http://blog.erratasec.com/2017/06/how-intercept-outed-realit...
It pointed to the exact printer being used and the exact time and date the document was printed. They didn't need her email to figure out it was her, but I'm sure that will help them in her court case.
edit: cleaned up some sloppy verbiage
I don't think we should expect news outlets to scour every printed document for these watermarks and remove them. Most aren't that technically savvy and this solidly seems like the responsibility of the person doing the leaking.
Leaking is dangerous and risky. I don't know the leaker personally but I could understand someone feeling that documents need to be released to the public and, at the same time, feeling like they can't evade the NSA's investigation. At that point any counter-measures probably seem pointless, especially for those who are not technical and can't imagine any bounds to the NSA investigative powers.
They should have assumed it. While I agree they can't be expected to have enough technical savvy to remove watermarks, they should have re-typed it and hid or (better) destroyed the original.
What she did was illegal and the government is going to nail her to the wall for it, if for no other reason than as an example to others contemplating the same thing. I'm astounded how little effort they (both the leaker and the Intercept) put into avoiding discovery.
If it were me the watermarks would have been gone before the document left my possession. If you depend on other people to keep your secrets you're doomed.
My first thought is that even blogs like AndroidPolice protect their sources better than The Intercept does here - they go as far as re-creating screenshots or renders of phone leaks.
The Intercept's lack of care is astounding. There wasn't any reason they needed to publish the fact that they received printed copies, let alone the actual scans.
"Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate actors … executed cyber espionage operations against a named U.S. company in August 2016, evidently to obtain information on elections-related software and hardware solutions."
which seem to directly tie it to GRU.
To me, this statement which was:
* made contemporaneously with the investigation * by experts * not intended for public consumption
is evidence. It's not a formal proof, but it's evidence.
The leaked info contains a few more specifics about the hand waving from a few months ago, but no actual evidence. What's worse is how the wording of the leaked document and press coverage (including that of The Intercept) interleaves simple assertions of fact into the narrative which do not support claims made by the narrative but simply make the whole thing seem "fact-based" even if it's speculative.
Generally speaking, The Intercept publishes very high quality work, but the presence of Sam Biddle's name on the byline is generally a good indicator of low quality work.
There is also no consideration of the possibility of false attribution of the above.
Suppose I see that an enemy wears size 10.5 Adidas sneakers. If I buy an identical pair and leave muddy footprints with them near a crime scene, does the presence of the footprints implicate my adversary?
In the case of hacking, our assessment must include a notion of how easy it would be for a nation or group to be falsely implicated.
Separately, there must be a discussion of motive apart from specific evidence. But what we're seeing is a blurring together of various tiny pieces of data, analysis, guesswork, etc., into a narrative.
Within intelligence circles such narratives are meant to be used to allow higher order analysis to proceed in the absence of low level proof.
This is useful in the same way that imagining Travis Kalanick as a misogynist is useful in assessing the question of how such a trait might have impacted corporate culture, but it does not follow that it's true just because one lower-level incident occurred, etc.
> Separately, there must be a discussion of motive apart from specific evidence. But what we're seeing is a blurring together of various tiny pieces of data, analysis, guesswork, etc., into a narrative.
Do you believe that the intelligence community has failed to consider these fairly obvious principles when producing their reports?
It seems you've constructed a belief system by which you can never be convinced of Russia's involvement. This is what I was getting at with my question above (which you didn't really answer).
My belief system isn't convincing me that Russians didn't hack the election system, or that they aren't capable of it. Just that this particular document is not the smoking gun.
No, but I think that those spreading these kinds of reports are intentionally masking the way that they are meant to be used in intelligence circles. This happened during the buildup to the Iraq war also.
My point is that the reports make those leaps intentionally in order to support higher order analysis. They are not meant to be taken as a distillation of all of the available intel.
> you can never be convinced of Russia's involvement
Not at all. But your use of the word "involvement" is a great example of insinuation. What does "involvement" mean in this case? I'll take a stab at it:
- Russia is a geopolitical adversary to the US (check)
- Russia and the US are engaged in a proxy war on several fronts and have been for decades (check)
- Russia and the US both undertake various mischief campaigns against each other and have since the cold war (check)
- Russia and the US both have at least two distinct offensive and defensive capabilities... one being cyber "warfare" and another being cyber "mischief". (check and check)
I agree on all of the above. I think many of the people who are up in arms about the Russia story did not believe the above until quite recently, yet it has been the case for a long time.
The appropriate analysis is to consider whether Russia actually thought it would impact the outcome of the US election, or if it intended to merely create mischief and chaos/mistrust. Clearly the latter is true per the history between the two nations and is consistent with the ongoing mischief campaign.
A deliberate effort to hack election machines, trigger power failures in hospitals, or any variety of more severe attacks crosses the line from "cyber mischief" into "cyber warfare".
What we're seeing is the anti-Russia hawks seizing upon the mischief and trying to make it seem like a cause for war. Don't forget that many have been vehemently trying to get the US to use force against Russia for quite some time.
Thus, the key evidence that is needed to escalate Russia's "involvement" from routine mischief and turn it into something akin to "warfare" is the hard evidence of intent to harm infrastructure.
While spear phishing voting machine companies may signal intent to conduct a Stuxnet style attack on US electronic voting machines, is spear phishing really a nation-state level attack approach?
Clearly, unless "The Russians" had far better predictive models than American statisticians, it would have been utterly foolish to undertake an attack that would personally tick off the sure-thing presidential candidate.
So I think that proof entails both a clear delineation of what sort of behavior/mischief is actually abnormal or asymmetric, and the notion of what constitutes proof of intent to escalate.
I really don't understand that at all because if we want to get real, the OPM china hack was bigger than most of the things being alleged at the moment by stealing the database of everyone with a security clearance and yet, not a peep from anybody.
It would seem if you were consistent about cyber threats, these people yelling for sanctions on Russia should be yelling for sanctions on China as well.
For example: It was, until this administration, extremely rare for the US government (the executive, to be precise) to lie to US-based press. They'd deny to comment, or say something that was meaningless when examined closely, or tell you to ask X (who will deny to comment). But, contrary to common believe, it's extremely hard to find examples for them straight-up saying A when knowing that it's really B.
"But nothing suggested that CNN “staged” the demonstrations to any extent greater than engaging protesters, directing their positions, and asking them questions as part of a news segment."
So it was staged, but not "really staged"?
This is like the fact-check where Trump precisely and accurately quoted a decrease in the national debt, but Politifact still checked it as "mostly false".
[1] - http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/feb/...
That aside, I don't see how it's rated false. Just because they claim "well this is how we do things" doesn't make what they have been doing for years any less fake.
I understand they didn't go out, pay some actors to hold some signs up but the scene itself was created and crafted for the TV and in my opinion that's fake.
The media is supposed to be informing the public, when you start using tricks to an attempt to hoodwink your audience into your narrative that's the opposite of informing the public.
All they had to do was point out either that they brought a few protesters over from the main protest to show you them specifically, or maybe a better idea yet, just go to the protest and turn the camera on so we can see what is actually happening, not what they are staging for us.
I can recall of a number of occasions during the Bush and Obama era where high-level officials were caught lying, sometimes in public testimony. And I don't even have any data points for Russia because we don't get their official statements on our news so I don't even know how I'd compare. How did you get both sides of the story accurately enough where you feel so confident in your beliefs?
Experts in what? Security research or PR?
Because the bar for hiring is pretty much the same lol
I have too many theories, but first we need to figure out if there is such a person: That's right, I'm questioning Reality.
Although you would think that when applying for a job that requires security clearance (even though she already had clearance), you would at least try to scrub your history, at the very least, you'd remove your retweets of Edward Fucking Snowden and Iranian politicians.
Did anyone do even a cursory check of her social media? I thought that's what most employers did these days before hiring people.
A jury (with nullification power), in principal, might (as might the electorate who choose Presidents who have pardon and clemency power); if you aren't going to flee to avoid capture and aren't confident of your ability to evade the counterintelligence services in the long term, compromising your ability in the short term to improve the optics of the event may not be completely irrational, even if it is far from guaranteed to pay off.
I've not only been on juries, but studied them. Nullification is a thing. It's quite rare and unlikely in the specific circumstance at issue, but that's already factored into the discussion in the grandparent post.
And lying can have very real consequences for politicians, even when it happens without breaking a law.
And in the end even this leak doesn't contain any evidence of anything that would even tie it to Russia, let alone GRU. On the internet no one knows you're a dog. So she will get 10 years in the slammer for nothing.