Russiagate Falls Apart, There Was No DNC Hack

[Brian4Liberty]

A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year’s DNC Hack (https://www.thenation.com/article/a-new-report-raises-big-questions-about-last-years-dnc-hack/)
Former NSA experts say it wasn’t a hack at all, but a leak—an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system.
By Patrick Lawrence - August 9, 2017


It is now a year since the Democratic National Committee’s mail system was compromised—a year since events in the spring and early summer of 2016 were identified as remote hacks and, in short order, attributed to Russians acting in behalf of Donald Trump. A great edifice has been erected during this time. President Trump, members of his family, and numerous people around him stand accused of various corruptions and extensive collusion with Russians. Half a dozen simultaneous investigations proceed into these matters. Last week news broke that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had convened a grand jury, which issued its first subpoenas on August 3. Allegations of treason are common; prominent political figures and many media cultivate a case for impeachment.

The president’s ability to conduct foreign policy, notably but not only with regard to Russia, is now crippled. Forced into a corner and having no choice, Trump just signed legislation imposing severe new sanctions on Russia and European companies working with it on pipeline projects vital to Russia’s energy sector. Striking this close to the core of another nation’s economy is customarily considered an act of war, we must not forget. In retaliation, Moscow has announced that the United States must cut its embassy staff by roughly two-thirds. All sides agree that relations between the United States and Russia are now as fragile as they were during some of the Cold War’s worst moments. To suggest that military conflict between two nuclear powers inches ever closer can no longer be dismissed as hyperbole.

All this was set in motion when the DNC’s mail server was first violated in the spring of 2016 and by subsequent assertions that Russians were behind that “hack” and another such operation, also described as a Russian hack, on July 5. These are the foundation stones of the edifice just outlined. The evolution of public discourse in the year since is worthy of scholarly study: Possibilities became allegations, and these became probabilities. Then the probabilities turned into certainties, and these evolved into what are now taken to be established truths. By my reckoning, it required a few days to a few weeks to advance from each of these stages to the next. This was accomplished via the indefensibly corrupt manipulations of language repeated incessantly in our leading media.
...
There has been a long effort to counter the official narrative we now call “Russiagate.” This effort has so far focused on the key events noted above, leaving numerous others still to be addressed. Until recently, researchers undertaking this work faced critical shortcomings, and these are to be explained. But they have achieved significant new momentum in the past several weeks, and what they have done now yields very consequential fruit. Forensic investigators, intelligence analysts, system designers, program architects, and computer scientists of long experience and strongly credentialed are now producing evidence disproving the official version of key events last year. Their work is intricate and continues at a kinetic pace as we speak. But its certain results so far are two, simply stated, and freighted with implications:


There was no hack of the Democratic National Committee’s system on July 5 last year—not by the Russians, not by anyone else. Hard science now demonstrates it was a leak—a download executed locally with a memory key or a similarly portable data-storage device. In short, it was an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system. This casts serious doubt on the initial “hack,” as alleged, that led to the very consequential publication of a large store of documents on WikiLeaks last summer.


Forensic investigations of documents made public two weeks prior to the July 5 leak by the person or entity known as Guccifer 2.0 show that they were fraudulent: Before Guccifer posted them they were adulterated by cutting and pasting them into a blank template that had Russian as its default language. Guccifer took responsibility on June 15 for an intrusion the DNC reported on June 14 and professed to be a WikiLeaks source—claims essential to the official narrative implicating Russia in what was soon cast as an extensive hacking operation. To put the point simply, forensic science now devastates this narrative.
...
More: https://www.thenation.com/article/a-new-report-raises-big-questions-about-last-years-dnc-hack/

[Brian4Liberty]

Seth Rich?

[nikcers]

23 MB/s. isn't that fast for a dedicated file server for a huge corporation like the DNC. I bet they probably could push 50+ MB/s out of their pipe but there was probably other load on the server.

[hard@work]

23 MB/s. isn't that fast for a dedicated file server for a huge corporation like the DNC. I bet they probably could push 50+ MB/s out of their pipe but there was probably other load on the server.

Are you suggesting there was a transatlantic endpoint mirroring that throughput?

[Todd]

When left wing publications start acknowledging the holes in this story, then we might be moving to some sanity on it.

[donnay]

A New Twist In Seth Rich Murder Case

By Joe Lauria

With U.S.-Russia tensions as dangerously high as they’ve been since the worst days of the Cold War, there is potential new evidence that Russia was not behind a hack of the Democratic National Committee, although Congress and the U.S. mainstream media accept the unproven allegation of Russia’s guilt as indisputable fact.

The possible new evidence comes in the form of a leaked audiotape of veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in which Hersh is heard to say that not Russia, but a DNC insider, was the source of the Democratic emails published by WikiLeaks just before the start of the Democratic National Convention in late July 2016.

Hersh said on the tape that the source of the leak was former DNC employee Seth Rich, who was murdered on a darkened street in a rough neighborhood of Northwest Washington D.C. two weeks before the Convention, on July 10, 2016. But Hersh threw cold water on a theory that the murder was an assassination in retaliation for the leak. Instead, Hersh concurs with the D.C. police who say the murder was a botched robbery.

Mainstream news outlets have mocked any linkage between Rich’s murder and the disclosure of the DNC emails as a “conspiracy theory,” but Hersh’s comments suggest another possibility – that the murder and the leak were unrelated while Rich may still have been the leaker.

In dismissing the possibility that Rich was the leaker, mainstream media outlets often ignore one of the key reason why some people believe that he was: Shortly after his murder, WikiLeaks, which has denied receiving the emails from the Russian government, posted a Tweet offering a $20,000 reward for information leading to the solution of the mystery of who killed Rich.

Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder and publisher, brought up Rich’s murder out of context in an interview with Dutch TV last August….

Read more: http://rinf.com/alt-news/newswire/a-new-twist-in-seth-rich-murder-case/

[nikcers]

Are you suggesting there was a transatlantic endpoint mirroring that throughput?
No I am suggesting that 22 MB/S isn't that big of an internet connection. As far as I know that is how they are determining that this was done locally because of the transfer speed. Distance doesn't really affect throughput so I don't know what you mean by transatlantic endpoint mirroring. I have downloaded at 25 MB/s on my tablet through a 5 dollar a month Russian VPN from Nevada through bit torrent protocol connecting to people in the US. I have seen coffee shops with 200 mbps connections that could start pushing that much data. The only smoking gun I would believe is if you can tell me they don't have a dedicated fiber internet service for the the DNC.

[goldenequity]

Here are 2 posts by 'Forensicator' (upon who's analysis the data speed transfer conclusion was drawn)

https://theforensicator.wordpress.com/guccifer-2-ngp-van-metadata-analysis/

https://theforensicator.wordpress.com/2017/07/10/mb-mega-bytes-or-mega-bits/#more-196

I'm sure there's more detailed input but these were for 'public' consumption.
His analysis was submitted to and included by VIPS report, the group of retired intel analysts that submitted the letter to Trump;
& volunteers have delivered the report to every member of the House and Senate intelligence and judicial committees.
Today another team is getting the report into the Old Executive Office Building and the Department of Justice (https://larouchepac.com/20170810/vips-exposure-fraud-behind-russiagate-breaks-out-nation).

The 2 VIPS articles include the 'speed' analysis and argue beyond it for the 'leak' conclusion

December 12, 2016
https://consortiumnews.com/2016/12/12/us-intel-vets-dispute-russia-hacking-claims/

July 24, 2017
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/24/intel-vets-challenge-russia-hack-evidence/

A response article (https://www.thenation.com/article/a-new-report-raises-big-questions-about-last-years-dnc-hack/) came out today by The Nation (liberal progressive mag)

[PierzStyx]

I've never taken the RUssian hack story seriously. Not since Assange said his source was a DNC leaker anyway.

That said, this whole thing has exposed that Trump and Russia were more than a little tight, especially since Don Jr. basically shot himself in the foot by lying the everyone about who he met with and what they talked about.

And I have welcomed the constant magnifying glass on everything Trump does. Every President should be so scrutinized.

[Swordsmyth]

http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303/imageroot/2017/08/08/20170810_dirt_0.jpg

[TheTexan]

A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year’s DNC Hack (https://www.thenation.com/article/a-new-report-raises-big-questions-about-last-years-dnc-hack/)
Former NSA experts say it wasn’t a hack at all, but a leak—an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system.
By Patrick Lawrence - August 9, 2017

Maybe the DNC insider was colluding with Russia?

Discuss.

[nikcers]

Maybe the DNC insider was colluding with Russia?

Discuss.

I honestly think the DNC and RNC are both part of the deepstate. The DNC was taken over by Bernie Sanders. I think the part that went wrong was large amounts of democrats were voting against Clinton. They blamed Russia because they wanted to punish Russia for their intervention in Syria. They both called each other Russian plants to ruin any debate over Russian foreign policy by making it partisan.

Saying there was no hack is like saying 9/11 never happened because jet fuel can't melt steel beams. Yeah it might be an inside job but it happened.

[Swordsmyth]

I honestly think the DNC and RNC are both part of the deepstate. The DNC was taken over by Bernie Sanders. I think the part that went wrong was large amounts of democrats were voting against Clinton. They blamed Russia because they wanted to punish Russia for their intervention in Syria. They both called each other Russian plants to ruin any debate over Russian foreign policy by making it partisan.

Saying there was no hack is like saying 9/11 never happened because jet fuel can't melt steel beams. Yeah it might be an inside job but it happened.
A "Leak" is not a "Hack".

[nikcers]

A "Leak" is not a "Hack".
What do you mean??? Physical access is total access... the most basic use of the term hacking .. Are you saying that the *leaker* isn't using a computer to gain access to unauthorized data?

plus you gotta at least know that they are using the word hack in order to cause arguments like this. It's like putting Iran on "notice", or any of the political ambiguous talking points that never get explained. Hacking can mean just manipulating something, which I would argue that Russia did manipulate the election, not as much as the deep state, but they did muddle the deep states plans

[Swordsmyth]

What do you mean??? Physical access is total access... the most basic use of the term hacking .. Are you saying that the *leaker* isn't using a computer to gain access to unauthorized data?
They may have had authorized access to the data.


plus you gotta at least know that they are using the word hack in order to cause arguments like this. It's like putting Iran on "notice", or any of the political ambiguous talking points that never get explained.
Which is why we shouldn't let them get away with it, the DNC was not "Hacked" unless it is proved that whoever accessed the data had to breach the security of the archive.


Hacking can mean just manipulating something, which I would argue that Russia did manipulate the election, not as much as the deep state, but they did muddle the deep states plans
Sloppy slang that should not be tolerated in this instance.

[nikcers]

They may have had authorized access to the data.


Which is why we shouldn't let them get away with it, the DNC was not "Hacked" unless it is proved that whoever accessed the data had to breach the security of the archive.


Sloppy slang that should not be tolerated in this instance.
Tell that to the 99% of the population that knows what a life hack is but doesn't know the difference between mega bit and mega byte. The talking point that you can't transfer data at that speeds over the internet is a false talking point. Its one thing to argue that Russia had no fucking reason to mess with the election, but there is proof that they did, they had their elite hackers running hundreds of bots controlling the political narrative of every talking point..

This is the reason why Trump hired people to come to his polical rally's. If fake supporters didn't help political campaigns they wouldn't hire them. There is no conspiracy that fake online support doesn't help politcal elections, every civilized country is shutting down the free speech of the internet, knocking down our tower of babel, because political elections were getting upset all around the world, and a lot of it is originating in Russia.

You could argue that these are non state actors that are paid by western interests, but I would argue that Putin has more control over their internet then you think and that's why Russians disappear after they criticize Putin on the Russian internet and proxies and VPNS are getting blocked and banned. That's why the most intelligence agencies will tell you that if it wasn't sanctioned by Putin he at least was aware of it and could of stopped it.

[dannno]

That said, this whole thing has exposed that Trump and Russia were more than a little tight, especially since Don Jr. basically shot himself in the foot by lying the everyone about who he met with and what they talked about.

And I have welcomed the constant magnifying glass on everything Trump does. Every President should be so scrutinized.

How do you know he lied?

Scrutiny is different than lying and framing.

[Swordsmyth]

Tell that to the 99% of the population that knows what a life hack is but doesn't know the difference between mega bit and mega byte. The talking point that you can't transfer data at that speeds over the internet is a false talking point. Its one thing to argue that Russia had no $#@!ing reason to mess with the election, but there is proof that they did, they had their elite hackers running hundreds of bots controlling the political narrative of every talking point..

This is the reason why Trump hired people to come to his polical rally's. If fake supporters didn't help political campaigns they wouldn't hire them. There is no conspiracy that fake online support doesn't help politcal elections, every civilized country is shutting down the free speech of the internet, knocking down our tower of babel, because political elections were getting upset all around the world, and a lot of it is originating in Russia.

You could argue that these are non state actors that are paid by western interests, but I would argue that Putin has more control over their internet then you think and that's why Russians disappear after they criticize Putin on the Russian internet and proxies and VPNS are getting blocked and banned. That's why the most intelligence agencies will tell you that if it wasn't sanctioned by Putin he at least was aware of it and could of stopped it.
OK Cocky-Locky the sky IS falling if you WANT to believe it, but I still won't go in that cave with foxy-loxy.

[Champ]

What do you mean??? Physical access is total access... the most basic use of the term hacking .. Are you saying that the *leaker* isn't using a computer to gain access to unauthorized data?

plus you gotta at least know that they are using the word hack in order to cause arguments like this. It's like putting Iran on "notice", or any of the political ambiguous talking points that never get explained. Hacking can mean just manipulating something, which I would argue that Russia did manipulate the election, not as much as the deep state, but they did muddle the deep states plans

Can't tell if this is a serious response or a play on semantics. One is external, other is local. The data on the DNC server appears to have been obtained locally, not externally like originally thought. You can call it whatever you like, but right now "leak" is sufficing to describe this. Doesn't entirely prove or disprove anything other than it was not likely to be some foreign hacker like Gufficer 2.0, but someone who had direct access.

[nikcers]

Can't tell if this is a serious response or a play on semantics. One is external, other is local. The data on the DNC server appears to have been obtained locally, not externally like originally thought..

The only information that is there is the transmission speed of the data transfer based time stamps. They say its a local data transfer because of the transfer speed. It actually could of been transferred to a non windows computer at first and then the metadata is useless. They infer that it was transferred to a flash drive because of the file transfer speed is very close to that of common flash drives. That is a really dumb argument unless you have the stupid flash drive, or its 2005. Most national companies have their data connected to internet service that could transfer at multitudes of that speed.

[Mordan]

All the stupids or shills who kept saying Russia Russia! Where are they?

There are no reputation consequences on this forum?

[goldenequity]

U.S. judge has ordered Christopher Steele Ex-Spy Who Wrote Trump Dossier To Testify (http://dailycaller.com/2017/08/10/ex-spy-who-wrote-trump-dossier-really-doesnt-want-to-testify-in-buzzfeed-lawsuit/)
http://dailycaller.com/2017/08/10/ex-spy-who-wrote-trump-dossier-really-doesnt-want-to-testify-in-buzzfeed-lawsuit/

http://cdn01.dailycaller.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Screen-Shot-2017-03-27-at-12.00.11-PM-e1490634052135-282x120.png

Christopher Steele, the former British spy who wrote the Trump dossier,
is hoping to avoid giving a deposition in a defamation lawsuit filed against BuzzFeed
for publishing the sensational and uncorroborated document.

Steele’s attorneys filed a motion in the U.S. District Court of Southern Florida on Thursday,
asking Judge Ursula Ungaro to rescind her motion requesting assistance from a court in the United Kingdom
to compel the London-based Steele to testify.

Ungaro is presiding over a lawsuit filed against BuzzFeed by Aleksej Gubarev,
a Russian tech executive who was accused in the dossier of using malware and computer viruses
to hack into the Democratic National Committee’s computer systems.

Gubarev’s lawyers provided a list of topics they’d like to explore in a deposition with Steele,
who began his investigation after being hired last June by Fusion GPS,
an opposition research firm that was working for a political ally of Hillary Clinton’s.

Gubarev’s lawyers want to find out
1. how Steele obtained information for the dossier,
2. who his sources are, and
3. whether he vetted the sources.
They also want to know details about
4. how Fusion GPS and Steele distributed the dossier to the media.

[hard@work]

No I am suggesting that 22 MB/S isn't that big of an internet connection. As far as I know that is how they are determining that this was done locally because of the transfer speed. Distance doesn't really affect throughput so I don't know what you mean by transatlantic endpoint mirroring. I have downloaded at 25 MB/s on my tablet through a 5 dollar a month Russian VPN from Nevada through bit torrent protocol connecting to people in the US. I have seen coffee shops with 200 mbps connections that could start pushing that much data. The only smoking gun I would believe is if you can tell me they don't have a dedicated fiber internet service for the the DNC.

The place where people get confused is in MB vs. mb. You are suggesting that your ipad can 100% utilize a 200 mbps connection. Divided by 8 that is 25 MB/s. Google suggest this is possible with their fiber service: https://support.google.com/fiber/answer/6250056?hl=en

That is in theory depending on the other side of the transfer's throughput, and any bottlenecks along the way. Anecdotally I have seen plenty of advertisement or claims of high MBs/mbps but I have yet to actually see it. One factor often is the bottlenecks in the devices being used. A solid state storage device vs. a 5400 rpm hard drive makes a difference. As does a network card and it's max throughput. There is also "server hops" to be considered; one device in a chain may have a bottleneck -- that will be the maximum transfer rate available.

We have been given none of that information as far as I am aware.

What we do not know is the max throughput available from that DNC server or to/from the source of transfer. It is conceivable that there was a hacker with access to a nearby local data center that connected to a DNC data center. I am unaware of whether or not the "hack" was done in an office building or in a data center. Or an ipad connected to wifi with password access remotely. If it was fiber to fiber from SSD to SSD then I can imagine this is probable. This would make sense as typically a hacker will "chain" connections as part of their obfuscation routine. Move the files to a safe "owned" device then once housed there it can be transferred around through multiple obfuscation points.

For me this could do two things:

1. Make it less probable to track the origin of attack accurately.
2. Allow for the faster transfer rate, theoretically even throttled at near or exact rate of a USB stick.

The question with the meta data is supposed to answer the means of transfer. Was it transferred to a solid state storage device (USB/iPad/SSD)? Or was it transferred through fiber to copper wires to a series of platter hard drives, chained around a botnet residing in Eastern Europe? That seems to me the real question VIPS is trying to answer. Possibilities or probabilities is just speculation anyways.

Maybe I missed the place where VIPS addressed the likelihood of a data center to data center transfer. If someone can point that out I would be grateful.

After this we know Assange has all but said his source was Seth Rich. I think there are a lot of other non-technical questions that need to be answered there. Implying that Assange is a Russian agent is one perspective. Insisting he is with zero evidence is not an acceptable answer.

[dannno]

All the stupids or shills who kept saying Russia Russia! Where are they?

There are no reputation consequences on this forum?

One of them got banned and another got 4 red bars and finally decided to take a well deserved vacation.

[charrob]

Guccifer 2.0 is the DNC



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rEE2TviDS4

[timosman]

One of them got banned and another got 4 red bars and finally decided to take a well deserved vacation.

A new bunch of trolls appeared almost immediately after that.