Why Some U.S. Ex-Spies Don't Buy the Russia Story (opens in new tab)

It's fine to be skeptical of course, and to be very skeptical of direct "hacking the election" (whatever that means) claims.

But there is plenty of public evidence that Russia was involved in the DNC hack. This evidence was available before the election, which makes it more credible against claims of political interference.

I've posted this before, but I think it's important people understand what public evidence is available:

2014 report into ATP-28: https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2014/10/apt28-a..., presenting pretty compelling (if circumstantial) evidence that group is Russian state backed.

(July) 2016 report into the DNC hacking, showing it was first breached by ATP-29 (The other Russian state backed hacking group), but the leaks almost certainly came from a second breach by ATP-28 later: https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democ...

In either case, Trump won the election because he won more electoral votes than Hillary. And he did this by winning more popular votes in key states. It’s that simple. The Democrats had an unappealing candidate who ran a weak campaign in key states. And lost.

What the DNC leaks do show, however, is that the Democrats ran a fraudulent primary election where they colluded with the Clinton campaign and suppressed any opposition from the left. This resulted in an unpopular candidate in the general election, and a public even more untrusting of the Clintons and the process. The Democrats needs to look in the mirror instead of playing to fears of Russian boogeyman.

AWS micro instances run Linux basically by default and have about 150-250 megabit connections.

I assume they loaded the documents onto a hacked AWS box running WordPress or similar and downloaded them later from there. Hackers almost always tunnel through at least one compromised machine because they don't trust a VPN alone for anonymity.

In no way does this imply anyone was or was not responsible. This is a common thing to do for any hacking group

Also it goes out it's way to mention William Binney, and The Nation article linked from it mentions other ex-government employees associated with VIPS, but neither mentions the mysterious Skip Folden that VIPS relied on as thier technical expert.

This is what the VIPS letter says about him:

Independent analyst Skip Folden, who retired after 25 years as the IBM Program Manager for Information Technology

but if he spent 25 years as a high or even medium level employee at IBM I would expect some kind of internet trail and I couldn't find one.

I would also point out that this article is mostly revolving around whether _some_ portion of the DNC emails were purposefully leaked, but it doesn't say much at all about the remaining incidents and data. It certainly doesn't disprove the "russia story."

This is laughably stupid. Why would attributing the hack to Russia instead of Wikileaks or whatever make any difference to the contents of the hacks?

I don't think this is true at all. I do recall CS releasing their own report in early summer, but my understanding is the January IC assessment was a completely separate document which did not cite the CS report in any way.

(If I am missing something here, happy to be corrected, this aspect just stuck out to me)

1) Russia's history when it comes to election meddling and spreading dis-information speaks for itself, yes the US does it too, but the Russia is on another level (Every eastern European country has been a public target from the same groups).

2) Russia had a lot more to fear from Hillary than Trump. The sanctions and military ratcheting would likely be more in force than it is now under Trump and a dysfunctional congress. Hillary was a known hawk on Russia, compared with Manafort/Flynn on Russia.

3) Putin himself said "some patriotic Russians might have done stuff" like sending phishing emails.

When Russia faced the lemon of a Hillary administration, they made lemonade. Arguably, it wasn't that hard and paid for itself. We as the voting public knew most of this before the election, including partly about Trump's intent of collusion and possibly collusion, and voted the way we did anyway.

Assange is kind of irrelevant, he has always had his own motives, and it's pretty clearly being anti-US. Offering Damore a job with wikileaks, really?

It seems to me the chances are Russia tries to hack most US politician's emails every day, and probably twice on Sundays. Even the nice ol' US was caught in 2009 spying on the UN Secretary General and the Security Council delegations of its allies; do we really for one moment think that famously-spy-heavy bad-guy Russia and its ex-spy-master President wouldn't be constantly trying to get its hands on the emails of its Cold War enemy?

In which case, hunting whether Trump encouraged Russia seems like hunting for who asked the clouds to rain this morning.

Which makes the US reaction not smell right. It smells somehow like a game of pretexts.

So having "not got that" about the scandal -- something seems fishy here -- it looks to my amateur, non-US, non-politician, probably-too-cynical eyes, like there's five parties having a political fight for control (and yes I am being deliberately simplistic and caricaturing):

- The Trump team, who seem like they're recruited like the Dirty Dozen (you're so unsuitable for any normal administration, and possibly borderline insane, that you've got nothing to lose with this crazy mission...)

- The powers that be / senior civil servants. Trump spent his entire campaign calling Washington "the swamp" and declaring he'd drain it. Did you think they wouldn't fight back, the FBI wouldn't leak, they wouldn't try to undermine this braggart who's just come marching in telling them he's going to rip them apart?

- The Republican establishment (McCain, etc). Did you really think parts of the Republican party that spent so long wanting anyone but Trump would grow to like him?

- The left-of-centre echo chamber (us techie types, journalists, other professionals), whose typical MO is to use the levers of embarrassment, twitterstorms, and rhetoric to try to shovel any government we are unfortunate enough to have over us into following our agenda

- Modern industry, which seems to have cottoned onto the idea that if publicly you say enough "left" things (equality, diversity) and sound passionate about social progress, you can pursue a "right" agenda (not paying tax, disempowering employees, building private monopolies with moats around them) without anybody making much fuss.

And though that may be a gross caricature, in that model somehow the behaviour seems to make sense. For example, the Trump-Russia scandal as a way of tying Trump's hands and forcing him down foreign policy lines he doesn't want. The administration's seeming dysfunction, because anyone who joins them knows it is the only administration they will ever serve, so you can only get amateurs who don't know the game of White House politics or think they can change how it is played. The constant storms over his latest tweet, despite his tweets having been incoherent for years, because raising the level of outrage creates social roadblocks -- making avenues hopefully too sensitive and already too explosive for him to travel further down them.

Which makes Russia seem like an irrelevant bystander -- doing what it does every day (which happens to be trying to hack American servers for everything it can get, while trying to nibble at gaining more control and influence in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean).