Tuesday, August 15, 2017

The Hack That Was NOT

The Democrats, the other half of the neo-liberal, authoritarian political establishment that rules the nation has continually blamed the Russians for the Hillary debacle because they hacked the DNC's email server.  President Putin has patiently denied these allegations with such vehemence that US Person has given his denials some credence.  Now comes a story from former intelligence experts and reported in the Nation that claims the DNC hack was an inside job, not the nefarious work of Russian agents, as alleged by an unreliable and ultimately biased mass media and intelligence apparatus that would have us believe our serious national problems are caused by outside, hostile forces and not our own corrupt, decrepit institutions.

Computer forensics provides support for the following woeful conclusions:
  •  the hack of the DNC mail server was accomplished locally using a portable data storage device (USB-2 thumb drive). No hack from Romania could have achieved the transfer speeds over the Internet revealed in the metadata of the download;
  • time stamps indicate the download took place in the EDT time zone;
  • before Guccifer 2.0 took responsibility for the leak of sensitive documents to Wikileaks they were adulterated by cutting and pasting them into a Russian language template to give the appearance that the hack was related to Russian involvement;
  • no one knows who phished John Podesta's e-mail, or even if it was actually attacked, or conveniently leaked by people with access to the account.
These conclusions were reached through independent investigations by security service professionals who are members of VIPS, which stands for Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.  They wrote Barrack Obama three days before he left office that the hack was much more likely to be an "inside job" as opposed to meddling of Russian intelligence.  Unfortunately, that was an inconvenient truth. The reality is the Russian hacking narrative is a political construction on the same historic level as the "Spanish blew up the Maine". The VIPS forensic work can be seen at consortiumnews.com.

A national intelligence assessment concluding the Russians were responsible is devoid of evidence that proves Russian agents were involved in a hack of DNC computers, but it is full of such categorical assertions.  One former senior official and member of VIPS called the assessment "a disgrace to the intelligence profession."  It was the work of three "hand-picked" agents from three agencies.  In light of the new forensic evidence, one has to ask: were they hand picked for their political reliability?  The FBI has never examined DNC's computer servers. They relied on information provided by the DNC's IT contractor, Crowd Source, which is co-founded by a notoriously anti-Russian emigre, Dimitri Alperovitch.  Crowd Source says that all malware was removed from DNC computers previous to the official investigation.  A convenient, if not revealing fact.