Cont: All things Trump + Russia Part 2

[Oystein]

The argument "Russians are innocent because they are Superior" is kinda ... I'd say "lame", if "fascist" wasn't the better word.

 

[GlennB]

About Killary's cowboy server he said that when he hacked it in 2013, he was far from the first and traces were left all over the place. And he notes the obvious even our resident Russia CT kooks understand and therefore stay very small-lipped about:

Lazar does not believe a Russian connection will be found because, "the Russians are more skillful than this, to let the tracks saved in the documents point to them. So, this is made by the other guys who want to put and point to the Russians."

Yes, but the Russians also know that and will obviously leave hints of their presence in order to make people believe they were not involved.

 

[Childlike Empress]

Yes, but the Russians also know that and will obviously leave hints of their presence in order to make people believe they were not involved.

It's turtles all the way down.

 

[jimbob]

The argument "Russians are innocent because they are Superior" is kinda ... I'd say "lame", if "fascist" wasn't the better word.

Yes, but the Russians also know that and will obviously leave hints of their presence in order to make people believe they were not involved.

Alternatively, the fact that the Russians sometimes cover their tracks doesn't mean that they always do so.

Oversights happen.

Some evidence is circumstantial because it is easy to fake - for example the timestamp evidence; *I* have sufficient knowledge to fake that, so the fact that indicates somewhere in the US is not very useful.

 

[Childlike Empress]

Alternatively, the fact that the Russians sometimes cover their tracks doesn't mean that they always do so.

Oversights happen.

Some evidence is circumstantial because it is easy to fake - for example the timestamp evidence; *I* have sufficient knowledge to fake that, so the fact that indicates somewhere in the US is not very useful.

And you have sufficient knowledge (although I'm not sure about creativity) to leave the name of an infamous soviet intelligence guy in Cyrillic letters in the meta data. Thanks for finally acknowledging that.

Next you explain why a Russian hacker would do that.

 

[Cl1mh4224rd]

Next you explain why a Russian hacker would do that.

Because they're most skilled in digital breaking and entering than they are in scrubbing the stolen goods of every single fingerprint?

 

[Oystein]

Next you explain why a Russian hacker would do that.

Vanity.

 

[Childlike Empress]

Because they're most skilled in digital breaking and entering than they are in scrubbing the stolen goods of every single fingerprint?

Taking care of the meta data is absolute basic stuff even jimbob is aware of. Vanity is maybe the best explanation, and it's totally weak if we are dealing with a professional operation (i.e. "The Russians", i.e. "Putin"). They would leave their traces only if they want their targets to know that they did something serious enough to not let the public know.

 

[jimbob]

Taking care of the meta data is absolute basic stuff even jimbob is aware of. Vanity is maybe the best explanation, and it's totally weak if we are dealing with a professional operation (i.e. "The Russians", i.e. "Putin"). They would leave their traces only if they want their targets to know that they did something serious enough to not let the public know.

It could be carelessness, it could be deliberate misinformation. It does not, however, support the case that it is not Russia.

 

[Childlike Empress]

It could be carelessness, it could be deliberate misinformation. It does not, however, support the case that it is not Russia.

Oh, it does, especially including the fact that we know about this meta data from a shady company run by a disgruntled Russian connected in transatlantic "think" tanks, not from the FBI who never saw the server.

 

[Elagabalus]

...They would leave their traces only if they want their targets to know that they did something serious enough to not let the public know...

Really?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgi_Markov

 

[Childlike Empress]

Brilliant: The De-Putin-Nazification of America

[...] As I’m sure you’ll recall, the Putin-Nazis originally materialized out of thin air around the time that Clinton was managing to lose the US presidential election to a repulsive, jabbering, narcissistic clown with absolutely no political experience, who the mainstream media had been assuring the world for months was the Second Coming of Hitler. Given that it was virtually impossible for Clinton to lose to such a noxious buffoon, the only rational explanation was that the Russians had somehow “hacked” the election, or “interfered with,” or “influenced” the election. They had done this by getting their hands on a batch of internal Democratic Party emails, passing them on to Putin-Nazi Propaganda Minister Julian Assange, who published them on the Internet, where they were read by former Obama-voters, who were so completely shocked by their contents that they decided not to vote for Clinton, as they had obviously been intending to do, until their minds got “interfered with.”

The rest, as they say, is history. On January 20, despite the fact that everyone knew that the entire Trump family were Putin-Nazi “sleeper” agents, and that the man himself was the Glorious Leader of an underground army of neo-Nazis numbering in the tens of hundreds that was threatening the very fabric of democracy by circulating cartoon frogs on the Internet, Donald J. Trump was sworn in as President, and the Trumpian Reich officially began. [...]

Seven months later, here we are, with a Special Counsel and a D.C. grand jury, who will certainly be able to find something on Trump, or at least ensure that he spends the rest of his term denying the stream of allegations, rumors, and leaks that will flow therefrom. Which means it’s time to start getting ready for the day when our national nightmare is over, and Kamala Harris (or whichever loyal figurehead the ruling classes ultimately choose) marches through Washington like Charles de Gaulle, presumably with the Obamas and Clintons in tow, after which the USA can continue to bomb, occupy, sanction, and otherwise destabilize various other countries, allow its banks to debt-enslave its citizens, maintain a brutal, militarized police force, and everything else it’s doing at the moment, but in a normal, liberal, non-fascist manner, and Stephen Colbert can get back to comedy. [...]

 

[Oystein]

Brilliant: The De-Putin-Nazification of America

Given that it was virtually impossible for Clinton to lose to such a noxious buffoon, the only rational explanation was that the Russians had somehow “hacked” the election, or “interfered with,” or “influenced” the election.

This indeed sounds very equivalent to the way Conspiracy Theorists "think": "I can't explain A, therefore any B that happens to pop out of the darkest of my body cavities".
E.g. "I do not see how the NoC witnesses could possibly be mistaken, therefore a military plane flew over the Pentagon".

 

[Emily's Cat]

This indeed sounds very equivalent to the way Conspiracy Theorists "think": "I can't explain A, therefore any B that happens to pop out of the darkest of my body cavities".
E.g. "I do not see how the NoC witnesses could possibly be mistaken, therefore a military plane flew over the Pentagon".

I don't think you understood that article.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Brilliant: The De-Putin-Nazification of America

That was hilarious.

 

[Childlike Empress]

That was hilarious.

I think I'm going to buy his debut novel Zone 23 that is advertised in the article. There is one great writer (never heard of him before).

 

[Stacko]

Paul Manafort may become eager to make a deal.

 

[varwoche]

Paul Manafort may become eager to make a deal.

Curious. And yet Emily's Cat tells us that the Russian involvement is overblown, and that the Trump gang is getting in trouble merely for associating with ordinary Russian citizens, and even for associating with ordinary American citizens of Russian descent.

Damn, those ordinary Russian citizens are positively brimming with wealth and high-level connections. It must be an extraordinarily wealthy country, and the common people apparently excel as networking.

 

[dudalb]

Paul Manafort may become eager to make a deal.

So we may have our Joe Valachi

 

[Brainster]

Anybody here talking about this Salon article, which references a Nation article which also seems to have been ignored by the lamestream media. Quoting from Salon:

Last week the respected left-liberal magazine The Nation published an explosive article that details in great depth the findings of a new report — authored in large part by former U.S. intelligence officers — which claims to present forensic evidence that the Democratic National Committee was not hacked by the Russians in July 2016. Instead, the report alleges, the DNC suffered an insider leak, conducted in the Eastern time zone of the United States by someone with physical access to a DNC computer.

The former US intelligence officers are the members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group that was initially formed to protest against the intel used to justify the Iraq War.

This part sounds pretty conclusive:

Investigators found that 1,976 megabytes of data were downloaded locally on July 5, 2016. The information was downloaded with a memory key or some other portable storage device. The download operation took 87 seconds — meaning the speed of transfer was 22.7 megabytes per second — “a speed that far exceeds an internet capability for a remote hack,” as Lawrence puts it. What’s more, they say, a transoceanic transfer would have been even slower (Guccifer claimed to be working from Romania).

And get this:

Further casting doubt on the official narrative is the fact the the DNC’s computer servers were never examined by the FBI. Instead, the agency relied on a report compiled by Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity firm compromised by serious conflicts of interest — the major one being that the firm was paid by the DNC itself to conduct its work. Another is that the firm’s owner is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a think tank known for its hostility toward Russia.

However, this part makes me a little uncomfortable:

The Intelligence Community Assessment published in January of this year, which claims “high confidence” in the Russian hacking theory, presented no hard evidence. Yet many in the media have relied on it as proof ever since. Ray McGovern, another VIPS member and formerly the chief of the CIA’s Soviet Foreign Policy Branch, called that intelligence assessment a “disgrace” to the profession.

McGovern is a bit of a kook; he has been on the fringes of the 9-11 Truth Movement for years; he wrote this blurb for one of David Ray Griffin's many nutty books:

"It has long been clear that the Bush-Cheney administration cynically exploited the attacks of 9/11 to promote its imperial designs.

But the present volume confronts us with compelling evidence for an even more disturbing conclusion: that the 9/11 attacks were themselves orchestrated by this administration precisely so they could be thus exploited.

Compelling evidence? Griffin's claims fall apart as soon as you examine them.

So McGovern's got some hair on him, and he's one of the four principal authors of the VIPS study according to the Nation:

The chief researchers active on the DNC case are four: William Binney, formerly the NSA’s technical director for world geopolitical and military analysis and designer of many agency programs now in use; Kirk Wiebe, formerly a senior analyst at the NSA’s SIGINT Automation Research Center; Edward Loomis, formerly technical director in the NSA’s Office of Signal Processing; and Ray McGovern, an intelligence analyst for nearly three decades and formerly chief of the CIA’s Soviet Foreign Policy Branch.

So I decided to look more into some of the other guys. William Binney? Here's an interview with him after he signed AE 9-11 Truth's petition.

As for Weibe and Loomis I couldn't find any concreted evidence of ties to the 9-11 crackpots, but they were both was closely associated with Binney at the NSA, and they both claim they could have prevented 9-11.

In a hard-hitting, on-point report, they told Scott Pelley that NSA had technology---a program called ThinThread--that was ready to deploy in January 2001 and could have picked up critical intelligence prior to 9/11. NSA management rejected ThinThread, and embarked on a billion-dollar boondoggle, Trailblazer, a proposal designed figure how to do what ThinThread could do (collect and analyze massive amounts of data) on a massive and far more invasive scale. NSA also tossed ThinThread's privacy protections, leaving Americans vulnerable to illegal surveillance.

But according to this New Yorker article from a couple years back ThinThread was rejected precisely because its privacy protections were inadequate:

But this was before 9/11, and the N.S.A.’s lawyers deemed ThinThread too invasive of Americans’ privacy.

So I'd say yellow light on this story: proceed with caution.