Insisting that the Hunter Biden laptop is fake is a trap. So is insisting that it’s real.
The lesson of 2016 is to be even more careful with potential disinformation in 2020.
Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani listens as President Trump speaks at the White House last month. Giuliani now claims he has a laptop that belonged to Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
By Thomas Rid
Oct. 24, 2020
“You mean the laptop is now another Russia, Russia, Russia hoax? You got to be kidding me,” President Trump shot back at Joe Biden in the final presidential debate Thursday. The former vice president had told the president that a now-infamous story in the New York Post — sourced from leaked emails and accusing Biden of corruption in Ukraine — was “a Russian plant.”
Who is right? And how should the nation handle this leak and potential foreign interference at a critical time?
A close look at the evidence shows that neither Biden nor Trump have the facts on their side for now. Take a step back, and the Russian interference of 2016 holds valuable lessons on what to do and what not to do in 2020: We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation — even if they probably aren’t.
If you’re even asking if Russia hacked the election, Russia got what it wanted
On April 12, 2019, a man at the end of his 40s allegedly walked across a parking lot in Wilmington, Del., just south of Conaty Park. He carried three water-damaged MacBooks with him as he entered the Mac Shop, a small repair store for Apple computers in a threadbare red-brick building. The shop’s owner, John Paul MacIsaac, looked at the machines and kept one for data recovery, according to a long, rambling interview with MacIsaac.
MacIsaac reportedly asked the customer for his name. First name, “Hunter.” Second name, after a pause, “Biden.” MacIsaac then asked the man for his phone number. The man provided Hunter Biden’s actual AT&T cellphone number and email address. MacIsaac wrote him a quote for $85 for data recovery services. The man left, and never returned to retrieve the machine or pay for the requested services. Less than two weeks later, Joe Biden would announce his run for the presidency.
MacIsaac, a self-described “military guy” and an ardent Trump supporter, had noticed a Beau Biden Foundation sticker covering the Apple logo on the laptop. He became suspicious. When he started recovering the data, MacIsaac noticed that the desktop was cluttered with files, including “disturbing” items. He notified the FBI, and passed a copy of the files on to trusted political contacts. Soon a hard drive was in the hands of Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s lawyer and surrogate. MacIsaac later said he “can’t be 100 percent sure” the customer that day was actually Hunter Biden.
Then, on Oct. 14, files purportedly from the mysterious laptop spilled into public view in the New York Post. My Signal messaging app immediately lit up with keen observers suspecting that this was finally it: the long-expected Russian hack-and-leak operation, a rerun of 2016, surfaced via a computer repair shop and the Post, in lieu of
Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks.
But the Hunter Biden leaks so far offer sharp contrasts to the infamous events of 2016.
First, in 2016, we had meaningful forensics artifacts on day one to show traces of the hack — in 2020, we have no such meaningful evidence. The cybersecurity research community immediately knew, with a good degree of confidence, what was going on in 2016, literally on the day the Democratic National Committee hack, and then the first leaks resulting from it, became public. The Biden leaks are starkly different: We have no malware samples or infrastructure forensics from a hack, and it is unclear whether the laptop, which is not available to researchers, even contains productive metadata or forensic indicators from the leaks.
I’ve done political opposition research. Donald Trump Jr. has no idea what it is.
Second, in 2016, disinformation was a surprise — in 2020, it was expected. Most journalists and media organizations reporting on the Hunter Biden leak initially focused on the disinformation, not the content of the leaked files. It helped, for sure, that the contents were not nearly as scandalous and revealing as initially — and falsely — reported. Social media companies were also ready: Facebook and Twitter had cooperated in several instances with the FBI to take down smaller disinformation campaigns already this year, and were expecting more to come. The social media companies immediately demoted or entirely prevented the Post story from being shared on their platforms.
"Russian Interference": "Suspected Russian spy" Guccifer 2.0's phone was registered in Israel
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Originally Posted by enhanced_deficit
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