the Washington Post.
By returning to the genesis of the Russian hacking narrative, we find that the AP's November report runs contrary to the DNC's initial claims, as reported by The Washington Post , in an article titled, Russian Government Hackers Penetrated DNC, Stole Opposition Research On Trump . When reviewing this early history of the matter, it becomes clear that it is logically impossible to separate the Guccifer 2.0 persona from the allegations of a Kremlin-backed hack of the DNC. Critical statements in that initial report by the Washington Post are highlighted below for emphasis:
"Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and gained access to the entire database of opposition research on GOP Presidential candidate Donald Trump, according to committee officials and security experts who responded to the breach
[Fancy Bear] broke into the network in late April and targeted the opposition research files. It was this breach that set off the alarm. The hackers stole two files,[Shawn] Henry said."
By taking this later (2017) stance, the Associated Press contradicts the "official" Russian hacking narrative involving Guccifer 2.0 (as implied by the DNC's own security firm) and which had, until that point, been characterized by the corporate press as Russian-hacking-gospel-truth. By seamlessly excising Guccifer 2.0 from culpability within a new timeline of events, the Associated Press makes the entire hacking story a fantasy narrative that can be neither proven nor disproven but must not be questioned.
The Forensicator explained to Disobedient Media:
"Investigators would have been able to rapidly determine if there were textual differences between Guccifer 2.0's document and the DNC's. If there were no textual differences, an initial determination might have been difficult, because Guccifer 2.0 went to some trouble to obscure internal metadata, known as Revision Save ID's (RSID's), which can be used to uniquely identify sections of text that have been changed and added into a Word document. However, when the Podesta emails were published in October 2016, investigators should have been able to source Guccifer 2.0's document to the Podesta emails quickly. They would have been able to do this before the 2016 election, a full year ahead of the AP report." [Emphasis Added]
The Forensicator then referred this author to a table in his report, depicting the metadata for Podesta's version of the Trump opposition report:
As we can see, the document was saved by Tony Carrk, who worked as Research Director for Hillary for America at the time. This document was attached to this Podesta email .
The Forensicator continued, saying: "We can see that Mr. Carrk made some change that took less than one minute to complete. If investigators compared Carrk's version of the document to the original DNC document, they should have been able to quickly determine that Guccifer 2's document is sourced from Podesta's emails and not directly from the DNC. For this, an RSID correlation would have probably been telling."
Why did the DNC, their security consultant firm Crowdstrike, and government investigators wait so long to tell us that Guccifer 2.0 did not obtain their copy of the Trump opposition report directly from the DNC? Why did Crowdstrike tell the Washington Post that the opposition report files had been stolen specifically from the DNC network if that were not the case?
The legacy press chorus had initially linked Guccifer 2.0's first document, and the "Russian fingerprints" therein to the Trump opposition report that the DNC claimed to have been stolen by Russian state-sponsored hackers. What prompted them to change their story, contradicting not only Guccifer 2.0 but the DNC themselves? Should we now assess the DNC's claim that the document had been taken by Russian hackers to be untrue?
Ultimately, it is the DNC's claim that they were breached by Russian hackers, who stole the Trump opposition report, which directly belies their allegation - because the document did not come from the DNC, but from John Podesta's emails.
Is it possible that Mueller's investigation may have taken a closer look into the origin of Guccifer 2.0's initial document, realizing that it was sourced from Podesta's email? The DNC and government investigators may have then decided that the best way to obscure the resulting contradictory evidence was by letting it quietly leak via a "former DNC official who spoke on the condition of anonymity," in the November 2017 article published by the Associated Press.
Given the repeated contradictions from the DNC and corporate media in their description of Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential race, how can the public be expected to believe that their other claims have any legitimacy whatsoever?
The AP's November 2017 article also noticed that Guccifer 2.0's first published document contained the word CONFIDENTIAL, while the original document did not. This was old news to anyone who had been paying attention; Adam Carter analyzed this artifact nine months earlier:
What is interesting here is that the AP admits that such elements of the document's publication had been fabricated, but did not then follow that realization by questioning other possibly fabricated elements of the documents, such as the Russian-language error messages. The AP certainly did not concern themselves with why a Russian state-sponsored hacker would benefit from airbrushing "confidential" onto such a report. Their claim that it was to attract media attention seems quite weak.
AP surmised that Guccifer 2.0 "air-brush[ed]" the word "confidential" into the document to "catch the reporter's attention." Both Carter and the Forensicator have explained that Guccifer 2.0 used a complex process, involving an intermediate template document, to inject this "alluring" fake. The Forensicator told this author that they take the position that this intermediate template file (ostensibly needed to add "CONFIDENTIAL" to the document) had an additional purpose.
The Forensicator explained that, for some readers and researchers, the copy/paste of an intermediate (RTF) copy of the Trump opposition report into a template document might be interpreted simply as an unconventional method for injecting "confidential" into 1.doc. However, the Forensicator added, it can also be interpreted as a "cover" for the final copy/paste operation which was a necessary step in the evolution of Guccifer 2.0's first document. It was needed to embed the Russian error messages into the final document (1.doc).
Once again, establishment media failed to pursue their cited evidence with due diligence. This is a grave mistake, especially given the way in which Guccifer 2.0's alleged 'hacking' has been used as a major bolstering point for increased tensions between the United States and Russia.
Initially, Gawker and The Smoking Gun Didn't Notice Iron Felix
Guccifer 2.0 made his noisy debut on June 15, 2016 (the day after the DNC publicly claimed it had been breached by Russian state-sponsored hackers). It also appears that Guccifer 2.0 gave advanced copies of their doctored version of the Trump opposition report to two media outlets, The Smoking Gun and Gawker.
In their full analysis, the Forensicator wrote that it was surprising that neither outlet reported on the easily viewed "Last Saved By" property, which listed "Феликс Эдмундович" (aka "Iron Felix") as the user who last saved the document. This unique name was noticed by various social media observers that same day and by Ars Technica the following day. How did the journalists miss this, and why?
Initially, Gawker and The Smoking Gun Didn't Notice the Russian Error Messages
Both Gawker and The Smoking Gun published Guccifer 2.0's Trump opposition report in full as a PDF file. Their PDF files have the now infamous Cyrillic error messages in them; they appear in the last few pages of their PDF files. Ars Technica dubbed these error messages, "Russian fingerprints."
Although both outlets reviewed this document in some detail, neither outlet noticed the Russian error messages in their first reports. The Forensicator suggests that, given their choice of word processing applications, they would have seen the Russian error messages, if only they had viewed the last few pages of each file. That is, unless (perhaps) they received their PDF's directly from Guccifer 2.0 or another third party and they just passed them along.
Ars Technica was Confused When They Didn't See the Russian Error Messages in Guccifer 2.0's Word Document
Ars Technica reported on Guccifer 2.0's publication of the Trump Opposition Report the day after Guccifer 2.0 arrived on the scene. They quickly noted that there were Russian language error messages in the PDF file posted by Gawker. They also noticed that when they viewed 1.doc themselves, they didn't see the Russian error messages. The Forensicator told Disobedient Media that this was because Ars Technica used Word for Windows, which displayed the error messages in English.
Ars Technica suggested that The Smoking Gun's PDF may have been generated by Guccifer 2.0 on a system that had Russian language settings enabled.
While this explanation appears reasonable, it is surprising (if that was the case) that Gawker didn't tell us that their PDF came directly from Guccifer 2.0 . The Smoking Gun also published a PDF with Russian error messages in it. Are we to believe that The Smoking Gun also received their PDF from Guccifer 2.0 or a third party, and failed to report on this fact?
IVN: Did Gawker Outsource Their Analysis to Russia?
An obscure media outlet, Independent Voter Network , raised various theories on the initial reporting done by The Smoking Gun and Gawker. One of their wilder theories suggested that Gawker had outsourced their analysis to a Russian sub-contractor. The Forensicator evaluated that claim, ultimately concluding that Independent Voter Network had gone on a wild goose chase because the "clue" they followed pointed to Gawker's document management service known as "DocumentCloud." DocumentCloud uses a technology that they call "CloudCrowd," which is what IVN saw in the PDF that Gawker uploaded. The Forensicator referred to a DocumentCloud job advertisement for confirmation of his conclusion.
The Forensicator told Disobedient Media: "We found CloudCrowd; it is not an outsourcing company. Probably not Russian, either."
Business Insider: Did Guccifer 2.0 Photoshop "Confidential" Into his Document Screenshots?
When Business Insider noted the presence of "CONFIDENTIAL" in Guccifer 2.0's document, they claimed that Guccifer 2.0 might have "photoshopped" his screenshots (placed on his blog site) to create the watermark and page footer with "confidential" in them.
The Forensicator countered that claim by pointing out that the Business Insider journalist likely viewed the document with "Full-Screen Reading" selected.
This mode will disable the display of the watermark and page headers and footers when viewed by the journalist, but they will be displayed when printed to PDF. No Photoshop required.
Conclusion
The close timing of the DNC announcement and Guccifer 2.0's publication of the Trump report, as well as reports of "Russian fingerprints" in those documents, created a strong link between Guccifer 2.0 and the Russian hackers who allegedly stole DNC files. Over a year later, the Associated Press tells us that this first narrative was wrong, contradicting the DNC's claims as well as much of the early legacy press reports on the issue. Must we concurrently accept the narrative that Russians hacked the DNC if claims that they had done so were not only based on flimsy evidence but have now been contradicted completely?
As far as documented evidence of election interference goes, one does not have to stray far from the actors in the Russian hacking saga to discover that the DNC and establishment Democrats were, instead of victims of meddling, the perpetrators of such abuse of the American Democratic process. In 2017 the NYC Board of Elections admitted that it had illegally purged hundreds of thousands of Democratic voters from the election roles, preventing them from voting in the 2016 Democratic primaries. This abuse of power represents just one in a constellation of legitimate examples of abuse that took place at the hands of corporatized Democrats in order to unfairly and illegally ensure a Clinton nomination.
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GunnyG Wed, 05/23/2018 - 18:28 Permalink
honest injun Wed, 05/23/2018 - 18:57 PermalinkPodesta the Molesta gets the Vince Foster invitation to jog at Fort Marcy Park very soon.
DrLucindaX Wed, 05/23/2018 - 19:10 PermalinkThis is too complicated for the average demon rat nitwit to follow. They don't want to know this so showing them facts has to be dumbed down. Otherwise, all new revelations will be ignored.
Justapleb Wed, 05/23/2018 - 19:54 PermalinkReally good work and reporting here that will never be understood by the masses. Everything that's going on is far too complex, too many moving parts, too much compartmentalization. Trump is doing a good job dumbing it down.
So the DNC announced Russia hacked them, and "proved" it with a file they say was stolen.But that file was not the DNC's. So the "proof" of Russia hacking the DNC is nonexistent.
Gotta dumb it down.
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Jun 09, 2018 | consortiumnews.com
Paul E. Merrell, J.D. , May 31, 2018 at 4:53 am
Realist , May 31, 2018 at 9:21 amGuccifer 2.0's American Fingerprints Reveal An Operation Made In The USA: https://disobedientmedia.com/2018/05/guccifer-2-0s-american-fingerprints-reveal-an-operation-made-in-the-usa/
Unfortunately, what this guy says is what most Americans still seem to believe. When I ask people what is the actual hard evidence for "Russiagate" (because I don't know of any that has been corroborated), I get a response that there have been massive examples of Russian hacks, Russian posts, tweets and internet adverts–all meant to sabotage Hillary's candidacy, and very effective, mind you. Putin has been an evil genius worthy of a comic book villain (to date myself, a regular Lex Luthor). Sez who, ask I? Sez the trustworthy American media that would never lie to the public, sez they. You know, professional paragons of virtue like Rachel Maddow and her merry band.
Nobody seems aware of the recent findings about Halpern, none seem to have a realistic handle on the miniscule scope of the Russian "offenses" against American democracy. Rachel, the NY Times and WaPo have seen to that with their sins of both commission and omission. Even the Republican party is doing a half-hearted job of defending its own power base with rigorous and openly disseminated fact checking. It's like even many of the committee chairs with long seniority are reluctant to buck the conventional narrative peddled by the media. Many have chosen to retire rather than fight the media and the Deep State. What's a better interpretation of events? Or is one to believe that the silent voices, curious retirements and political heat generated by the Dems, the prosecutors and the media are all independent variables with no connections? These old pols recognise a good demonizing when they see it, especially when directed at them.
Personally, I think that not only the GOPers should be fighting like the devil to expose the truth (which should benefit them in this circumstance) but so should the media and all the watchdog agencies (ngo's) out there because our democracy WAS hijacked, but it was NOT by the Russians.
Worse than that, it was done by internal domestic enemies of the people who must be outed and punished to save the constitution and the republic, if it is not too late. All the misinformation by influential insiders and the purported purveyors of truth accompanied by the deliberate silence by those who should be chirping like birds suggests it may well be far too late.
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Jul 20, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com
As some commenters on SST seem still to have difficulty grasping that the presence of 'metadata' alluding to 'Iron Felix' in the 'Guccifer 2.0' material is strong evidence that the GRU were being framed over a leak, rather than that they were responsible for a hack, an update on the British end of the conspiracy seems in order.
If you look at the 'Lawfare' blog, in which a key figure is James Comey's crony Benjamin Wittes, you will find a long piece published last Friday, entitled 'Russia Indictment 2.0: What to Make of Mueller's Hacking Indictment.'
Among the authors, in addition to Wittes himself, is the sometime GCHQ employee Matt Tait. It appears that the former head of that organisation, the Blairite 'trusty' Robert Hannigan, who must know where a good few skeletons are buried, is a figure of some moment in the conspiracy.
(See https://www.lawfareblog.com... .)
It was Matt Tait who, using the 'Twitter' handle @pwnallthethings, identified the name and patronymic of Dzerzhinsky in the 'metadata' of the 'Guccifer 2.0' material on 15 June 2016, the day after Ellen Nakashima first disseminated the BS from 'CrowdStrike' in the 'WP.'
The story was picked up the following day in a report on the 'Ars Technica' site, and Tait's own account appeared on the 'Lawfare' site, to which he has been a regular contributor, on 28 July.
(See https://arstechnica.com/inf... ; https://www.lawfareblog.com... .)
According to the CV provided in conjunction with the new article:
'Matt Tait is a senior cybersecurity fellow at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin. Previously he was CEO of Capital Alpha Security, a consultancy in the UK, worked at Google Project Zero, was a principal security consultant for iSEC Partners, and NGS Secure, and worked as an information security specialist for GCHQ.'As I have noted before on SST, a cursory examination of records at 'Companies House' establishes that 'Capital Alpha Security', which was supposed to have provided Tait with an – independent – source of income at the time he unearthed this 'smoking gun' incriminating the GRU, never did any business at all. So, a question arises: how was Tait making ends meet at that time: busking on the London underground, perhaps?
(See https://beta.companieshouse... .)
Actually, there has been a recent update in the records. Somewhat prematurely perhaps, there is an entry dated 24 July 2018, entitled 'Final Gazette dissolved via compulsory strike-off. This document is being processed and will be available in 5 days.'
The document, when available, may clarify a few loose ends, but the general picture seems clear. Last November, Tait filed 'dormant company accounts' for the company's first year in existence, up until February 2017. One can only do this if one has absolutely no revenue, and absolutely no expenditure. Not even the smallest contract to sort out malware on someone's computer, or to buy equipment for the office.
He then failed to file the 'Confirmation statement', which every company must is legally obliged to produce annually, if it is not to be struck off. This failure led to a 'First Gazette notice for compulsory strike-off' in May.
It is, of course, possible that at the time Tait set up the company he was genuinely intending to try to make a go of a consultancy, and simply got sidetracked by other opportunities.
However – speaking from experience – people who have set up small 'one man band' companies to market skills learnt in large organisations, and then go back into such organisations, commonly think it worth their while to spend the minimal amount of time required to file the documentation required to keep the company alive.
If one sees any realistic prospect that one may either want to or need to go back into the big wide world again, this is the sensible course of action: particularly now when, with the internet, filing the relevant documentation takes about half an hour a year, and costs a trivial sum.
However, Tait may well anticipate that there is there will never be any call for him to go back into the big wide world, as the large organisation in which he has now found employment is part of a 'Borgist' network. So much is evident from another entry on the 'Lawfare' site:
'Bobby Chesney is the Charles I. Francis Professor in Law and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the University of Texas School of Law. He also serves as the Director of UT-Austin's interdisciplinary research center the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law. His scholarship encompasses a wide range of issues relating to national security and the law, including detention, targeting, prosecution, covert action, and the state secrets privilege; most of it is posted here. Along with Ben Wittes and Jack Goldsmith, he is one of the co-founders of the blog.'
(See https://www.lawfareblog.com... .)
Also relevant here is the fact that, rather transparently, this placing of the GRU centre stage is bound up with the attempt to suggest that there is some kind of 'Gerasimov doctrine', designed to undermine the West by 'hybrid warfare.' Unfortunately, the original author of this claptrap, Mark Galeotti, who, I regret to say, is, like Tait, British, has now recanted and confessed. In March, he published a piece on the 'Foreign Policy' site, under the title: 'I'm Sorry for Creating the 'Gerasimov Doctrine'; I was the first to write about Russia's infamous high-tech military strategy. One small problem: it doesn't exist.'
(See https://foreignpolicy.com/2... .)
If anyone wants to grasp what the Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, General Valery Gerasimov, was actually saying in the crucial February 2013 article which Galeotti was discussing, and how his thinking has developed subsequently, the place to look is, as so often, the Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth.
Informed discussions by Charles Bartles and Roger McDermott are at https://www.armyupress.army... ; http://www.worldinwar.eu/wp... ; and https://jamestown.org/progr... .
In relation to the ongoing attempt to frame the GRU, it is material that, in his 2013 piece, Gerasimov harks back to two pivotal figures in the arguments of the interwar years. Of these, Georgy Isserson, the Jewish doctor's son from Kaunas who became a Civil War 'political commissar' and then a key associate of Mikhail Tukhachevsky, was the great pioneer theorist of 'deep operations.'
The ideas of the other, Aleksandr Svechin, the former Tsarist 'genstabist', born in Odessa into an ethnically Russian military family, who was the key opponent of Tukhachevky and Isserson in the arguments of the 'Twenties, provided key parts of the intellectual basis of the Gorbachev-era 'new thinking.'
The 'Ars Technica' article in which Tait's claims were initially disseminated opened:
'We still don't know who he is or whether he works for the Russian government, but one thing is for sure: Guccifer 2.0 – the nom de guerre of the person claiming he hacked the Democratic National Committee and published hundreds of pages that appeared to prove it – left behind fingerprints implicating a Russian-speaking person with a nostalgia for the country's lost Soviet era.'
In his 2013 article, Gerasimov harks back to the catastrophe which overcame the Red Army in June 1941. Ironically, this was the product of the Stalinist leadership's disregard of the cautions produced not only by Svechin, but by Isserson. In regard to the latter, the article remarks that:
'The fate of this "prophet of the Fatherland" unfolded tragically. Our country paid in great quantities of blood for not listening to the conclusions of this professor of the General Staff Academy.'
As it happens, while both Svechin and Tukhachevsky were shot by the heirs of 'Felix Edmundovich', the sentence of death on Isserson was commuted, and he spent the war in prison and labour camps, while others used his ideas to devastating effect against the Germans.
Quite clearly, the 'Guccifer 2.0' persona is a crude fabrication by someone who has absolutely no understanding of, or indeed interest in, the bitter complexities of both of the history of Russia and of the 'borderlands', not only in the Soviet period but before and after.
Using this criterion as a 'filter', the obvious candidates are traditional Anglo-Saxon 'Russophobes', like Sir Richard Dearlove and Christopher Steele, or the 'insulted and injured' of the erstwhile Russian and Soviet empires, so many of them from the 'borderlands', of the type of Victoria Nuland, or the various Poles, Ukrainians and Balts and Jews who have had so much influence on American policy.
(I should note that other Jews, not only in Russia, but outside, including in Israel, think quite differently, in particular as they are very well aware, as Isserson would have been, of the extent to which 'borderlands' nationalists were enthusiastic collaborators with the Germans in the 'Final Solution'. On this, there is a large and growing academic literature.)
It is not particularly surprising that many of the victims of the Russian and Soviet empires have enjoyed seeing the tables turned, and getting their own back. But it is rather far from clear that this makes for good intelligence or sound policy. We were unable to load Disqus. If you are a moderator please see our troubleshooting guide .
blue peacock , 2 days agoHow does the objective truth get disclosed in an environment of extreme deceit by so many parties?richardstevenhack , 2 days agoHow to trust western intelligence when they have such a long and sordid track record of deceit, lies and propaganda? At the same time there is such a long history of Russian and Chinese intelligence and information operations against the west.
Then there is the nexus among the highest levels of US law enforcement and intelligence as well as political elites in both parties and key individuals in the media complex.
We are living in a hall of mirrors and it seems the trend is towards confirmation bias in information consumption.
Excellent post, especially the debunking of the 'Gerasimov doctrine' which I always thought was more hand-waving and Russian mind-reading.David Blake -> richardstevenhack , 5 hours agoIt's important to realize that there are a number of people in the infosec community who have biases against Russia, just as there are in the general population. Then there are more cautious people, who recognize the difficulty in attributing a hack to any specific person absent solid, incontrovertible, non-circumstantial and non-spoofable (and preferably offline) evidence.
Tait doesn't appear to be one of the latter. Thomas Rid would be another. There are others.
Jeffrey Carr is one of the latter, and his familiarity with intelligence matters is clear from his organization of the annual "Suits and Spooks" Conference. I believe he was the first to raise questions about the DNC hack which didn't pass his smell test.
There are also a number of companies in infosec who rely on latching onto a particular strain of hacker, the more publicly exploitable for PR purposes the better, as a means of keeping the company name in front of potential high-profile and highly billable clients. CrowdStrike and its Russia obsession isn't the only one that's been tagged with that propensity.
Mandiant could be referred to as the "Chinese, all the time" company, for example. Richard Bejtlich was at Fireeye and the became Chief Security Officer when they acquired Mandiant. He spent quite a bit of effort on his blog warning about the Chinese military buildup as a huge threat to the US. He's former USAF so perhaps that's not surprising.
Bottom line: Confirmation bias is a real thing.
One quick way to know their bias is the AC test. Google their name plus "Atlantic Council". Ridd fails badly.Barbara Ann , 2 days agoGlad David's comment has been reproduced as a post in its own right, this is a critically important topic. IMO Matt Tait plays the role of midwife in this conspiracy. His Twitter threadmlnw , 2 days agoThe Comey, Brennan, Mueller claim - indeed a central one upon which the recent indictment rests- that Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian State agent that hacked the DNC- was discredited and put to rest last year by the forensics conducted by Bill Binney and his colleagues. The Guccifer 2.0 metadata was analyzed for its transmission speed, and based on the internet speeds to and from numerous test locations abroad and in the U.S., it was determined to have been impossible for the so-called Guccifer 2.0 to have hacked the DNC computers over the internet. The transmission speed however did correspond to the speed of the transfer to a thumb drive. Additionally, it was found that the data had been manipulated and split into two parts to simulate a July and a September transfer, when in fact the parts merge perfectly as single file, and where, according to Binney, the probability of the split being a coincidence would be 100 to the 50th power.mlnw -> mlnw , 2 hours agoAs for the crude trace fingerprints (e.g. the referencing of Dzerzinsky), one of the Wikileaks data dumps (Vault 7 Marble) during a period when Assange was negotiating with the Administration - there were two at the time (Vault 7 Marble and Vault 7 Grasshopper), the release of which apparently enraged Mike Pompeo- was designed to obfuscate, fabricate and frame countries such as Russia, Iran or North Korea by pretending to be the target country, including in the use of target's alphabet and language.
VIPs has written numerous articles on this in Consortium News. See also the report by Patrick Lawrence Smith in The Nation at: https://www.thenation.com/a... . (It was apparently so hot at the time- and disputed by several other VIPs members- that The Nation sought an independent assessment by third party, though those comments were easily addressed and dismissed in seriatim by Binney in an annex to the article.)
Binney has explained his forensic analysis and conclusions at numerous forums, and in a sit-down with Secretary Pompeo in October, 2017- though Mueller, the FBI, and mainstream and some of the alternative press seem either deaf, dumb and blind to it all, or interested in discrediting the study. The irony is, I'd venture to guess, that Binney, with his 40 years of experience, including as Technical Director and technical guru at the NSA, is, even in retirement, more sophisticated in these matters than any one at the Agency, or the FBI, or CIA, or certainly, the Congressional Intelligence Committees. So, it is astounding that any or all of them could have, but did not, invite him to testify as an expert.
Moreover, the NSA has a record of every transmission, and also would have it on backup files. And, the FBI has been sitting on Seth Rich's computer and his communications with Wikileaks, and presumably has a report that it has not released. And of course, as Trump asked in his press conference, where's the DNC server, any or all of which would put this question to rest.
A recent interview with Binney can be found at:
Play HideThe last clause of the first paragraph should have said: "according to Binney, the probability of the split being a coincidence would be one over 100 to the 50th powerJack -> David Habakkuk , a day agoDavidFred -> Jack , a day agoThere is a pattern of abuse of formerly well regarded institutions to achieve the propaganda aims of the Deep State establishment. The depths that were plumbed to push the Iraq WMD falsehoods are well known. Yet no one was held to account nor was there any honest accounting of the abuse. There have been pretenses like the Owen inquiry that you note.
We see the same situation of sweeping under the rug malfeasance and even outright criminality through obfuscation and obstruction in the case of the meddling in the 2016 election by top officials in intelligence and law enforcement. Clearly less and less people are buying what the Deep State sells despite their overwhelming control of the media channels.
It seems that we are marching towards a credibility crisis similar to what was experienced in the Soviet Union when no one trusted the contents in Pravda.
What is to be gained by the leadership in Britain in promoting these biological weapons cases since Litvinenko? In the US it is quite apparent that the Deep State have become extremely powerful and the likelihood that Trump recognizes that resistance is futile is very high. Schumer may be proven right that they have six ways from Sunday to make you kowtow to their dictats.
Jack,TTG , a day ago"Yet no one was held to account"
That was one of the changes being hoped for when Obama was first elected. Instead we got little, except for things such as bailed out bankers and the IRS scandal which lasted until the end of his 2nd term. The panic from the left over the 2016 election issues the are still going on is that the expected candidate isn't in office and they are being exposed. Whether they get prosecuted is another story.
I think Matt Tait, David Habakkuk and many others are reading far more into this Dzerzinsky thing than what it warrants. The government dependent ID cards used by my family while I was working as a clandestine case officer overseas were signed by Robert Ludlum. Intelligence officers often have an odd sense of humor.richardstevenhack -> TTG , a day agoOn a different note, I fully endorse David Habakkuk's recommendation of the writings of Bartles, McDermott and many others at the Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth. They are top notch. I learned a lot from Tim Thomas many years ago.
I agree that taken by itself, the Dzerzinsky thing would be an anomaly only and could be dismissed as "black humor" of a kind often found in hackers. However, taken with all the other evidence produced by Adam Carter, it becomes much more obviously an attempt to support a false flag "Russian hacker" narrative that otherwise is porous.Publius Tacitus -> TTG , a day agoI believe there is a phrase going something like "an attempt to add verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative."
TTG,smoothieX12 . , a day agoYou want us to believe that the GRU are so sloppy and so inexperienced that they would launch a hack on the DNC and not take every measure to ensure there was no link whatsoever to anything Russian? Any former intel officer worth a damn knows that an operation to disrupt the election in a country the size of the United States would start with a risk/reward assessment, would require a team of at least 100 persons and would not be writing any code that could in any way be traced to Russia.
Unfortunately, the original author of this claptrap, Mark Galeotti, who, I regret to say, is, like Tait, British, has now recanted and confessed.ancient archer , a day agoDoctrine-mongering and repeating birth of new faux-academic "entities", such as a "hybrid war" (any war is hybrid by definition), is a distinct feature of the Western "political science-military history" establishment. Galeotti, who for some strange reason passes as Russia "expert" is a perfect example of such "expertise" and doctrine-mongering. Military professionals largely met this "hybrid warfare" BS with disdain.
I have to say that the more I look into this whole Russiagate affair, which is mostly in the minds of democrats (and a few republicans) and the MSM, the more it seems that there is indeed a foreign conspiracy to meddle in the internal affairs of the US (and in the presidential elections) but the meddling entity is not Russia. It is the British!So many (ex-) MI6 operators (Steele, Tait, etc) involved in the story. It is interesting that the media don't question the intense involvement of the British in all this. And of course, the British haven't been laggards in adding fuel to the fire by the whole novichok hoax.
This needs to be looked at in more detail by the alternative media and well informed commentators like the host of this site.
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Jul 18, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
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begob , July 16, 2018 at 9:16 am
Peter VE , July 16, 2018 at 4:51 pmThe best evidence rule should result in the DNC server being made available for inspection by the accused at the discovery stage. Naw gaw hap'n?
Besides, the Crowdstrike copy will have to qualify for a hearsay exception, and trustworthiness comes into issue.
Peter VE , July 16, 2018 at 9:46 amI am willing to bet money that those servers. or more accurately, their hard drives, will be found to have become mysteriously corrupted and no longer readable. The scene from The Big Easy comes to mind, when a heavy magnet is "accidentally" set next to the incriminating videotape in the police evidence room. That, of course, assumes that they will ever be subpoenaed.
Crowdstrike brings up a couple of interesting questions.
1) Were they so bumbling that they would wait a full month after evidence of "hacking" turned up at the DNC to take action to protect the network? They worked for the DNC, so it's possible.
or
2) Did they use that month to ensure that the proper evidence pointing to the GRU could be found on the duplicate copies of the hard drives which they supplied to the FBI, and set up redirecting intermediary steps somewhere on 3rd country servers? In which case, were they actually working for the FSB, (since we know from our own experience that the worst enemy of any intelligence agency are the ones you compete with for funding)?Newton Finn , July 16, 2018 at 9:55 amBased on the incredible sloppiness of their work for the DNC, one can only assume that Crowdstrike is actually a GRU operation ;-)
YY , July 16, 2018 at 10:10 amGood context here for all things Russophobic:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/07/16/when-did-russia-become-an-adversary/
Bit of a slog but relevant
https://disobedientmedia.com/2018/07/muellers-latest-indictment-ignores-evidence-in-the-public-domain/
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May 29, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored by Elizabeth Lea Vos via Disobedient Media,
In his final report in a three-part series, Guccifer 2's West Coast Fingerprint , the Forensicator discovers evidence that at least one operator behind the Guccifer 2.0 persona worked from the West Coast of the United States.
The Forensicator's earlier findings stated that Guccifer 2.0's NGP-VAN files were accessed locally on the East Coast, and in another analysis they suggested that a file published by Guccifer 2.0 was created in the Central time zone of the United States. Most recently, a former DNC official refuted the DNC's initial allegations that Trump opposition files had been ex-filtrated from the DNC by Russian state-sponsored operatives.
So, if Guccifer 2.0's role was negated by the statements of the DNC's own former "official" in a 2017 report by the Associated Press , why do we now return our attention to the Guccifer 2.0 persona, as we reflect on the last section of new findings from the Forensicator?
The answer: Despite almost two years having passed since the appearance of the Guccifer 2.0 persona, legacy media is still trotting out the shambling corpse of Guccifer 2.0 to revive the legitimacy of the Russian hacking narrative. In other words, it is necessary to hammer the final nail into the coffin of the Guccifer 2.0 persona.
As previously noted, In his final report in a three-part series, the Forensicator discusses concrete evidence that at least one operator behind the Guccifer 2.0 persona worked from the West Coast of the United States. He writes:
"Finally, we look at one particular Word document that Guccifer 2 uploaded, which had "track changes" enabled. From the tracking metadata we deduce the timezone offset in effect when Guccifer 2 made that change -- we reach a surprising conclusion: The document was likely saved by Guccifer 2 on the West Coast, US ."
The Forensicator spends the first part of his report evaluating indications that Guccifer 2.0 may have operated out of Russia. Ultimately, the Forensicator discards those tentative results. He emphatically notes:
"The PDT finding draws into question the premise that Guccifer 2 was operating out of Russia, or any other region that would have had GMT+3 timezone offsets in force. Essentially, the Pacific Timezone finding invalidates the GMT+3 timezone findings previously described."
The Forensicator's new West Coast finding is not the first evidence to indicate that operators behind the Guccifer 2.0 persona were based in the US. Nine months ago, Disobedient Media , reported on the Forensicator's analysis , which showed (among other things) that Guccifer 2.0's "ngpvan" archive was created on the East Coast. While that report received the vast majority of attention from the public and legacy media, Disobedient Media later reported on another analysis done by the Forensicator, which found that a file published by Guccifer 2.0 (on a different occasion) was probably created in the Central Timezone of the US.
Adding to all of this, UK based analyst and independent journalist Adam Carter presented his own analysis which also showed that the Guccifer 2.0 Twitter persona interacted on a schedule which was best explained by having been based within the United States.
The chart above shows a box which spans regular working hours. It indicates that unless Guccifer 2.0 worked the night shift, they were likely working out of the US. Though this last data point is circumstantial, it is corroborated by the previously discussed pieces of independently verifiable hard evidence described by the Forensicator.
When taking all of these separate pieces into account, one observes a convergence of evidence that multiple US-based operators were behind the Guccifer 2.0 persona and its publications. This is incredibly significant because it is based on multiple pieces of concrete data; it does not rely on "anonymous sources within the government," nor contractors hired by the DNC. As a result, much of the prior legacy press coverage of Guccifer 2.0 as a Russia-based agent can be readily debunked.
Such tangible evidence stands in contrast to the claims made in a recently published Daily Beast article, which reads more like a gossip column than serious journalism. In the Daily Beast's recital, the outlet cites an anonymous source who claims that a Moscow-based GRU agent was behind the Guccifer 2.0 operation, writing :
"Guccifer 2.0, the "lone hacker" who took credit for providing WikiLeaks with stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, was in fact an officer of Russia's military intelligence directorate (GRU), The Daily Beast has learned. It's an attribution that resulted from a fleeting but critical slip-up in GRU tradecraft.
But on one occasion, The Daily Beast has learned, Guccifer failed to activate the VPN client before logging on. As a result, he left a real, Moscow-based Internet Protocol address in the server logs of an American social media company, according to a source familiar with the government's Guccifer investigation.
Working off the IP address, U.S. investigators identified Guccifer 2.0 as a particular GRU officer working out of the agency's headquarters on Grizodubovoy Street in Moscow."
[The Daily Beast , March 22, 2018]
Clearly, the claim made in the Daily Beast's report is in direct contradiction with the growing mound of evidence suggesting that Guccifer 2.0 operated out of the United States. A detailed technical breakdown of the evidence confirming a West-Coast "last saved" time and how this counters the claims of the Daily Beast can be found in the Forensicator's work.
The Forensicator explained to Disobedient Media that their discovery process was initiated by the following Tweet by Matt Tait ( @pwnallthings ), a security blogger and journalist. Tait noticed a change revision entry in one of the Word documents published in Guccifer 2.0's second batch of documents, (uploaded 3 days after Guccifer 2.0 first appeared on the scene).
The Forensicator corrects Tait, stating that the timestamp is in "wall time," (local time) not UTC. The Forensicator explains that Tait's mistake is understandable because the "Z" suffix usually implies "Zulu" (GMT) time, but that isn't the case for "track changes" timestamps. The Forensicator writes that the document Tait refers to in his Tweet is named Hillary-for-America-fundraising-guidelines-from-agent-letter.docx ; it has Word's "track changes" feature enabled. Guccifer 2.0 made a trivial change to the document, using the pseudonym, "Ernesto Che," portrayed below:
The Forensicator correlated that timestamp ("12:56:00 AM") with the document's "last saved" timestamp expressed in GMT, as shown below courtesy of the Forensicator's study :
Based on the evidence discussed above, the Forensicator concludes that Guccifer 2.0 saved this file on a system that had a timezone offset of -7 hours (the difference between 0:56 AM and 7:56 AM GMT). Thus, the system where this document was last changed used Pacific Timezone settings.
The logical conclusion drawn from the preceding analysis is that Guccifer 2.0 was operating somewhere on the West Coast of the United States when they made their change to that document . This single finding throws into shambles any other conclusions that might indicate that Guccifer 2.0 was operating out of Russia. This latest finding also adds to the previously cited evidence that the persona was probably operated by multiple individuals located in the United States.
Taken all together, the factual basis of the Russian hacking story totally collapses. We are left instead with multiple traces of a US-based operation that created the appearance of evidence that Kremlin-allied hackers had breached the DNC network. Publicly available data suggests that Guccifer 2.0 is a US-based operation. To this, we add:
- The Forensicator's recent findings that Guccifer 2.0 deliberately planted "Russian fingerprints" into his first document, as reported by Disobedient Media.
- A former DNC official's statement that a document with so-called "Russian fingerprints" was not in fact taken from the DNC, as reported by Disobedient Media .
- The media's role in propagating the connection between early Russian hacking allegations and the Guccifer 2.0 persona, as reported by Disobedient Media .
In the course of the last nine months this outlet has documented the work of the Forensicator, which has indicated that not only were Guccifer 2.0's "ngp-van" files accessed locally on the East Coast of the US, but also that several files published by the Guccifer 2.0 persona were altered and saved within the United States. The "Russian fingerprints" left on Guccifer 2.0's first document have been debunked, as has the claim that the file itself was extracted from the DNC network in the first place. On top of all this, a former DNC official withdrew the DNC's initial allegations that supported the "Russian hack" claim in the first place.
One hopes that with all of this information in mind, the long-suffering Guccifer 2.0 saga can be laid to rest once and for all, at least for unbiased and critically thinking observers.
Chris2 Tue, 05/29/2018 - 22:15 Permalink
beemasters -> Chris2 Tue, 05/29/2018 - 22:18 PermalinkSnowden talked about the NSA or is it CIA, had the ability to leave Russian fingerprints.
All of this was the "insurance" to frame Trump who they knew would win when they saw that Hillary rallies had 20 people only showing up few old lesbians and nobody else.
LetThemEatRand Tue, 05/29/2018 - 22:16 PermalinkThe hunt for the messenger has certainly proven to be an effective distraction.
Meanwhile, Snowden risked his life and liberty to show us evidence that the NSA developed technology to make it appear even with expert analysis that NSA hacking originated from a foreign power.
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Mar 03, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
... ... ...
In addition to several odd facts surrounding Rich's still unsolved murder - which officials have deemed a "botched robbery," forensic technical evidence has emerged which contradicts the Crowdstrike report. The Irvine, CA company partially funded by Google , was the only entity allowed to analyze the DNC servers in relation to claims of election hacking:
Notably, Crowdstrike has been considered by many to be discredited over their revision and retraction of a report over Russian hacking of Ukrainian military equipment - a report which the government of Ukraine said was fake news.
In connection with the emergence in some media reports which stated that the alleged "80% howitzer D-30 Armed Forces of Ukraine removed through scrapping Russian Ukrainian hackers software gunners," Land Forces Command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine informs that the said information is incorrect .
Ministry of Defence of Ukraine asks journalists to publish only verified information received from the competent official sources. Spreading false information leads to increased social tension in society and undermines public confidence in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. -- mil.gov.ua (translated) (1.6.2017)
In fact, several respected journalists have cast serious doubt on CrowdStrike's report on the DNC servers:
- How To Get To "Reasonable Certainty" on a Russia Finding -- Jeffrey Carr, Medium (12.13.2016)
- HERE'S THE PUBLIC EVIDENCE RUSSIA HACKED THE DNC -- IT'S NOT ENOUGH -- Sam Biddle, The Intercept (12.14.2016)
Pay attention, because Mueller is likely to use the Crowdstrike report to support the rumored upcoming charges against Russian hackers.
Also notable is that Crowdstrike founder and anti-Putin Russian expat Dimitri Alperovitch sits on the Atlantic Council - which is funded by the US State Department, NATO, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukranian Oligarch Victor Pinchuk. Who else is on the Atlantic Council? Evelyn Farkas - who slipped up during an MSNBC interview with Mika Brzezinski and disclosed that the Obama administration had been spying on the Trump campaign:
The Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff dealing with Russians, that they would try to compromise those sources and methods , meaning we would not longer have access to that intelligence. - Evelyn Farkas
... ... ...
Brennan and Russian disinformation
Hersh also told Butowsky that the DNC made up the Russian hacking story as a disinformation campaign -- directly pointing a finger at former CIA director (and now MSNBC/NBC contributor ) John Brennan as the architect.
I have a narrative of how that whole f*cking thing began. It's a Brennan operation, it was an American disinformation , and the fu*kin' President, at one point, they even started telling the press -- they were backfeeding the Press, the head of the NSA was going and telling the press, fu*king c*cksucker Rogers, was telling the press that we even know who in the Russian military intelligence service leaked it.
Listen to Seymour Hersh leaked audio: https://www.youtube.com/embed/giuZdBAXVh0 (full transcription here and extended audio of the Hersh conversation here )
Hersh denied that he told Butowsky anything before the leaked audio emerged , telling NPR " I hear gossip [Butowsky] took two and two and made 45 out of it. "
Technical Evidence
As we mentioned last week, Dotcom's assertion is backed up by an analysis done last year by a researcher who goes by the name Forensicator , who determined that the DNC files were copied at 22.6 MB/s - a speed virtually impossible to achieve from halfway around the world, much less over a local network - yet a speed typical of file transfers to a memory stick.
The big hint
Last but not least, let's not forget that Julian Assange heavily implied Seth Rich was a source:
Given that a) the Russian hacking narrative hinges on Crowdstrikes's questionable reporting , and b) a mountain of evidence pointing to Seth Rich as the source of the leaked emails - it stands to reason that Congressional investigators and Special Counsel Robert Mueller should at minimum explore these leads.
As retired U.S. Navy admiral James A. Lyons, Jr. asks: why aren't they?
Liberal -> Stan522 Fri, 03/02/2018 - 21:26 Permalink
Relax you conspiracy theory-loving extremists. Our 336 spy agencies are just busy trying to solve the Michael Hasting's murder first. But it's just really hard to find the culprits because they're all hiding in Siberia.
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Mar 08, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com
Richardstevenhack , 07 March 2018 at 06:23 PM
Re this: " In the case of Russian meddling there is no forensic evidence available to the IC because the Democratic National Committee did not permit the FBI to investigate and examine the computers and the network that was allegedly attacked."To be precise, CrowdStrike did provide the FBI with allegedly "certified true images" of the DNC servers allegedly involved in the alleged "hack." They also allegedly provided these images to FireEye and Mandiant, IIRC .
All three allegedly examined those images and concurred with CrowdStrike's analysis.
Of course, given the CrowdStrike itself is a massively compromised organization due to its founder and CEO, those "certified true images" are themselves tainted evidence.
In addition, regardless of whether the images were true or not, the evidence allegedly contained therein is painfully inadequate to confirm that APT28 or APT29 were involved, nor that the Russian government was involved, or even that there was a real hack involved, and even less evidence that any emails that might have been exfiltrated were given to Wikileaks as opposed to another leak such as that alleged by Sy Hersh to have been done by Seth Rich.
The "assessment" that Putin ordered any of this is pure mind-reading and can be utterly dismissed absent any of the other evidence Publius points out as necessary.
The same applies to any "estimate" that the Russian government preferred Trump or wished to denigrate Clinton. Based on what I read in pro-Russian news outlets, Russian officials took great pains to not pick sides and Putin's comments were similarly very restrained. The main quote from Putin about Trump that emerged was mistranslated as approval whereas it was more an observation of Trump's personality. At no time did Putin ever say he favored Trump over Clinton, even though that was a likely probability given Clinton's "Hitler" comparison.
As an aside, I also recommend Scott Ritter's trashing of the ICA. Ritter is familiar with intelligence estimates and their reliability based on his previous service as a UN weapons inspector in Iraq and in Russia implementing arms control treaties.
Exposing The Man Behind The Curtain
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/exposing-the-man-behind-the-curtain_us_5877887be4b05b7a465df6a4Throwing a Curveball at 'Intelligence Community Consensus' on Russia
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/did-17-intelligence-agencies-really-come-to-consensus-on-russia/His analysis of the NSA document leaked by NSA contractor Reality Winner which supposedly supported the Russia theory is also relevant.
Leaked NSA Report Is Short on Facts, Proves Little in 'Russiagate' Case
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/leaked-nsa-report-is-short-on-facts-proves-little-in-russiagate-case/
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Feb 27, 2018 | www.youtube.com
So, the Democrats want to show that the FBI spying was due to Page and not the dossier because it came "first" so to speak?
This still doesn't excuse them using the dossier in FISA warrant without disclosing information about how it was obtained and it doesn't take away from the fact that he helped them nail Russians before.
How do they keep their reputation in tact by being "two faced", it appears to me to make their reputation worse so I really don't get the Democrats strategy on this, I suppose as it doesn't change what they have done.
I still say Crowdstrike so called "analysis" is where the rubber really starts to hit the road with Wikileaks disclosure, saying it was the "Russians".
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Feb 21, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
Partisan | Feb 20, 2018 5:06:58 PM | 11
The whole piece is just hilarious and I laughed out loud all time while reading it.
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/02/16/nyts-really-weird-russiagate-story/
Since the FBI never inspected the DNC's computers first-hand, the only evidence comes from an Irvine, California, cyber-security firm known as CrowdStrike whose chief technical officer, Dmitri Alperovitch, a well-known Putin-phobe, is a fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank that is also vehemently anti-Russian as well as a close Hillary Clinton ally.Thus, Putin-basher Clinton hired Putin-basher Alperovitch to investigate an alleged electronic heist, and to absolutely no one's surprise, his company concluded that guilty party was Vladimir Putin. Amazing! Since then, a small army of internet critics has chipped away at CrowdStrike for praising the hackers as among the best in the business yet declaring in the same breath that they gave themselves away by uploading a document in the name of "Felix Edmundovich," i.e. Felix E. Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police.
As noted cyber-security expert Jeffrey Carr observed with regard to Russia's two main intelligence agencies: "Raise your hand if you think that a GRU or FSB officer would add Iron Felix's name to the metadata of a stolen document before he released it to the world while pretending to be a Romanian hacker. Someone clearly had a wicked sense of humor."
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Feb 20, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
Partisan | Feb 20, 2018 5:06:58 PM | 11
The whole piece is just hilarious and I laughed out loud all time while reading it.
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/02/16/nyts-really-weird-russiagate-story/
Since the FBI never inspected the DNC's computers first-hand, the only evidence comes from an Irvine, California, cyber-security firm known as CrowdStrike whose chief technical officer, Dmitri Alperovitch, a well-known Putin-phobe, is a fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank that is also vehemently anti-Russian as well as a close Hillary Clinton ally.Thus, Putin-basher Clinton hired Putin-basher Alperovitch to investigate an alleged electronic heist, and to absolutely no one's surprise, his company concluded that guilty party was Vladimir Putin. Amazing! Since then, a small army of internet critics has chipped away at CrowdStrike for praising the hackers as among the best in the business yet declaring in the same breath that they gave themselves away by uploading a document in the name of "Felix Edmundovich," i.e. Felix E. Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police.
As noted cyber-security expert Jeffrey Carr observed with regard to Russia's two main intelligence agencies: "Raise your hand if you think that a GRU or FSB officer would add Iron Felix's name to the metadata of a stolen document before he released it to the world while pretending to be a Romanian hacker. Someone clearly had a wicked sense of humor."
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Feb 08, 2018 | wearechange.org
Article via Strategic-Culture
New revelations from Wikileaks' 'Vault 7' leak shed a disturbing light on the safeguarding of privacy. Something already known and largely suspected has now become documented by Wikileaks. It seems evident that the CIA is now a state within a state, an entity out of control that has even arrived at the point of creating its own hacking network in order to avoid the scrutiny of the NSA and other agencies.
Reading the revelations contained in the documents released by WikiLeaks and adding them to those already presented in recent years by Snowden, it now seems evident that the technological aspect regarding espionage is a specialty in which the CIA, as far as we know, excels. Hardware and software vendors that are complicit -- most of which are American, British or Israeli -- give the CIA the opportunity to achieve informational full-spectrum dominance, relegating privacy to extinction.
Such a convergence of power, money and technology entails major conflicts of interest, as can be seen in the case of Amazon AWS (Amazon's Cloud Service), cloud provider for the CIA , whose owner, Jeff Bezos, is also the owner of The Washington Post .
It is a clear overlap of private interests that conflicts with the theoretical need to declare uncomfortable truths without the need to consider orders numbering in the millions of dollars from clients like the CIA.
While it is just one example, there are thousands more out there. The perverse interplay between media, spy agencies and politicians has compromised the very meaning of the much vaunted democracy of the land of the Stars and Stripes. The constant scandals that are beamed onto our screens now serve the sole purpose of advancing the deep interest of the Washington establishment. In geopolitical terms, it is now more than obvious that the deep state has committed all available means toward sabotaging any dialogue and détente between the United States and Russia.
In terms of news, the Wikileaks revelations shed light on the methods used by US intelligence agencies like the CIA to place blame on the Kremlin, or networks associated with it, for the hacking that occurred during the American elections.
Perhaps this is too generous a depiction of matters, given that the general public has yet to see any evidence of the hacking of the DNC servers. In addition to this, we know that the origin of Podesta's email revelations stem from the loss of a smartphone and the low data-security measures employed by the chairman of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.
In general, when the 16 US spy agencies blamed Russia for the hacking of the elections, they were never specific in terms of forensic evidence. Simply put, the media, spies and politicians created false accusations based on the fact that Moscow, together with RT and other media (not directly linked to the Kremlin), finally enjoy a major presence in the mainstream media.
The biggest problem for the Washington establishment lies in the revelation of news that is counterproductive to the interests of the deep state. RT, Sputnik, this site and many others have diligently covered and reported to the general public every development concerning the Podesta revelations or the hacking of the DNC.
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Mar 08, 2017 | www.frontpagemag.com
Troubling questions about "Umbrage" and potential false-flag attacks. 53
The Central Intelligence Agency now can mimic foreign intelligence agencies' hack attacks by leaving electronic "fingerprints" creating the false impression of a foreign intrusion into computer networks, according to claims accompanying a new WikiLeaks document dump.
In other words, there may not be hard evidence that CIA operatives, say, used cyberspace to create a modern-day Reichstag fire to undermine the Trump administration, but it may be the case that the CIA has the technological capabilities to do such a thing, if it were so inclined.
This assertion that the CIA can hack computer networks and leave behind convincing evidence that somebody else did it, comes with the release by WikiLeaks of a huge collection of documents – 8,761 items in all – collectively dubbed the "Vault 7" leaks that purport to describe espionage techniques used by the CIA. The Vault 7 collection is said to have come from a former U.S. government hacker or contractor associated with "an isolated, high-security network" within the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Va. The files made public don't include the actual cyber weapons themselves which WikiLeaks says it will not release for the time being.
This documentary agglomeration covers "the entire hacking capacity of the CIA," Julian Assange's WikiLeaks claimed in a press release, and it is only the first in a series of what he calls the "Year Zero" leaks.
The Year Zero label has a decidedly sinister quality to it and may offer clues into what WikiLeaks hopes to accomplish with these new leaks, apparently the most significant and damaging to the U.S. intelligence community since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden handed over thousands of classified U.S. documents to journalists in 2013.
Year Zero was used by the bloodthirsty Khmer Rouge when it seized power in Cambodia in 1975. The term is analogous to Year One of the French Revolutionary calendar, which implied a violent break with the old system and the merciless leveling of existing institutions.
As one online resource states:
The idea behind Year Zero is that all culture and traditions within a society must be completely destroyed or discarded and a new revolutionary culture must replace it, starting from scratch. All history of a nation or people before Year Zero is deemed largely irrelevant, as it will ideally be purged and replaced from the ground up. In Cambodia, so-called New People -- teachers, artists, and intellectuals -- were especially singled out and executed during the purges accompanying Year Zero.
According to WikiLeaks, "[t]he CIA's Remote Devices Branch's UMBRAGE group collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques 'stolen' from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation."
With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the "fingerprints" of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from. UMBRAGE components cover keyloggers, password collection, webcam capture, data destruction, persistence, privilege escalation, stealth, anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques.
If this new information about "Umbrage" is accurate, this means that, as stated above, the CIA could hack people and institutions and then attribute the cyber-attacks to others in what amount to false-flag operations. For example, in order to create the impression that a foreign power favored one political candidate over another, the CIA or unseen rogue elements with access to "Umbrage," could have hacked into Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee and made it appear that the intrusion was carried out by former KGB lieutenant colonel Vladimir Putin's operatives.
That Russians hacked Clinton and the DNC and gave Trump an unfair advantage in the election is precisely what Democrats allege. Is such a scenario in which U.S. operatives hack one political party to help another at least a little far-fetched?
You bet it is. But given what we've learned about the CIA's anti-Trump shenanigans in recent months, it seems unwise to reflexively rule out the possibility that that's how things could have gone down. Espionage, after all, is all about deception and covering tracks. Things aren't what they seem and the motives of those creating an illusion aren't easily discerned.
On the positive side, "Umbrage," if it is a real thing, is a powerful innovation in tradecraft and an indication that American cyberwarfare is soaring to dizzying new heights.
On the other hand, combine "Umbrage" with the seemingly invincible false narrative that President Donald Trump is a tool of Russian interests, and plenty of Americans would be willing to believe Trump really does have substantial ties to the Kremlin, something that has not been proven. Even now there is still no publicly available evidence the Trump campaign somehow colluded with the Russian government last year. Sources in newspaper articles are never identified. All that exists is the alleged say-so of faceless CIA spooks and people like former CIA employee and would-be presidential spoiler Evan McMullin whose motives are questionable.
It is hard to know what to believe.
And it opens the door to head-spinning possibilities and far-out theories.
As investigative journalist Jerome Corsi writes of Vault 7 and "Umbrage":
This revelation yields a "through the looking glass" possibility that the Obama administration obtained [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] permission to conduct electronic surveillance on Russians believed to be coordinating with the Trump campaign based on intelligence the CIA planted to deceive the NSA into thinking there was actual contact between Russian agents and the Trump campaign.
Possibly, what the CIA was monitoring was not actual contacts between Russian agents and the Trump campaign, but CIA-created counter-espionage designed to implicate Trump and provide the legal context for the [Department of Justice] to have enough "evidence" to obtain a FISA green-light.
This kind of double-level thinking is enough to give anyone a throbbing headache.
Vault 7 also includes eye-opening developments worthy of James Bond 007 and Q Branch.
According to WikiLeaks, the CIA recently "lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized 'zero day' exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation." These cyber weapons can be used "against a wide range of U.S. and European company products, [including] Apple's iPhone, Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones."
Something called "Weeping Angel" was created by the CIA's Embedded Devices Branch to infest smart televisions.
"After infestation, Weeping Angel places the target TV in a 'Fake-Off' mode, so that the owner falsely believes the TV is off when it is on. In 'Fake-Off' mode the TV operates as a bug, recording conversations in the room and sending them over the Internet to a covert CIA server."
Another technique allows the CIA "to bypass the encryption of WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Wiebo, Confide and Cloackman by hacking the 'smart' phones that they run on and collecting audio and message traffic before encryption is applied."
"As of October 2014," WikiLeaks claims, "the CIA was also looking at infecting the vehicle control systems used by modern cars and trucks. The purpose of such control is not specified, but it would permit the CIA to engage in nearly undetectable assassinations."
Despite all this intrigue, it needs to be said that the CIA does some valuable work to advance U.S. interests in the world. It's a shame that it has come to be dominated by left-wingers over the years.
There is, though, a certain logic to the agency's slide to port. Not all self-styled do-gooders, after all, land jobs in the nonprofit sector. A leftist member of the intelligence community is fundamentally the same as a community organizer who is convinced he knows what is best for his fellow man.
And left-wingers in all occupations are willing to do whatever it takes to accomplish their objectives.
In the summer 2001 issue of Social Policy magazine, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) founder Wade Rathke urged his comrades to get in on the ground floor of the cyber-warfare revolution:
Crazy, computer viruses are started by young kids around the world or hackers bored out of their skulls that live right down the street. As union organizers we are still doing 8 point difficulty dumpster dives for alpha lists of employees, when theoretically some good geeks could tap in, load up, and download the whole thing and throw it over our transom window. What a waste of talent when such a huge contribution could be made to the labor movement.
Maybe Rathke missed his calling.
Matthew Vadum, senior vice president at the investigative think tank Capital Research Center, is an award-winning investigative reporter and author of the book, " Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers ."
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Feb 04, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
mc888 -> nmewn Feb 3, 2018 12:00 PM Permalink
Sessions is not recused from a Ukraine investigation. An investigation of the State Dept should bring the focus around to issues of substance.
- Obama repeal of Smith-Mundt to allow State Dept propaganda in the domestic US
- Obama coup of Ukraine
- Obama / McCain support of Nazis in Ukraine
- Adam Schiff relationship with Ukrainian arms dealer Igor Pasternak
- DNC collusion with Ukrainian IT "Security" company Crowdstrike tied to the Atlantic Council to push false narrative of DNC hack and malware to influence US election
- DNC consultant Andrea Chalupa, unregistered foreign agent whose entire family is tied to Ukrainian Intelligence
Further research revealed that Andrea Chalupa and her two siblings are actively involved with other sources of digital terrorism, disinformation and spamming, like TrolleyBust com, stopfake org, and informnapalm.
Ms. Chalupa kept cooperating with the Khodorovky owned magazine "The Interpreter." Now, it's a part of RFE/RL run by the government funded Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) whose director, Dr. Leon Aron also a director of Russian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
http://thesaker.is/guess-whats-neither-meat-nor-fish-but-ms-chalupa-and
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Jan 02, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
Sid2 , Jan 1, 2018 8:19:39 PM | 31
@25 I don't mean to argue but would wonder on your second note in the chain, blaming Comey. Clinton was done far far before anything Comey could do at the last minute. In the summer. By then the emails had been released (however that release occurred) to show how she had twisted Sanders away from the nomination and had questions re The Clinton Foundation.Sid2 , Jan 1, 2018 8:34:37 PM | 33I think Jack Rabbit's question hits the money in that they KNOW what happened. My question is how come the Clintons would have so much clout to control the story away from their shenanigans? It must leak over into significant parts of the Democratic Party itself. PS I may be wrong on this--Crowdstrike is responsible for Guccifer 2.0, at the behest of Hillary.
@31 supplementary on Crowdstrike activity (intelligence service hired by Hillary Clinton after the leaks/hacks became public):http://theduran.com/how-crowdstrike-placed-malware-in-the-dnc-server/
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Last modified: March, 01, 2020
