Now this leak calls into question some of the evidence about the DNC hack [1]. This evidence being the malware was Russian. But there were many other pieces of evidence that pointed to Russia so I'm personally not anymore persuaded it wasn't Russia for the DNC stuff. The Podesta stuff is still up in the air AFAIK. [edit: see pvg reply]
Either way this leak will just add to the deniability angle for the partisan hawks. Although this is probably way over the head of CNN/Fox News crowd so it's also possible it will have zero effect.
[1] Previous leaks mentioned NSA/Five Eyes collected foreign malware. This leaks adds CIA to that group and further solidifies the "misdirected attribution" angle.
Assange's claims are not hard evidence either, nor do I trust him.
US intelligence agencies say the Russians were involved and that kind of activity by the Russians is corroborated by intelligence agencies in Europe.
The nature of intelligence operations is that, if done correctly, there is no hard evidence unless the perpetrator wants there to be.
He was never neutral or objective on the subject of Hillary Clinton. And isn't it convenient that despite our knowing of multiple politicians whose private email got hacked, hers is the only one he felt was worthy of publishing...
So, yeah, not exactly a "sudden" lack of objectivity on his part. Also it's been demonstrated his followers will turn a blind eye to things that don't fit their narrative.
How would he know? Isn't wikileaks set up so that people can submit data anonymously? Is he claiming that they got the data through different channels? Why would an insider purposefully leak the data in a way that de-anonymized him to Assange and possibly others, instead of using the established channels?
Not all leaks are submitted through the web forms. Craig Murray has stated that he received some of the leaks in person from a DNC insider during a face to face meeting in Washington, and he couriered those leaks to wikileaks himself.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/dec/14/craig-murray...
Murray's Wikipedia page is not full of alarm bells, it does mention him appearing on Alex Jones's radio program but to discuss a non-crazy subject.
I’m a lot more puzzled by the fact that Assange would say anything about the uploader, even if it is negative. I guess denying it’s the most likely suspect re-rolls the dice in most people’s head.
False!
He does not answer the question about someone affiliated with Russia handing him the information.
He always repeats this carefully worded answer: "our source is not the Russian government and it is not [a] state party."
Why so carefully worded -- why can't he say "no one affiliated Russia gave me the data"?
Because he knows it came through an intermediary for Russia and wants to be able to lie, but still have a weaselly excuse if he's caught.
The fact that he's spent a lot of time spreading the Seth Rich idea is even more suspect. It's a conspiracy theory straight out of the KGB's cold war book.
Seth Rich was murdered and his watch was yanked at. He fought back at his attacker(s). "Nothing was stolen!"
The professional assassin got into a fight with the victim and then shot him, but forgot to actually steal something? Not very likely.
So why doesn't he ? If it was really the CIA that hacked the DNC then why would they be so stupid to blame Russia if Assange could so easily falsify that claim ? That's a huge reputation risk.
Assange only said that it wasn't the Russian Government themselves. Doesn't rule out it being a team of hackers with connections to Russian IC or even directly to the Kremlin.
Or even Russian hackers acting on their own but with the wink wink approval of Putin. Kremlin may even fund groups like startups. Give out money, see what happens. It's like Al Qaeda - they don't need to have an org chart or any explicit communication.
https://www.secureworks.com/research/threat-group-4127-targe...
https://twitter.com/pwnallthethings/status/81662155364329472...
(the second link is a lengthy thread)
It's very possible that many people had access to Podesta's email but the timing of that phishing attempt and the Wikileaks leak was a little too convenient to ignore.
https://medium.com/@thegrugq/the-russian-way-of-cyberwar-edb...
"Alternating Competing Hypothesis"
We don't know that at all. There isn't a single piece of evidence for it anywhere.
There is some evidence, but no definitive evidence.
'"[SecureWorks] researchers assess with moderate confidence that the group is operating from the Russian Federation and is gathering intelligence on behalf of the Russian government," the report from SecureWorks concluded.'
But that's simply heresy: such targets might also be of interest to western intelligence, or really anyone who wanted to stir up trouble by framing another country.
All we can say is that the correlation is interesting, but that's about it.
Unfortunately everyone these days think everything is a conspiracy or has to have HD recordings of something they think happened as public evidence or it is false, but that's not how the world really works...
This simply isn't true. The whole "17 agencies" thing is a talking point that first came up in one of Hillary Clinton's debates and gets repeated without challenge.
The "17 agencies" didn't all independently make their own assesments about what happened and decided it was the Russians. Instead, James Clapper (at the time, the Director of National Intelligence) made the claim that the Russians were behind certain hacks. Clapper is the ultimate head of sixteen out of seventeen of the agencies.
The actual agencies involved include parts of the coast guard and the department of energy and other groups that seem REALLY unlikely to have conducted an in-depth, independent investigation into the hacking of a politician's emails.
Also, this is the same James Clapper who lied under oath to congress. Specifically, when asked “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” He responded, “No, sir.” Wyden asked “It does not?” and Clapper said, “Not wittingly."
This is perjury and he should have been prosecuted for it. At a minimum, lying under oath makes it less likely that anything else he claims should be taken at face value.
NSA makes a distinction between data and metadata, as we know. If you assume that distinction, then the question is -- "does the NSA collect actual communications content on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans" -- something which, to our knowledge, is not the case.
Can it? Potentially yes. But we haven't seen anything that suggests that it actually does.
At best, his response contains an assumption which is arguably normal for an NSA director to make, and which may have be conveniently advantageous to hold. But I'm sure, even if you ask him today, he will say that metadata does not constitute intelligence collection.
To prove perjury you need to demonstrate mens rea (guilty intent) and I think it's plausible that he did not intend to mislead the investigation. It was a hard question to answer, because he could not answer in a way that would reveal the existence of the program to collect metadata either.
> "The reason I’m asking the question is, having served on the committee now for a dozen years, I don’t really know what a dossier is in this context. So what I wanted to see is if you could give me a yes or no answer to the question, does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"
To answer "no" to this question is to say that the NSA does not "have millions or hundreds of millions of dossiers" on Americans. I see no reason to believe why that's not the case. You're welcome to explain to me why storing communications metadata at the NSA is worse than requiring telcos to store it, but that's hardly the slam dunk "he's definitely a fucking liar" case you want it to be.
It's also unreasonable to expect the DNI to voluntarily admit to the existence of a centralized metadata repository in public, on TV. That's what the "he lied" folks expect to have happened here.
At the end of the day, "Clappergate" is just "where should the metadata live," and that is, to my mind, a very minor argument.
The folks asking the questions had security clearance and could have asked the question during a classified briefing but they chose not to.
fun fact, it is the same private company the government paid for evidence that North Korea (yeah, right) was responsible for the sony hack.
In reality they allegedly hacked computers of people related to a single party and brought to light the illicit activities that party was doing.
tl;dr Saying Russia hacked the election is the same as saying that some kid hacked the FBI when all he did was deface their website. It implies a level of sophistication that did not happen.
My understanding was the Security professionals expected that the most likely scenario was that both parties were hacked: one side was revealed and the other one used for leverage.
That's not the claim. In fact, multiple people have said that is not the claim.
The claim is that the Russians influenced the election in favor of Trump by promoting propaganda against Clinton.
I think the more likely objective (assuming the Russians were behind this, which for the time being is a fair assumption) is that they wanted to delegitimize a President Clinton. Everyone thought she would win. I think it's a bold claim to make that the Kremlin set out on a campaign to elevate an obtuse philanderer in a field of 16 who ignores any semblance of political norms. Rather, I think they just wanted to further tarnish Clinton's image, as President, as a corrupt establishment figure.
The DNC problems are part of a long term reshaping of US political identities. The Russia issues are a serious near-term national security concern.
And those leaks were very transparently beneficial to a person/group who are also going to benefit from this one.
I don't trust the CIA at all. But I don't trust Wikileaks either. I see way too many self-described "skeptical" types who aren't approaching any of this with any shred of skepticism.
Doesn't preclude planting 'evidence' of Russian hacking to stir up a red scare (towards renewed cold war -level funding of the intelligence community) irrespective of the election's outcome. I.e., the fact that anyone actually uncovered secret data through some other means could have just been unrelated/incidental. E.g., if Wikileaks got their material from an inside whistle-blower as they've insinuated.
I wouldn't either be surprised if the 'evidence' of Russian interference was just circumstantial rather than planted... E.g., "Woah, we found evidence of probing originating from Russia (in the pile of probing evidence from script-kiddies all over the world, mostly Nigerian princes but those don't bolster our narrative)!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j_ZfKmcnSk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
http://www.mintpressnews.com/migrant-crisis-syria-war-fueled...
That’s the analysis I heard so it doesn’t really change the overall analysis but I’m no expert and I’m open to other views.
This hasn't stopped people from connecting every leak since his arrest to him.
> The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.
and later specifically mentions Martin:
> Over the last three years the United States intelligence sector, which consists of government agencies such as the CIA and NSA and their contractors, such as Booze Allan Hamilton, has been subject to unprecedented series of data exfiltrations by its own workers.
> A number of intelligence community members not yet publicly named have been arrested or subject to federal criminal investigations in separate incidents.
> Most visibly, on February 8, 2017 a U.S. federal grand jury indicted Harold T. Martin III with 20 counts of mishandling classified information. The Department of Justice alleged that it seized some 50,000 gigabytes of information from Harold T. Martin III that he had obtained from classified programs at NSA and CIA, including the source code for numerous hacking tools.
EDIT: I would infer from this that WL mention Martin to shore up their claim that the CIA hacking archive is circulating among contractors, not to hint that he's a source.
I honestly imagine the day-to-day activity there to be way more mundane than we imagine. It's probably just sifting through thousands of pages worth of intelligence (transcribed phone calls from terrorism suspects, reports from people at foreign embassies, etc) for things that are usable. Probably often with few results. I don't even think the amount of information is the real limitation. It's probably the quality.
Of course the CIA could have constructed a complicated false flag operation to get Trump elected, but they lack a reasonable motive. Similar things can be said about many conspiracy theories, only few of them attribute credible motives to the state actors and/or individuals involved.
CIA is overwhelmingly republican, just like the FBI. So yes they would.
I've always understood the FBI v. CIA conflict as a classic Red vs Blue security alignment. FBI aligned with Defense and CIA aligned with State.
The "hack" of the election was trickery to twist a system to a desired end. Like all good hacks it ignored definitions to employ whatever techiques were availible regardless. That some were not traditionally called "hacking" means nothing given the overall effectiveness of the program.
With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the "fingerprints" of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from.
This has interesting implications for the claim that "Russians" hacked the election (although I can't imagine the CIA wanting to hack the election in Trump's favour).