In the context of Twitter's actions and explanation, it doesn't matter. They aren't trying to ascertain the authenticity. Note the policy is against both hacking and doxxing and this story is doxxing regardless of how the emails were obtained.

I'd say the article is self-consistent, but not necessarily credible. I don't think "hack" means literal network intrusion. If the article's own description of the provenance of the information is taken at face value, cloning a hard drive at a repair shop without authorization still qualifies as "hacked", and in violation of Twitter terms.

The "authorization" is provided by the owner of the laptop, which is legally the owner of the shop, since whoever dropped the machine off signed a contract indicating as much.

Surely you provide authorization to perform a data recovery but not to share the data with the media?

Weird the same standard doesn't apply to tax returns by the federal government. Either have principles and stand by them always, or admit you're covering for one side.

The tax returns were obtained from a credible source, meaning that the documents were almost certainly authentic. Meanwhile, the NY Post has made no effort to verify the authenticity of the hacked material, and it is well known that the GRU will mix false documents when they release hacked material to try and amplify the impact.

Also, NYTimes did not disclose any PII in their articles about Trumps taxes. The NY Post couldn't even be bothered to scrub that out.

Furthermore, it has been widely reported that Giuliani was being targeted by the GRU to launder disinformation[1]. This article is from December 2019[2]. Here is a quote from the article:

"Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) suggested over the weekend that any evidence presented by Giuliani should be scrubbed for possible Russian propaganda..."

So there you go. A republican senator, on record. Anyone who has been paying attention was expecting Giuliani to try and stir up an October surprise, and it was widely known that he was probably going to be laundering GRU disinformation.

[1] https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/521328-intellig... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/12/30/giulianis...

This is non-responsive to whether the documents were hacked or not.

The tax returns were absolutely hacked. There is no question that those documents were not legitimately obtained.

No one knows if they were hacked or not, that is the problem. But the cover story is so flimsy caution is warranted in this case. If it turns out the flimsy cover story was true, and if the NY Post removes PII from their story, then twitter will lift the ban. It is not that complicated.

RE: Tax, the NY Times, which has a long history of credible investigative journalism, has stated that their source had legal access to the documents. They were not obtained by their source via a hack. The source most likely did not have permission to share the documents, but the practice of using anonymous, credible sources has a long history in journalism and is widely accepted as ethical. And the practice of laundering RSU disinformation is generally looked down on. And the NY Post has failed to prove that they aren't laundering RSU disinformation.

owner of hard disk =/= owner of information on it. Anything less, means all the data you store on AWS automatically belongs to Amazon to do with as they please.

Any subset of it could've been fabricated or modified to for the narrative.

Let's see if the emails have DKIM validation again.

If there's a body hash (bh) parameter, then you can pull the DKIM key from DNS and prove one way or another whether it went through a mailserver with that DKIM private key.

From my understanding that is what happened in france in 2017

This is the key point. Twitter blocked the NYPost article before doing any sort of investigation.

Jack is just trying to justify it after the fact.

Just like the policy change he made to privilege government-connected after an extended period of letting Trump get away with violating Twitter’s supposed rules. For some reason, the Trumpeters never combined about that retrospective justification.

The Jack giveth, the Jack taketh away...

That's what happens with a free press when you are at first see as a benefit and later a liability to the person who owns a press...

"policy change he made to privilege government-connected after"

???