CrowdStrike couldn't say for sure Russians stole DNC emails...

[Ronson]

At 3:06.

Ed Henry vacillates between saying "Putin" and "Russia" as though they are interchangeable. It's possible Putin wanted Trump to win and the military wanted Hillary to win, and then it's a matter of who actually meddled; one, both or neither.

The Russian "duma" while in session cheered when Trump won, so we know who they wanted anyway. But I still say Putin hates Hillary and he never would have wanted her to win, or any of the Obama gaggle.

[Juvenal]

So, for those who don't know, a hash value of a file means you take a big file and mix up the data in a clever way to get a much smaller value (e.g. 97f674d1e001697fd685da6ce17789b9). The odds of two different files having the same hash value is effectively 0 (should be 1 / (2^128)).

I think 16^32 is more intuitive, or some variation on 2^10 ~ 1000 hence 1000^12.8 or roughly a trillion to one for decimal dinosaurs.

That's not even in the same ballpark as the orders of magnitude generated by DNA matches. Those numbers run on 4^bases. Matching up a thousand base pairs is just a warm up and that's already 2^2000 ~ 10^200, leaving hash crashing probabilities in their digital dust.

But any road, the basics are there. It's a trillion to one odds that it's the same file. That's enough, all by itself, even before you look at the fact we had digital eyes on the GRU operation after one of the fancy bears forgot to fire up his VPN leaving his tookus hanging out for the world to see.

Yes, Even Elite Hackers Make Dumb Mistakes
By Lily Hay Newman
03.25.2018

ON THURSDAY, A report from the Daily Beast alleged that the Guccifer 2.0 hacking persona—famous for leaking data stolen from the Democratic National Committee in 2016—has been linked to a GRU Russian intelligence agent. What appears to have given Guccifer away: The hacker once failed activate a VPN before logging into a social media account. This slip eventually allowed US investigators to link the persona to a Moscow IP address. In fact, they traced it directly to GRU headquarters.

That's from 2018. No one who's honest would be trying to resurrect the claim it wasn't Russia at this point, except maybe a Russian asset pushing Russian agitprop because that's what they do.

Russian disinformation network is said to have helped spread smear of U.S. ambassador to Ukraine
By Isaac Stanley-Becker
Dec. 17, 2019 at 10:01 a.m. EST

The story that appeared on the Hill website on March 20 was startling.

Marie Yovanovitch, the American ambassador to Ukraine, had given a “list of people whom we should not prosecute” to Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuri Lutsenko, according to a write-up of an interview Lutsenko gave to the conservative columnist John Solomon.

Five days later, an image of that purported list appeared in a post on the website Medium and on some other self-publishing platforms in locations as disparate as Germany, South Africa and San Francisco. In less than a week, the Medium essay had been translated into Spanish and German and posted to other websites.

Now, a social media analysis firm, Graphika, has traced those posts to a Russian disinformation campaign — in the first evidence that a network of accounts involved in spreading disinformation before the 2016 presidential election also participated in circulating the false claims about Yovanovitch that earlier this year led to her recall from the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv.

[Juvenal]

Just The News is the site Solomon launched after getting booted from the Hill.

An internal review following his removal resulted in editor's notes being added to 14 Solomon pieces.

The Hill's review of John Solomon's columns on Ukraine
BY THE HILL STAFF - 02/19/20 09:00 AM EST

Background

Solomon was hired July 10, 2017, as The Hill's executive vice president for digital video and led the company's effort to launch Hill.TV, an online streaming channel that focuses on the politics of the day. Solomon left The Hill on Oct. 4, 2019.

Solomon also wrote numerous news articles for The Hill in 2017 and 2018. An editorial decision was made to label Solomon’s work as opinion as of May 14, 2018.

As early as 2018, he was removed from the Hill's news staff after something of a writer's rebellion. After he wrote up the "Do Not Prosecute" list, disinformation that made its way into the impeachment hearings, the writing was on the wall. They had to dump him. The criticism was bringing down the entire organization. The Wemple blog is just one example, but it's pretty damning.

Opinions
John Solomon leaves behind lasting damage at the Hill

By Erik Wemple
Media critic
November 15, 2019 at 6:44 p.m. EST

The diss from Speier is the first instance in the awareness of this blog when a Washington official has penalized the Hill for enabling Solomon’s reign of distortion under its banner. Witness after witness — all of them under oath — has slammed Solomon’s series of articles for containing a tenuous connection to actual events. “It was, if not entirely made up in full cloth, it was primarily non-truths and non-sequiturs,” said George Kent, a senior State Department official, in reference to a key Solomon article from March 2019.

That piece transmitted allegations from then-Ukrainian prosecutor general Yuri Lutsenko that Yovanovitch had presented him with a “do not prosecute” list. The New York Times reports that Lutsenko acknowledges that no such list ever existed but claims that Yovanovitch did ask him to go easy on certain individuals “who worked with the embassy on its anti-corruption efforts.” The list was a “fabrication,” Yovanovitch said on Friday. Nor did she tell “Mr. Lutsenko or other Ukrainian officials who they should or should not prosecute.” Solomon cites testimony by Kent acknowledging U.S. attempts to protect anti-corruption organizations as corroboration of his reporting.

He's shameless.

We asked the Hill’s spokesperson what management is doing about the situation. Is the Hill reviewing Solomon’s Ukraine coverage? We will update this post if we receive a response.

Meantime, Solomon isn’t budging. “I stand by each and every one of the columns that I wrote,” Solomon said in a statement — a statement provided to . . . the Hill. Here’s the headline of said Hill story: "Yovanovitch says John Solomon’s columns were used to push false allegations.”

Link added. The byline names Olivia Beavers as the reporter of the article published 11/15/19 01:58 PM EST, five hours before the Wemple piece.

Three months later, the Hill did the full take-down on his Ukraine reports cited above.

[rogue06]

Didn't he end up dead?

The victim of a fairly strange robbery.

[Mountain Man]

The victim of a fairly strange robbery.

So strange, in fact, that nothing was actually taken from him, so I'm not sure on what basis the police ruled it a "botched robbery".

[rogue06]

So strange, in fact, that nothing was actually taken from him, so I'm not sure on what basis the police ruled it a "botched robbery".

And IIRC it took place hours after he left to walk home which was like 5 minutes away.

[DivineOb]

Seth Rich? Holy moly you guys...

In any case, are we done on this? Juvenal pointed about the VPN thing which I had forgotten about and which is incredibly strong evidence.

[seanD]

Seth Rich? Holy moly you guys...

In any case, are we done on this? Juvenal pointed about the VPN thing which I had forgotten about and which is incredibly strong evidence.

By beef is with the intelligence community about this subject. They've proven in the past they aren't trustworthy, and they've proven they're still not trustworthy, neither is the democratic political party that serve as their political surrogates. As far as Crowdstrike, I didn't know the specifics about the DNC server issue until you pointed that out.

[Mountain Man]

I think 16^32 is more intuitive, or some variation on 2^10 ~ 1000 hence 1000^12.8 or roughly a trillion to one for decimal dinosaurs.

That's not even in the same ballpark as the orders of magnitude generated by DNA matches. Those numbers run on 4^bases. Matching up a thousand base pairs is just a warm up and that's already 2^2000 ~ 10^200, leaving hash crashing probabilities in their digital dust.

But any road, the basics are there. It's a trillion to one odds that it's the same file. That's enough, all by itself, even before you look at the fact we had digital eyes on the GRU operation after one of the fancy bears forgot to fire up his VPN leaving his tookus hanging out for the world to see.

Yes, Even Elite Hackers Make Dumb Mistakes
By Lily Hay Newman
03.25.2018

ON THURSDAY, A report from the Daily Beast alleged that the Guccifer 2.0 hacking persona—famous for leaking data stolen from the Democratic National Committee in 2016—has been linked to a GRU Russian intelligence agent. What appears to have given Guccifer away: The hacker once failed activate a VPN before logging into a social media account. This slip eventually allowed US investigators to link the persona to a Moscow IP address. In fact, they traced it directly to GRU headquarters.

That's from 2018. No one who's honest would be trying to resurrect the claim it wasn't Russia at this point, except maybe a Russian asset pushing Russian agitprop because that's what they do.

Was this ever actually confirmed? I ask because the Daily Beast report doesn't offer any substantiation other than their say-so ("The Daily Beast has learned..."), and they make reference to Mueller's embarrassing Russian troll farm indictment fiasco, a move that blew up in the dirty cop's face when it became clear that he didn't have the evidence to support the charges, and the case was eventually dropped by the Department of Justice.

[Juvenal]

Was this ever actually confirmed? I ask because the Daily Beast report doesn't offer any substantiation other than their say-so ("The Daily Beast has learned..."), and they make reference to Mueller's embarrassing Russian troll farm indictment fiasco, a move that blew up in the dirty cop's face when it became clear that he didn't have the evidence to support the charges, and the case was eventually dropped by the Department of Justice.

Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election

III. RUSSIAN HACKING AND DUMPING OPERATIONS

Beginning in March 2016, units of the Russian Federation’s Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff (GRU) hacked the computers and email accounts of organizations, employees, and volunteers supporting the Clinton Campaign, including the email account of campaign chairman John Podesta. Starting in April 2016, the GRU hacked into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The GRU targeted hundreds of email accounts used by Clinton Campaign employees, advisors, and volunteers. In total, the GRU stole hundreds of thousands of documents from the compromised email accounts and networks.109 The GRU later released stolen Clinton Campaign and DNC documents through online personas, “DCLeaks” and “Guccifer 2.0,” and later through the organization WikiLeaks. The release of the documents was designed and timed to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election and undermine the Clinton Campaign.

There's excruciating detail from designators for the individual GRU units involved, the hundreds of spearphishing attacks targeting the DCCC, including the specific attack a week earlier that provided access to the servers, and the google searches used to mine idioms used by the Guccifer 2.0 persona for its WordPress account.


The further suggestion that evidence was lacking for the indictments is contradicted by the filing which instead cites the need to protect recently reclassified information.

Although Concord has availed itself of the Court’s jurisdiction to obtain discovery from the United States regarding efforts to detect and deter foreign election interference (some of which was leaked online, in violation of the Court’s protective order and, apparently, to discredit the investigation, see ECF No. 94, at 8-11), when pressed to comply with its obligations as a party to this litigation, it has refused to do so. Most recently, in the government’s view, Concord failed to comply with two Court-issued trial subpoenas, see ECF Nos. 362, 367, ignored a Court order to make available a corporate representative, see ECF Nos. 364, 367, and submitted a misleading (at best) declaration from an incredible declarant, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the Russian oligarch and codefendant who controls Concord and is alleged in the indictment as having funded and directed the defendants’ election interference campaign. See ECF Nos. 376-1, 377, 378. In short, Concord has demonstrated its intent to reap the benefits of the Court’s jurisdiction while positioning itself to evade any real obligations or responsibility.

Upon careful consideration of all of the circumstances, and particularly in light of recent events and a change in the balance of the government’s proof due to a classification determination, as well as other facts described in more detail in a classified addendum to this motion, the government has concluded that further proceedings as to Concord, a Russian company with no presence in the United States and no exposure to meaningful punishment in the event of a conviction, promotes neither the interests of justice nor the nation’s security. The government has therefore decided that the calculation of whether a substantial federal interest is served by this prosecution, see Justice Manual § 9-27.230, has changed since the indictment was returned, and the better course is to cease litigation as to the Concord Defendants.

And lastly, the repetition of baseless accusations against Mueller warrants pushback. There is no evidence of any personal profit by Mueller. On the contrary, he has devoted a lifetime to serving the public, beginning with his decision to volunteer for service in Vietnam, where he was decorated for his service, including the Bronze star with V for valor, the Purple Heart, and various commendation medals.

After resigning his commission, he devoted a lifetime to the Justice Department, serving in roles from U.S. Attorney to FBI director, and his resumption of a minor role as a simple homicide prosecutor at a substantial paycut after leaving the FBI directorship.

His appointment as FBI director came after a unanimous, 98-0 vote of approval in the Senate, a week before the attacks on 9/11. His reputation as a conservative Republican was responsible for his nomination. His reputation as an exemplary public servant was responsible for the overwhelmingly bipartisan support.

Mueller's service to our country has always been beyond reproach, and no less so when he warned that Russia's attacks on our country are ongoing, perhaps perfectly exemplified by these resurrected attempts to absolve Russia for its responsibility for the hacks during the 2016 campaign. These attacks, reckless of the overwhelming evidence long since provided against them, can only serve the interest of a hostile foreign power, and warrant the question whether your interest in supporting a particular candidate is more important than your interest in supporting your country.

[Mountain Man]

Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election

III. RUSSIAN HACKING AND DUMPING OPERATIONS

Beginning in March 2016, units of the Russian Federation’s Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff (GRU) hacked the computers and email accounts of organizations, employees, and volunteers supporting the Clinton Campaign, including the email account of campaign chairman John Podesta. Starting in April 2016, the GRU hacked into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The GRU targeted hundreds of email accounts used by Clinton Campaign employees, advisors, and volunteers. In total, the GRU stole hundreds of thousands of documents from the compromised email accounts and networks.109 The GRU later released stolen Clinton Campaign and DNC documents through online personas, “DCLeaks” and “Guccifer 2.0,” and later through the organization WikiLeaks. The release of the documents was designed and timed to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election and undermine the Clinton Campaign.

There's excruciating detail from designators for the individual GRU units involved, the hundreds of spearphishing attacks targeting the DCCC, including the specific attack a week earlier that provided access to the servers, and the google searches used to mine idioms used by the Guccifer 2.0 persona for its WordPress account.


The further suggestion that evidence was lacking for the indictments is contradicted by the filing which instead cites the need to protect recently reclassified information.

Although Concord has availed itself of the Court’s jurisdiction to obtain discovery from the United States regarding efforts to detect and deter foreign election interference (some of which was leaked online, in violation of the Court’s protective order and, apparently, to discredit the investigation, see ECF No. 94, at 8-11), when pressed to comply with its obligations as a party to this litigation, it has refused to do so. Most recently, in the government’s view, Concord failed to comply with two Court-issued trial subpoenas, see ECF Nos. 362, 367, ignored a Court order to make available a corporate representative, see ECF Nos. 364, 367, and submitted a misleading (at best) declaration from an incredible declarant, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the Russian oligarch and codefendant who controls Concord and is alleged in the indictment as having funded and directed the defendants’ election interference campaign. See ECF Nos. 376-1, 377, 378. In short, Concord has demonstrated its intent to reap the benefits of the Court’s jurisdiction while positioning itself to evade any real obligations or responsibility.

Upon careful consideration of all of the circumstances, and particularly in light of recent events and a change in the balance of the government’s proof due to a classification determination, as well as other facts described in more detail in a classified addendum to this motion, the government has concluded that further proceedings as to Concord, a Russian company with no presence in the United States and no exposure to meaningful punishment in the event of a conviction, promotes neither the interests of justice nor the nation’s security. The government has therefore decided that the calculation of whether a substantial federal interest is served by this prosecution, see Justice Manual § 9-27.230, has changed since the indictment was returned, and the better course is to cease litigation as to the Concord Defendants.

And lastly, the repetition of baseless accusations against Mueller warrants pushback. There is no evidence of any personal profit by Mueller. On the contrary, he has devoted a lifetime to serving the public, beginning with his decision to volunteer for service in Vietnam, where he was decorated for his service, including the Bronze star with V for valor, the Purple Heart, and various commendation medals.

After resigning his commission, he devoted a lifetime to the Justice Department, serving in roles from U.S. Attorney to FBI director, and his resumption of a minor role as a simple homicide prosecutor at a substantial paycut after leaving the FBI directorship.

His appointment as FBI director came after a unanimous, 98-0 vote of approval in the Senate, a week before the attacks on 9/11. His reputation as a conservative Republican was responsible for his nomination. His reputation as an exemplary public servant was responsible for the overwhelmingly bipartisan support.

Mueller's service to our country has always been beyond reproach, and no less so when he warned that Russia's attacks on our country are ongoing, perhaps perfectly exemplified by these resurrected attempts to absolve Russia for its responsibility for the hacks during the 2016 campaign. These attacks, reckless of the overwhelming evidence long since provided against them, can only serve the interest of a hostile foreign power, and warrant the question whether your interest in supporting a particular candidate is more important than your interest in supporting your country.

I'm aware of what the dirty cop's report says, and his case for Russian hacking is exceptionally weak.

At a May press conference capping his tenure as special counsel, Robert Mueller emphasized what he called "the central allegation" of the two-year Russia probe. The Russian government, Mueller sternly declared, engaged in "multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election, and that allegation deserves the attention of every American." Mueller's comments echoed a January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) asserting with "high confidence" that Russia conducted a sweeping 2016 election influence campaign. "I don't think we've ever encountered a more aggressive or direct campaign to interfere in our election process," then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told a Senate hearing.

While the 448-page Mueller report found no conspiracy between Donald Trump's campaign and Russia, it offered voluminous details to support the sweeping conclusion that the Kremlin worked to secure Trump's victory. The report claims that the interference operation occurred "principally" on two fronts: Russian military intelligence officers hacked and leaked embarrassing Democratic Party documents, and a government-linked troll farm orchestrated a sophisticated and far-reaching social media campaign that denigrated Hillary Clinton and promoted Trump.

But a close examination of the report shows that none of those headline assertions are supported by the report’s evidence or other publicly available sources. They are further undercut by investigative shortcomings and the conflicts of interest of key players involved:

• The report uses qualified and vague language to describe key events, indicating that Mueller and his investigators do not actually know for certain whether Russian intelligence officers stole Democratic Party emails, or how those emails were transferred to WikiLeaks.
• The report's timeline of events appears to defy logic. According to its narrative, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange announced the publication of Democratic Party emails not only before he received the documents but before he even communicated with the source that provided them.
• There is strong reason to doubt Mueller’s suggestion that an alleged Russian cutout called Guccifer 2.0 supplied the stolen emails to Assange.
• Mueller’s decision not to interview Assange – a central figure who claims Russia was not behind the hack – suggests an unwillingness to explore avenues of evidence on fundamental questions.
• U.S. intelligence officials cannot make definitive conclusions about the hacking of the Democratic National Committee computer servers because they did not analyze those servers themselves. Instead, they relied on the forensics of CrowdStrike, a private contractor for the DNC that was not a neutral party, much as “Russian dossier” compiler Christopher Steele, also a DNC contractor, was not a neutral party. This puts two Democrat-hired contractors squarely behind underlying allegations in the affair – a key circumstance that Mueller ignores.
• Further, the government allowed CrowdStrike and the Democratic Party's legal counsel to submit redacted records, meaning CrowdStrike and not the government decided what could be revealed or not regarding evidence of hacking.
• Mueller’s report conspicuously does not allege that the Russian government carried out the social media campaign. Instead it blames, as Mueller said in his closing remarks, "a private Russian entity" known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA).
• Mueller also falls far short of proving that the Russian social campaign was sophisticated, or even more than minimally related to the 2016 election. As with the collusion and Russian hacking allegations, Democratic officials had a central and overlooked hand in generating the alarm about Russian social media activity.
• John Brennan, then director of the CIA, played a seminal and overlooked role in all facets of what became Mueller’s investigation: the suspicions that triggered the initial collusion probe; the allegations of Russian interference; and the intelligence assessment that purported to validate the interference allegations that Brennan himself helped generate. Yet Brennan has since revealed himself to be, like CrowdStrike and Steele, hardly a neutral party -- in fact a partisan with a deep animus toward Trump.

None of this means that the Mueller report's core finding of "sweeping and systematic" Russian government election interference is necessarily false. But his report does not present sufficient evidence to substantiate it.

https://www.realclearinvestigations....ng_claims.html

I'm also aware of the dirty cop's excuse for why he couldn't prosecute the case against the 13 Russian ham sandwiches trolls, which begs the question: why did he indict them if he wasn't ready to take the case to trial? It's pretty obvious that he was just looking to add another trophy to his mantle in order to give the false appearance of a legitimate investigation and that he never expected the defendants to actually contest the charges and force him to sheepishly tell the judge that the dog ate his homework.

[DivineOb]

I'm aware of what the dirty cop's report says, and his case for Russian hacking is exceptionally weak.

MM, I've already demonstrated you to be totally unwilling to actually dig into the original data sources when drawing your conclusions (e.g. the supposed FBI docs which demonstrate lying and evidence withholding). Why should we assume you have actually looked in depth at the original sources in this case (e.g. the Mueller Report itself)?

[Mountain Man]

MM, I've already demonstrated you to be totally unwilling to actually dig into the original data sources when drawing your conclusions (e.g. the supposed FBI docs which demonstrate lying and evidence withholding). Why should we assume you have actually looked in depth at the original sources in this case (e.g. the Mueller Report itself)?

Help me out here: Are you appealing to the ad hominem fallacy, or the genetic fallacy?

[DivineOb]

Help me out here: Are you appealing to the ad hominem fallacy, or the genetic fallacy?

Neither of those.

Ad hominem would be if I attacked you unjustly and discarded your argument for that reason e.g. I said you cheated on your wife with her sister so your argument is invalid. I did nothing of the sort.

Claiming the genetic fallacy in this case is even further off base.

What I'm doing is accurately characterizing you as someone who likes to copy / paste without reading or understanding what is actually being said. This is true and clearly evidenced recent (i.e. as of last week) behavior.

[Mountain Man]

Neither of those.

Ad hominem would be if I attacked you unjustly and discarded your argument for that reason e.g. I said you cheated on your wife with her sister so your argument is invalid. I did nothing of the sort.

Claiming the genetic fallacy in this case is even further off base.

What I'm doing is accurately characterizing you as someone who likes to copy / paste without reading or understanding what is actually being said. This is true and clearly evidenced recent (i.e. as of last week) behavior.

Right, so it's the ad hominem fallacy. Thanks for clarifying.