Title: A New Report By Intelligence Experts Reveal With Forensic Evidence DNC Was Not Hacked – It Was A Leak And An Inside Job. Source:
[None] URL Source:http://investmentwatchblog.com/a-ne ... -was-a-leak-and-an-inside-job/ Published:Aug 20, 2017 Author:Ruby Henley Post Date:2017-08-20 10:38:15 by A K A Stone Keywords:None Views:6508 Comments:16
A group of former U.S. Intelligence officers calling themselves the VIPs have authored an extensive report with forensic evidence that the Democratic National Committee was not hacked by the Russians in July 2016. The report alleges the DNC suffered an insider leak, which was conducted in the Eastern time zone of the United States by someone with physical access to a DNC computer.
This report was shared with the respected left-liberal magazine, THE NATION. Author of that report is a well respected writer, Patrick Lawrence https://www.thenation.com/authors/patrick-lawrence/ His credentials are: Patrick Lawrence is a longtime columnist, essayist, critic, and lecturer. He was a correspondent abroad (writing as Patrick L. Smith) for many years, chiefly for the Far Eastern Economic Review, the International Herald Tribune and The New Yorker, and chiefly in Asia. His most recent books are Somebody Else’s Century: East and West in a Post-Western World (Pantheon) and Time No Longer: America After the American Century (Yale). His next book is tentatively titled After Exceptionalism. His website is patricklawrence.us.
A group calling themselves the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) was founded in 2003. It now has 30 members, including a few associates with backgrounds in national-security fields other than intelligence. 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. These men have experience in matters concerning Russian intelligence and the related technologies.
There were other highly sensitive “spooks” in this incredible endeavor that I am not going to mention, as I felt I was peeking into a very private world just by reading the report. The amazing work they have done is overwhelming, and it must be recognized by Special Counsel Mueller. They have shared the report with the appropriate authorities, and they are waiting for a response.
This highly moral group of professionals were overwhelmed at the incompetence of the FBI investigation into the DNC hack, which has been proven to be a leak. The following aspects of the investigation concerned them, as it should everyone.
President Trump’s ability to conduct foreign policy with Russia has been crippled. He was forced into signing legislation imposing severe sanctions on Russia which will make it difficult for it to pursue its pipeline project to its vital energy sector. This could actually be considered an act of war. This was directly caused by the DNC’s assertions that Russians hacked the server in July. This is actually the foundation that ended up in Special Counsel Robert Mueller just calling a Grand Jury! The equation that has been used in this absurd evolution, crippling a sitting President is: possibilities turning into allegations – allegations turning into probabilities – probabilities turning into certainties – certainties being used as established truths. I am not a lawyer, but I would say this makes a mockery out of the law, does it not? This was a highly corrupt manipulation of language repeated by the news media. We have been urged to accept the word of institutions and officials with serious records of deception. A year has been lost without any credible evidence of what happened last year at the DNC and who was responsible for it. The so-called professionals surrounding this investigation have used words “high confidence” in their “assessment.” This mockery of the law was taken seriously by the forensic investigators, intelligence analysts, system designers, program architects, and computer scientists; thus, spawning a forensic investigation into the truth of the DNC case. I would say they are truth seekers, who have banded together to uncover the lies, which have corrupted the current Presidency and divided a country. To say the least, it has been hell for the United States of America.
Now to get to the meat of the report. It is technical, and it contains the forensic evidence that cannot be disproved. https://www.thenation.com/article/a-new-report-raises-big-questions-about- last-years-dnc-hack/ QUOTE:
Research into the DNC case took a fateful turn in early July, when forensic investigators who had been working independently began to share findings and form loose collaborations wherein each could build on the work of others. In this a small, new website called www.disobedientmedia.com proved an important catalyst. Two independent researchers selected it, Snowden-like, as the medium through which to disclose their findings. One of these is known as Forensicator and the other as Adam Carter. On July 9, Adam Carter sent Elizabeth Vos, a co-founder of Disobedient Media, a paper by the Forensicator that split the DNC case open like a coconut.
By this time Binney and the other technical-side people at VIPS had begun working with a man named Skip Folden. Folden was an IT executive at IBM for 33 years, serving 25 years as the IT program manager in the United States. He has also consulted for Pentagon officials, the FBI, and the Justice Department. Folden is effectively the VIPS group’s liaison to Forensicator, Adam Carter, and other investigators, but neither Folden nor anyone else knows the identity of either Forensicator or Adam Carter. This bears brief explanation.
The Forensicator’s July 9 document indicates he lives in the Pacific Time Zone, which puts him on the West Coast. His notes describing his investigative procedures support this. But little else is known of him. Adam Carter, in turn, is located in England, but the name is a coy pseudonym: It derives from a character in a BBC espionage series called Spooks. It is protocol in this community, Elizabeth Vos told me in a telephone conversation this week, to respect this degree of anonymity. Kirk Wiebe, the former SIGINT analyst at the NSA, thinks Forensicator could be “someone very good with the FBI,” but there is no certainty. Unanimously, however, all the analysts and forensics investigators interviewed for this column say Forensicator’s advanced expertise, evident in the work he has done, is unassailable. They hold a similarly high opinion of Adam Carter’s work.
Forensicator is working with the documents published by Guccifer 2.0, focusing for now on the July 5 intrusion into the DNC server. The contents of Guccifer’s files are known—they were published last September—and are not Forensicator’s concern. His work is with the metadata on those files. These data did not come to him via any clandestine means. Forensicator simply has access to them that others did not have. It is this access that prompts Kirk Wiebe and others to suggest that Forensicator may be someone with exceptional talent and training inside an agency such as the FBI. “Forensicator unlocked and then analyzed what had been the locked files Guccifer supposedly took from the DNC server,” Skip Folden explained in an interview. “To do this he would have to have ‘access privilege,’ meaning a key.”
Forensicator’s first decisive findings, made public in the paper dated July 9, concerned the volume of the supposedly hacked material and what is called the transfer rate—the time a remote hack would require. The metadata established several facts in this regard with granular precision: On the evening of July 5, 2016, 1,976 megabytes of data were downloaded from the DNC’s server. The operation took 87 seconds. This yields a transfer rate of 22.7 megabytes per second.
These statistics are matters of record and essential to disproving the hack theory. No Internet service provider, such as a hacker would have had to use in mid-2016, was capable of downloading data at this speed. Compounding this contradiction, Guccifer claimed to have run his hack from Romania, which, for numerous reasons technically called delivery overheads, would slow down the speed of a hack even further from maximum achievable speeds.
What is the maximum achievable speed? Forensicator recently ran a test download of a comparable data volume (and using a server speed not available in 2016) 40 miles from his computer via a server 20 miles away and came up with a speed of 11.8 megabytes per second—half what the DNC operation would need were it a hack. Other investigators have built on this finding. Folden and Edward Loomis say a survey published August 3, 2016, by www.speedtest.net/reports is highly reliable and use it as their thumbnail index. It indicated that the highest average ISP speeds of first-half 2016 were achieved by Xfinity and Cox Communications. These speeds averaged 15.6 megabytes per second and 14.7 megabytes per second, respectively. Peak speeds at higher rates were recorded intermittently but still did not reach the required 22.7 megabytes per second.
“A speed of 22.7 megabytes is simply unobtainable, especially if we are talking about a transoceanic data transfer,” Folden said. “Based on the data we now have, what we’ve been calling a hack is impossible.” Last week Forensicator reported on a speed test he conducted more recently. It tightens the case considerably. “Transfer rates of 23 MB/s (Mega Bytes per second) are not just highly unlikely, but effectively impossible to accomplish when communicating over the Internet at any significant distance,” he wrote. “Further, local copy speeds are measured, demonstrating that 23 MB/s is a typical transfer rate when using a USB–2 flash device (thumb drive).” END OF QUOTE.
The time stamps in the metadata prove that the DNC leaker recording the download worked somewhere on the East Coast of the United States. They entered the system at approximately 6:45 pm in the Eastern Daylight Time Zone. It is impossible that the operation took place in Russia. At last we have some indication of where the leak occurred.
There is a video I would like to insert at this time:
I would also like to go further into the report that Representative Dana Rohrabacher will consult Trump before giving public Julian Assange Information. If you will remember he met with Julian Assange and now believes the emails were not hacked by Russia.
He says, “I will have discussions with President Trump before going public, and that should happen hopefully within two weeks of now by the end of the month. In the end, the American people are going to know more than what they know now, and it will be with more certainty.”
Rohrabacher said he believes the release of the emails was an “inside job,” as he has read the recent report we have just reviewed by the VIPs. Further, he said the group had found the DNC emails had been downloaded too quickly to have been done remotely.
I am glad to know that Rohrabacher is one Representative, who is honest and will be briefing President Trump privately on this matter.
I want to remind you that Kim DotCom who worked with Wikileaks, and he said with Seth Rich on the delivery of the DNC emails to Wikileaks has sent a letter to Special Counsel Mueller asking him to please allow him to give his evidence to the Special Counsel.
He was visited by the then FBI Director Comey in New Zealand some time back, and something went terribly wrong. Comey left without the evidence, and when he returned he was fired. There are some reports I have read that say more about the incident, but I do not feel secure in writing about them.
The author, of the article in THE NATION has a note at the end of the report, which will not surprise any of us. It is as follows: Editor’s note: After publication, the Democratic National Committee contacted The Nation with a response, writing, “U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded the Russian government hacked the DNC in an attempt to interfere in the election. Any suggestion otherwise is false and is just another conspiracy theory like those pushed by Trump and his administration. It’s unfortunate that The Nation has decided to join the conspiracy theorists to push this narrative.”
I am not going to take that too seriously, as Representative Dana Rohrabacher seems to believe it is very credible and performed by a very credible group of former Intelligence officers of very high positions in U.S. Intelligence. We also, have Julian Assange, and Kim DotCom , who have stepped in demanding to give evidence to President Trump. Kim DotCom has asked the question, “why would Special Counselor Mueller not want the evidence I have to give?” He also made a statement to the American people, “You should be worried if he does not want this evidence.”
Kim DotCom was interviewed by Suzie Dawson from The Internet Party. In the interview Kim states that everything he has stated is true and correct and he has evidence to back that up. He has lawyered up so that he can ask for immunity in exchange for the evidence that he says proves Seth Rich is the DNC Leaker.
Also, Kim DotCom states that Seth Rich’s family (Aaron Rich) has contacted him and have asked him not to release the documents or information. He also mentioned that his lawyers have drafted a very detailed letter to Special Council Robert Mueller in order for him to review the evidence that debunks the Russian Hacking Narrative.
Kim Dot Com Interview with The Internet Party & Suzie Dawson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuARd…
Good piece. I think the evidence for the DNC leaks points increasingly at a bitter Bernie bro who worked at the DNC deliberately leaking this info to Wikileaks. And that is what a primary associate of Assange who claims to have received the data on a USB stick in some little-known D.C. wooded parkland claims to have happened. And, though it is not conclusive, WikiLeaks has never been caught in any lie about the actual substance of their allegations and their sources. Normally, they don't reveal anything about sources but they made an exception for this particular information, given how important it was considered to be.
Seems easy enough. Just tell us how it could have been done ... over the intercontinental Internet ... to Russia ... at a constant speed of 23Mb.
Mmmm...another problem with that is that USB transfer speeds tend to vary. In particular, they often suffer from a significant speed drop the longer the transfer takes. It is an inherent weakness of the USB controllers.
Like you, I think we don't have any adequate accounting of these claims for some USB stick not in evidence or for the speeds of data transfer intercontinentally or whether the logs themselves can be considered valid and incontrovertible legal evidence. A log file is still just one more file on a computer. They're typically not that secure. Maybe someone stole info and created a deliberately misleading evidence trail in the data transfer log.
Mmmm...another problem with that is that USB transfer speeds tend to vary. In particular, they often suffer from a significant speed drop the longer the transfer takes. It is an inherent weakness of the USB controllers.
"By 2003, most USB flash drives had USB 2.0 connectivity, which has 480 Mbit/s as the transfer rate upper bound; after accounting for the protocol overhead that translates to a 35 MB/s effective throughput." -- Wiki
Even with throughput degradation, an average transfer speed of 23 MB/s is reasonable.
#9. To: Tooconservative, A K A Stone, misterwhite (#4)
Normally, they don't reveal anything about sources but they made an exception for this particular information, given how important it was considered to be.
Julian Assange may want to leverage full disclosure in return for a "get out of embassy-jail free card."
UPDATE (2017-08-02): This blog entry has been updated with additional information which documents actual transfer rates seen when targeting both a close US host and another domestic US host located on the opposite coast. The effect of using a VPN is also shown.
The bottom line is that the rate drops dramatically when packets have to transit large distances (even without factoring in the use of a VPN, or going trans Atlantic) – the transfer speeds dropped from 14 MB/s to 2MB/s.
Detailed test results are documented in the blog entry, The Need for Speed.
This handy calculator will let us do all sorts of what if comparisons and that particular “calculator” link will convert 22.6 MB/s (the estimated transfer rate cited in the report) into the following chart.
[chart omitted]
As you can see it is at about the 20% level of a 1 Gb/s local area network (LAN), which is typical of many enterprise/SOHO wired (LAN) networks, and as far as “carriers” go, some form of “optical link” will be required. For the gory details, see this Wikipedia article on Optical Carrier transmission rates.
In practice, actual transmission rates will fall well below the theoretical rates shown above, because packets transmitted over the Internet have to transit through many switches and must share bandwidth with other users. Further, copying multiple small files will increase the need for “hand-shaking” messages which further decreases the effective transmission speed. The only way to find the actual speeds that can be achieved is to run tests. The typical ISP provided “speed test” will show optimistic speeds, but they’re a start. The following graphic shows the result of a cable provider’s speed test.
Optical Carrier transmission rates are a standardized set of specifications of transmission bandwidth for digital signals that can be carried on Synchronous Optical Networking (SONET) fiber optic networks.[1] Transmission rates are defined by rate of the bitstream of the digital signal and are designated by hyphenation of the acronym OC and an integer value of the multiple of the basic unit of rate, e.g., OC-48. The base unit is 51.84 Mbit/s.[2] Thus, the speed of optical-carrier-classified lines labeled as OC-n is n × 51.84 Mbit/s.
Some reviewers have questioned the following conclusion in the Guccifer 2.0 NGP/VAN Metadata Analysis study.
Conclusion 7. A transfer rate of 23 MB/s is estimated for this initial file collection operation. This transfer rate can be achieved when files are copied over a LAN, but this rate is too fast to support the hypothesis that the DNC data was initially copied over the Internet (esp. to Romania).
Below, performance data is tabulated that demonstrate that transfer rates of 23 MB/s (Mega Bytes per second) are not just highly unlikely, but effectively impossible to accomplish when communicating over the Internet at any significant distance. Further, local copy speeds are measured, demonstrating that 23 MB/s is a typical transfer rate when writing a USB-2 flash device (thumb drive).
Below, are some representative discussions on the subject of the 23 MB/s rate cited in the study.
What if the "Russian hacker" was at a public library in Washington, DC with a high speed connection? He could download directly to a USB and be gone in 2 minutes.
Even with throughput degradation, an average transfer speed of 23 MB/s is reasonable.
You'd think so but it isn't.
This is why FireWire was always more popular than USB 2.
FireWire connections could keep up their full rated transfer speed far better than USB.
Even USB 3 can be appallingly slow at times. Trust me, I've studied this a bit and am motivated to get USB to transfer at good speeds. It just doesn't always work.
Keep in mind that there are ways around those limitations. You can upload to proxies or clouds, etc. You can split transfers on to multiple systems and reassemble them after transmission (which is what TCP/IP does anyway).
Technically, you can greatly exceed the usual limitation for international upload speed.
Even so, you are faced with the fact that often your upload broadband speed is 10% of the speed available for download traffic. For instance, my new 20Mbps connection only has 2Mbps upload speed. Now that isn't all that slow, pretty average really. But 2Mbps (megabits per second) is only about 0.25MBps (megabytes per second). And that is considered a decent broadband speed, pretty standard in a lot of cities for business or personal use.
So the technical questions should be examined and resolved as much as possible. It does sound as though that is a very very high transfer rate unless you had access to optic cable or direct connection speeds off a satellite or something.
I did read one article where they questioned the validity of both the file size and transfer time. Something about interpretations of the metadata.
I recall some stuff questioning metadata, but the first metadata analysis I saw about comparison times to identify the transfer speed was by Forensicator on July 9th, and written about by Elizabeth Vos, same date, in Disobedient Media.
I saw some early posts going back and forth about metadata, but not in the context of the metadata found and analyzed by Forensicator. Below may be what I saw early on, but it discusses time stamps in relation to the time of the CrowdStrke report.
All Signs Point to Russia Being Behind the DNC Hack
Thomas Rid Jul 24 2016, 11:00pm
Why the recent hack of the Democratic National Committee is a game-changer.
[excerpt]
The metadata in the leaked documents are perhaps most revealing: one dumped document was modified using Russian language settings, by a user named [Russian cyrillic characters]," a code name referring to the founder of the Soviet Secret Police, the Cheka, memorialised in a 15-ton iron statue in front of the old KGB headquarters during Soviet times. The original intruders made other errors: one leaked document included hyperlink error messages in Cyrillic, the result of editing the file on a computer with Russian language settings. After this mistake became public, the intruders removed the Cyrillic information from the metadata in the next dump and carefully used made-up user names from different world regions, thereby confirming they had made a mistake in the first round.
[...]
Other features are also suspicious. One is timing, as ThreatConnect, another security company, has pointed out in a useful analysis: various timestamps indicate that the Guccifer-branded leaking operation was prompted by the DNC's initial publicity, with preparation starting around 24 hours after CrowdStrike's report came out. Both APT 28 and Guccifer were using French infrastructure for communications. ThreatConnect then pointed out that both the self-proclaimed hacker's technical statements on the use of 0-day exploits as well as the alleged timeline of the DNC breach are most likely false. Another odd circumstantial finding: sock-puppet social media accounts may have been created specifically to amplify and extend Guccifer's reach, as UK intelligence startup Ripjar told me.
Forensicator analyzed the file made public by the persona Guccifer 2.0 (not to be confused with the original Guccifer of the Hillary hack). The general public has the 7zip file, identical to what Forensicator analyzed. If the data was altered by Guccifer 2.0 prior to publication, then the entire basis of the Russian DNC hacking story is undermined by falsified data.
Seperate from metadata, nobody really argues that the email content is not authentic. The argument focuses on whether they were leaked by some unknown person, or hacked by Guccifer 2.0., or hacked by Russians. The file metadata, as released by Guccifer 2.0, contained the metadata as indicated by Forensicator. Wikileaks obtained the same metadata from some, as yet unidentified, source.
No evidence has been shown which suports a Guccifer 2.0 hack story, or his claim of being the Wikileaks source. Assange has expressly and repeatedly said it was a leak.
This study analyzes the file metadata found in a 7zip archive file, 7dc58-ngp-van.7z, attributed to the Guccifer 2.0 persona. For an in depth analysis of various aspects of the controversy surrounding Guccifer 2.0, refer to Adam Carter’s blog, Guccifer 2.0: Game Over.
Based on the analysis that is detailed below, the following key findings are presented:
On 7/5/2016 at approximately 6:45 PM Eastern time, someone copied the data that eventually appears on the “NGP VAN” 7zip file (the subject of this analysis). This 7zip file was published by a persona named Guccifer 2, two months later on September 13, 2016.
Due to the estimated speed of transfer (23 MB/s) calculated in this study, it is unlikely that this initial data transfer could have been done remotely over the Internet.
The initial copying activity was likely done from a computer system that had direct access to the data. By “direct access” we mean that the individual who was collecting the data either had physical access to the computer where the data was stored, or the data was copied over a local high speed network (LAN).
As Terban noted in his blog, the metadata shows that 499 documents were authored by a DCCC employee, Missy Kurek. Kurek is the deputy executive director for finance, and political director to Nancy Pelosi.
Moreover, the technical metadata shows a number of Windows-based systems operating on DCCC networks, each connected to DCCC printers. Some of the systems appear to be personal computers, others look as if they're managed by the IT staff at the DCCC.
The email addresses collected during the FOCA examination are mostly DCCC domains, but there were two addresses related to the Clinton's – one for clintonfoundation.org and the other for presidentclinton.com.
A majority the timestamps correlate to the same time frame the DNC / DCCC were hacked – incidents claimed by Guccifer 2.0. Salted Hash was unable to locate any files newer than July 2016.
Sean Gallagher at Ars Technica also ran metadata checks, and came to similar conclusions – this doesn't appear to be a new hack. What Guccifer 2.0 released on Tuesday is a dump of previously compromised records that were not released.
This very recent article may be what you saw. You may have seen something entirely different. I had not seen this before right now, and it is just what I was able to find referring to the Forensicator analysis as written about in The Nation. It's by New York Magazine.
The Nation Article About the DNC Hack Is Too Incoherent to Even Debunk
By Brian Feldman NY Mag August 10, 2017 4:31 pm
Yesterday, The Nation published an article by journalist Patrick Lawrence purporting to demonstrate that last summer’s pivotal DNC hack was, in fact, an inside job. Maybe unsurprisingly, it’s proven especially popular among people who hold it as an article of political faith that the Russian government and intelligence services played no role in the theft and publication of a cache of emails from DNC staffers:
[...]
Conclusive proof, or even strong evidence, that the DNC emails were leaked by an insider and not by Russian-sponsored hackers would indeed be a huge story — among other things, it would contradict the near-unanimous opinion of U.S. intelligence agencies, and raise some very serious questions about their objectivity and neutrality.
But this article is neither conclusive proof nor strong evidence. It’s the extremely long-winded product of a crank, and it’s been getting attention only because it appears in a respected left-wing publication like The Nation. Anyone hoping to read it for careful reporting and clear explanation is going to come away disappointed, however.
If you want to get to the actual claims being made, you’ll have to skip the first 1,000 or so words, which mostly consist of breathtakingly elaborate throat-clearing. (“[H]ouses built on sand and made of cards are bound to collapse, and there can be no surprise that the one resting atop the ‘hack theory,’ as we can call the prevailing wisdom on the DNC events, appears to be in the process of doing so.”) About halfway through, you get to the crux of the article: A report, made by an anonymous analyst calling himself “Forensicator,” on the “metadata” of “locked files” leaked by the hacker Guccifer 2.0.
This should, already, set off alarm bells: An anonymous analyst is claiming to have analyzed the “metadata” of “locked files” that only this analyst had access to? Still, if I’m understanding it correctly, Lawrence’s central argument (which, again, rests on the belief that Forensicator’s claims about “metadata” are meaningful and correct) is that the initial data transfer from the DNC occurred at speeds impossible via the internet. Instead, he and a few retired intel-community members and some pseudonymous bloggers believe the data was transferred to a USB stick, making the infiltration a leak from someone inside the DNC, not a hack.
The crux of the whole thing — the opening argument — rests on the fact that, according to “metadata,” the data was transferred at about 22 megabytes per second, which Lawrence and Forensicator claim is much too fast to have been undertaken over an internet connection. (Most connection speeds are measured at megabits per second, not megabytes; 22 megabytes per second is 176 megabits per second.) Most households don’t get internet speeds that high, but enterprise operations, like the DNC — or, uh, the FSB — would have access to a higher but certainly not unattainable speed like that.
If that’s your strongest evidence, your argument is already in trouble. But the real problem isn’t that there’s a bizarre claim about internet speed that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. It’s that Lawrence is writing in techno-gibberish that falls apart under even the slightest scrutiny. You could try to go on, but to what end? As an example: Lawrence writes that “researchers penetrated what Folden calls Guccifer’s top layer of metadata and analyzed what was in the layers beneath.” What on earth is that supposed to mean? We don’t know what “metadata” we’re talking about, or why it comes in “layers,” and all I’m left with is the distinct impression that Lawrence doesn’t either. Even if you wanted to take this seriously enough to engage with, you can’t, because it only intermittently makes sense. There may be evidence out there, somewhere, that a vast conspiracy theory has taken place to cover up a leak and blame Russia. But it’s going to need to be at least comprehensible.
I believe that Brian Feldman is correct in that the article is so incoherent to Brian Feldman that Brian Feldman cannot debunk it, and in this manner he self-justify his not trying.
(Most connection speeds are measured at megabits per second, not megabytes; 22 megabytes per second is 176 megabits per second.) Most households don’t get internet speeds that high, but enterprise operations, like the DNC — or, uh, the FSB — would have access to a higher but certainly not unattainable speed like that.
The DNC could have Gigabyte speed locally and it just wouldn't matter. His statement is bollocks. Feldman exhibits a fundmental lack of knowledge of what he is talking about.
File sizes are measured in megabytes, not megabits. Neither MB/s nor Mb/s is wrong for a transfer speed. Stating a file size in megabits would be really strange. There are 8 bits to a byte. It is reassuring to see that Brian Feldman could manage 8 times 22 and get 176 Mbs. Now let Feldman demonstrate sending from NY to LA at a sustained rate of 176 Mbs on the internet. And do it on a VPN to retain anonymity. It was really 22.6 MB/s, which rounds to 23 MB/s, which would equate to 184 Mb/s, 22MB/s is equally unattainable while having the packets sent by a very indirect route over a long distance.
An anonymous analyst is claiming to have analyzed the “metadata” of “locked files” that only this analyst had access to?
More bollocks. The whole world had access to the files. Wikileaks published the files. Forensicator was able to unlock files to access their metadata. It is not just an analysis by the anonymous Forensicator, but the approval of his work by former NSA experts, an IBM expert, and hacker Kim DotCom.
But the real problem isn’t that there’s a bizarre claim about internet speed that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. It’s that Lawrence is writing in techno-gibberish that falls apart under even the slightest scrutiny.
Any scrutiny in this article is bollocks. Either everything appears to be techno-gibberish to Brian Feldman, or he is deliberately trying to mislead his readers into believing that Forensicator and the other experts attested to techno-gibberish.
Conclusive proof, or even strong evidence, that the DNC emails were leaked by an insider and not by Russian-sponsored hackers would indeed be a huge story — among other things, it would contradict the near-unanimous opinion of U.S. intelligence agencies, and raise some very serious questions about their objectivity and neutrality.
Anybody still pushing that unanimous or near-unanimous opinion of U.S. intelligence agencies must be brain dead or some sort of shill. It has been admitted that the Intelligence Report was the work of DNI Clapper, the guy who told Congress the least untruthful statement he could when he lied to Congress.
FACT CHECK: Did 17 Intel Agencies ‘All Agree’ Russia Influenced The Presidential Election?
David Sivak Fact Check Reporter 1:35 PM 06/01/2017
During an interview Wednesday with the tech news outlet Recode, former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton discussed at length her belief that Russian interference in the 2016 election harmed her chances of winning.
“Read the declassified report by the intelligence community that came out in early January,” said Clinton. “Seventeen agencies, all in agreement – which I know from my experience as a senator and secretary of state is hard to get – they concluded with ‘high confidence’ that the Russians ran an extensive information war against my campaign to influence voters in the election.”
Verdict: False
While the intelligence report she mentions does express ‘high confidence’ that Russia sought to undermine her campaign, it only represents the views of three agencies – the FBI, CIA and NSA. Clinton incorrectly claims this report shows consensus among 17 intelligence agencies.
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper himself appeared in front of Congress and explicitly pushed back on the idea that “17 intelligence agencies agreed,” stating flatly that it was just three.
Fact Check:
The intelligence community is comprised of 17 agencies including the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). Another of these agencies – the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) – speaks on behalf of the intelligence community and orchestrated the January report.
“The [intelligence community assessment] was a coordinated product from three agencies: CIA, NSA and the FBI, not all 17 components of the intelligence community,” said former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper during a congressional hearing in May. “Those three under the aegis of my former office.”
A handful of experienced analysts were chosen from the three agencies to investigate and draw independent conclusions. Each agency reached the same verdict about Russian interference.
So while the DNI published the report as an intelligence community assessment, Clapper clarified at the hearing that the report reflects the views of those three agencies alone. In fact, when questioned by Democratic Senator Al Franken, Clapper resisted the notion that all 17 agencies had reached a consensus.
Franken: The intelligence communities have concluded, all 17 of them, that Russia interfered with this election. And we all know how that’s right.
Clapper: Senator, as I pointed out in my statement, Senator Franken, it was- there were only three agencies that directly involved in this assessment plus my office.
Franken: But all 17 signed on to that?
Clapper: Well, we didn’t go through that process. This was a special situation because of the time limits and […] the sensitivity of the information, we decided – it was a conscious judgment – to restrict it to those three. I’m not aware of anyone who dissented, or disagreed when it came out.
DHS published a joint statement with the DNI back in October expressing the same verdict about Russian interference, so it’s fair to say a handful of agencies have publicly drawn conclusions. But simply because the DNI speaks for the intelligence community as a whole doesn’t mean all 17 agencies reached independent conclusions, let alone conducted independent investigations. Clinton overstates her case.
Nice sleuthing. The Nation's article is a bit much as the critic points out but they made some points that the scoffers did not want to answer at all or even to be heard. So they derided it and wrote some distracting commentary and then pretended that its weakest points were its only points. Common disinfo technique.
