Cont: Breaking: Mueller Grand Jury charges filed, arrests as soon as Monday pt 2

[Skeptic Ginger]

If you don't access the physical hardware itself, there's a lot you cannot be certain of. For example, BIOS hacks won't generally get replicated. Depending on how careful you are about copying the contents of a hard drive (you can't just do a copy/paste), those contents may not be fully duplicated either. And if you want to evaluate the possibility of an inside job, then yes, actually, dusting for fingerprints is potentially useful.

There's really no good reason for the FBI to not access the actual physical servers.

Red herring.

 

[Ziggurat]

Red herring.

Blue tuna.

 

[davefoc]

I just realized that Ziggurat was talking about hacks to the BIOS ROM. It seems plausible that all remnants of a BIOS attack might not be present on the hard disk or a hard disk image.


However, the article states that a third party investigated the DNC server. It seems likely that any analysis of the server would have included a test of the BIOS ROM for shenanigans. To know specifically what the third party did one would need access to their report which probably isn't public.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

I just realized that Ziggurat was talking about hacks to the BIOS ROM. It seems plausible that all remnants of a BIOS attack might not be present on the hard disk or a hard disk image.


However, the article states that a third party investigated the DNC server. It seems likely that any analysis of the server would have included a test of the BIOS ROM for shenanigans. To know specifically what the third party did one would need access to their report which probably isn't public.

Regardless, the FBI was investigating Russian election interference, hacking/attempted hacking of the DNC, of states' voting systems, and of state's voter registration systems long before they warned the DNC they were the target of a cyber attack.

How the DNC responded to the warning remains a red herring.

 

[theprestige]

Trump has reason to fear the IC.
I don't see how he can legitimately claim that they can't be trusted.

I think that's a fairly reasonable opinion to have, in the context of what's being discussed in this thread. But I'd like to go back to your previous post:

Trump pissed on the IC long before he even became a nominee.

I think that "long before he became a nominee", he had legitimate reasons to distrust ("piss on") the US intelligence committee. The same way we all probably have legitimate reasons to distrust the US intelligence committee. Indeed, I think that the fact that he was pissing on the IC long before he got embroiled in a feud with them is an argument in favor of his current mistrust being motivated in part by the healthy mistrust we all have for an Intelligence Community that includes COINTELPRO, Iran-Contra, black torture sites and extraordinary rendition, warrantless wiretapping and unconstitutional data mining of US citizens, etc.

 

[Segnosaur]

No warrant is required if the DNC voluntarily hands them over.

No warrant is required if the DNC voluntarily hands them over.

Which of course doesn't answer the question... why would they want (or need) to?

As has been pointed out to you before... EVERYTHING can be copied and turned over to the FBI. And the intrusion was not physical so there was no need to examine the machine itself.

Why wouldn't the Democrats want to turn the machine over? Well, maybe they wanted to have their own experts run a parallel investigation that might highlight issues the FBI overlooked. Or maybe they don't want to lose a potentially valuable piece of hardware (decent servers can cost many $10s of thousands of dollars *) that could be useful in the future.

Note: Costs include physical hardware, software, man-hour costs, etc.

Re: Virtual or physical server

Physical.

Do you have any evidence that the servers in question were in fact physical servers and not virtual servers running on a local host?

 

[Hellbound]

As has been pointed out to you before... EVERYTHING can be copied and turned over to the FBI. And the intrusion was not physical so there was no need to examine the machine itself.
...
Or maybe they don't want to lose a potentially valuable piece of hardware (decent servers can cost many $10s of thousands of dollars) that could be useful in the future.

Actually, my suspicion would be these two, along wit the time and money that would be lost having to purchase or rent a new server to replace the one being investigated, and reloading and reconfiguring all the software on that new system. If they had a good backup, it would be easier, but they'd still be out the cost. I suspect they didn't want the downtime associated with the hardware having to be packaged as evidence and shipped (once collected as evidence, it stays as such through the investigation, I'm fairly sure. It would likely not be returned quickly).

 

[Fudbucker]

I think that's a fairly reasonable opinion to have, in the context of what's being discussed in this thread. But I'd like to go back to your previous post:



I think that "long before he became a nominee", he had legitimate reasons to distrust ("piss on") the US intelligence committee. The same way we all probably have legitimate reasons to distrust the US intelligence committee. Indeed, I think that the fact that he was pissing on the IC long before he got embroiled in a feud with them is an argument in favor of his current mistrust being motivated in part by the healthy mistrust we all have for an Intelligence Community that includes COINTELPRO, Iran-Contra, black torture sites and extraordinary rendition, warrantless wiretapping and unconstitutional data mining of US citizens, etc.

I have a healthy mistrust for those very reasons. However, do you think Trump has a clue what "extraordinary rendition" is? Or COINTELPRO? Or even Iran-Contra?

 

[Emily's Cat]

You do understand that even the crimes he's actually been charged with are allegations, too... right? Or would be, if he hadn't plead guilty.

Of course. But there's also a fairly substantial difference in how you're using that term.

"Alleged and has been charged with..." carries a fair bit more weight than "Alleged, but has not been charged with, and has not pleaded guilty to... "

Especially when the context is "what do you know to be true" as opposed to what you believe to be true, but do not actually know.

 

[theprestige]

I have a healthy mistrust for those very reasons. However, do you think Trump has a clue what "extraordinary rendition" is? Or COINTELPRO? Or even Iran-Contra?

Actually, I do think he has a clue what those things are.

 

[CapelDodger]

Trump pissed on the IC long before he even became a nominee.

Do any examples of that come to mind?

 

[Emily's Cat]

Generally speaking that's correct. There is nothing special about a thumb drive over other storage devices - to some extend it also depends on how it was formatted.

However, in both Mac and windows it is possible to add 'tags' to categorize files that stay with the document when it's copied. These tags can be searched too.

There are other ways of categorizing (I have no idea if they were in this case). The files names can be used to identify content, dates, category etc. Also files could be categorized into different directories - a whole structure if required.

It is also possible to have an index file. Human readable file that could have been manually or electronically created that identifies all the other files by location/file name, tag words, dates and possible some type of category code.

So there are many ways that the information was already categorized and that information would be copied with the files from it's source onto a thumb drive, it's not rocket science.

That all makes sense, but my admittedly small understanding is that all of that tagging etc. would have had to have been done by someone before the data was copied onto the drive - the drive doesn't "automatically" add that additional information. I would think that at best it would pick up file name and created/modified date, but only because that's already attached to the file itself.

I had understood the claim to be different. I had understood the claim to be that the thumb drive automatically creates meaningful and searchable metadata all by itself without human effort. Have I misunderstood the claim being made?

 

[Ziggurat]

Do you have any evidence that the servers in question were in fact physical servers and not virtual servers running on a local host?

I mean they weren't off on some cloud service. The DNC owned the actual physical hardware. Whether that hardware ran virtual servers or not I have no idea, but the DNC was in possession of the physical hardware on which everything was located.

 

[Emily's Cat]

As far as Emily's cat goes, just because whoever you get your data from doesn't format it how you want it, doesn't mean it isn't searchable or categorized.

I haven't worked with a lot of social media data. I've worked with some web and mobile log data, as well as call transcript and email data. Perhaps social media data is just natively better structured than the stuff I've worked with. Searchable, sure - any text-based items are searchable. But NLP isn't always super easy to pull meaning out of all by itself, there's a huge amount of work that goes in the front end to train it, and it needs a fairly substantial amount of validation.

End of the day, "searchable" isn't the same as "categorized". I'm sure there's an element of context here that we're not connecting on. To me, "searchable" can apply to unstructured data quite well... but "categorized" only applies to structured data - it implies the creation of well-organized and defined metadata.

 

[CapelDodger]

Actually, I do think he has a clue what those things are.

The triumph of hope over experience.


Trump might recognise "Iran-Contra", but could easily think it was about Iran arming the Contras, who were a kind of Mexican Hezbollah. And Obama did nothing about it.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Yeah, because such thing as translation software doesn't exist ...

Have you used translation software? It's great if the information being translated is formal and well organized. Not so great if it contains a lot of idiomatic phrasing, slang, abbreviations, and colloquialisms.

This is social media data, right? I'm kinda betting it's not particularly formal or even grammatically accurate.

 

[Emily's Cat]

That is true. But there seems to be a presumption that they wouldn't do that if Trump didn't attack them. And I don't think that's true. Trump's hostility to the intelligence agencies didn't come out of nowhere. He has good reason to not trust them.

Furthermore, in a power struggle between the president and the intelligence agencies, it's the president who should win. Anything else is deeply undemocratic.

Sure... but my money is on the intelligence agencies. I'm betting that the president isn't generally well-versed in psy-ops and misinformation techniques.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Neither do I. There's an obvious reason why Trump claims that they're all against him, of course, and it rhymes with Hushya.

I'm having some dumb. I don't know what rhymes with "hushya".

 

[varwoche]

I'd be willing to bet that searchable is far preferable to "categorized", because categorization by the opposing party wouldn't be relied on regardless.

 

[Segnosaur]

Do you have any evidence that the servers in question were in fact physical servers and not virtual servers running on a local host?

I mean they weren't off on some cloud service. The DNC owned the actual physical hardware. Whether that hardware ran virtual servers or not I have no idea, but the DNC was in possession of the physical hardware on which everything was located.

But the problem is if they were running virtual servers on a local host, that would give them even more reason to not want to turn over the physical hardware to the FBI... because it might impact more services than just the one being investigated.

Although hopefully you now recognize now that the FBI could do a completely adequate investigation with what the Democrats provided, and that turning over physical hardware would be both unnecessary and probably would cause unnecessary costs to the Democrats.