This is the correct POV on this. If it is Russia and there is proof, we do have to deal with it. How about we cut a deal with them - we'll stop spying on you and all our allies in exchange for you stopping, too. That goes for meddling in foreign nations' elections. We have no high ground to stand on here.
First: it's no longer just the CIA. It's ALL the agencies. Second: there is proof, I heard a computer espionage expert talking about it on the radio. He was initially skeptical but then looked at the evidence the agencies have made public and became convinced. Essentially he said that the only possibility of it NOT being the Russians was if somebody had hacked the Russians and was pretending to be them, and the chances of that, he said, were about zero. So all you're saying is that you don't care to examine even the evidence that has been made public. Your team winning is not a good reason for taking that stance. Also, whether we like it or not, we have to realize that there are certain things that cannot be made public. We are right to be skeptical, but we also have to know that they have agents to protect and making some information public would endanger them by making it obvious where the info came from.
Maybe if Trump starts murdering journalists, jailing political rivals and annexes part of Mexico this will be true. Maybe he'll do it just for that reason.
We have no high ground to stand on. We've interfered in hundreds of elections outside the US, but wah wah when it's (maybe) done to us. You have a vivid imagination. SMH
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/01/russian-hacking-trump/510689/ How solid is the intelligence community’s case that Russia tried to tilt the election for Trump? The Washington Post has cited “the United States’ long-standing struggle to collect reliable intelligence on President Vladimir Putin and those closest to him.” Since the end of the Cold War and especially since 9/11, American intelligence agencies have deprioritized Russia. The Post reported in fall, citing U.S. officials, that the “CIA and other agencies now devote at most 10 percent of their budgets to Russia-related espionage, a percentage that has risen over the past two years,” but is still dwarfed by the Cold War peak of about 40 percent. As for the actual evidence of intent, what’s publicly available remains circumstantial, including Russian state TV’s pushing of Trump’s candidacy, and reports that the Republican National Committee, too, was hacked though suffered none of the same embarrassing leaks as the DNC. (The RNC has denied it was hacked; The Wall Street Journal reports, citing “officials who have been briefed on the attempted intrusion,” that the effort was thwarted by the RNC’s cybersecurity systems.) All of this was occurring in an international political context in which Trump was one of the most pro-Russian presidential candidates in recent memory, while Vladimir Putin personally blamed Hillary Clinton for inciting protests against his rule when she was secretary of state.
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/01/06/the-dubious-case-on-russian-hacking/ The Dubious Case on Russian ‘Hacking’ By William Binney and Ray McGovern http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-hacking-intelligence-20170105-story.html Emails were leaked, not hacked By William Binney and Ray McGovern William Binney (williambinney0802@comcast.net) worked for NSA for 36 years, retiring in 2001 as the technical director of world military and geopolitical analysis and reporting; he created many of the collection systems still used by NSA. Ray McGovern (rrmcgovern@gmail.com) was a CIA analyst for 27 years; he briefed the president's daily brief one-on-one to President Reagan's most senior national security officials from 1981-85.
The whole point of this Big Serious Report, at least according to the weeks of hype which preceded its release, was that the American public would finally be furnished with all the evidence they need to conclude with unshakable confidence that the Russian Government and Scary Dictator Putin were directly responsible for ordering the “hack” of the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta. The report certainly asserts that this is what happened, but various “U.S. Officials” have been asserting such for months through a variety of channels. The main response to these assertions from skeptics has always been: show us actual evidence to support your extreme and highly incendiary claims. After months and months of tortured debate and histrionics, still no evidence is forthcoming. Government Officials and their sycophants in the media can insist all day that providing specific evidence would somehow compromise “sources and methods,” but this could just as easily serve as a pretext for covering up evidence that is either fundamentally flimsy or doesn’t exist — revelations which the Government would rather not divulge because were they to do so, the public would know once and for all that this Russian Hacking Mania has been nothing but a blame-deflecting sham from the beginning.
Ziff-Davis has been publishing computer and tech relate magazine and website since at least the 1980s, if not sooner. http://www.zdnet.com/article/no-smoking-gun-for-russian-dnc-hacks/ No smoking gun for Russian DNC hacks The Russian government may have hacked Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to support Donald Trump's campaign, but there's no hard technical proof. The primary method used in Grizzly Steppe is spear phishing. In spear phishing, a very common hacking approach, you receive messages, which look like they're coming from a friend or co-worker. In Grizzly Steppe, if you click on the message's content or follow a link, you infect your device with Remote Access Tools (RATs) malware. From that, emails and other data are syphoned to the attacker. The JAR included "specific indicators of compromise, including IP addresses and a PHP malware sample." But what does this really prove? Wordfence, a WordPresssecurity company specializing in analyzing PHP malware, examined these indicators and didn't find any hard evidence of Russian involvement. Instead, Wordfence found the attack software was P.AS. 3.1.0, an out-of-date, web-shell hacking tool. The newest version, 4.1.1b, is more sophisticated. Its website claims it was written in the Ukraine. Mark Maunder, Wordfence's CEO, concluded that since the attacks were made "several versions behind the most current version of P.A.S [sic] which is 4.1.1b. One might reasonably expect Russian intelligence operatives to develop their own tools or at least use current malicious tools from outside sources."
I'm a little unclear on this conspiracy theory of yours - what does anyone stand to gain from making this up? Especially the intelligence services, who will soon be reporting to Trump? Second point: things can be true even if Denny Crane doesn't understand why they are true. barfo
More Maunder and his crew also analyzed the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses used in Grizzly Steppe. They found the IP addresses that DHS provided "may have been used for an attack by a state actor like Russia. But they don't appear to provide any association with Russia. They are probably used by a wide range of other malicious actors, especially the 15 percent of IP addresses that are Tor exit nodes." In short, Maunder continued in a FAQ, the data in the DHS/FBI Grizzly Steppe report contained "'indicators of compromise' (IOCs) [sic] which you can think of as footprints that hackers left behind. The IOC's in the report are tools that are freely available and IP addresses that are used by hackers around the world. There is very little Russia-specific data in the Grizzly Steppe report." Others beside Wordfence found the JAR less than convincing. Robert M. Lee, CEO of the security company Dragos, wrote: "This ultimately seems like a very rushed report put together by multiple teams working different data sets and motivations. It is my opinion and speculation that there were some really good government analysts and operators contributing to this data and then report reviews, leadership approval processes, and sanitation processes stripped out most of the value and left behind a very confusing report trying to cover too much while saying too little." In short, maybe it was the Russians behind the attacks on the DNC and other US organizations, but neither the source code nor the network analysis we've been shown so far strongly supports this conclusion.
John McCain and Lindsey Graham seem pretty convinced, and presumably would have security clearance (being on the Senate Arms Committee or whatever it's called) to see much more evidence than us. Are you going to claim they're leaping to conclusions? Or maybe they're being led astray by deceptive politically-motivated intelligence agencies? Or perhaps they're just butthurt about Trump being mean to them? Do tell.
it's simple Denny.....the info you can dig up doesn't add up...until you accept that as a fact instead of political lobby, it will not make sense...smoking gun...all we get to see are the empty ammo boxes...
It's true the DNC may have been hacked by Putin himself. There simply hasn't been anything but circumstantial evidence that links it to the Russian government. There are obvious reasons why Obama ordered this report. Do realize we should be most skeptical of possibly cherry picked intel. This is the administration that claimed Benghazi was an uprising over a YouTube video, after all. And told us Saddam had WMDs. These reports say what the administration wants them to say. True for W, true for O. I have defended corporate WWW sites against cyberattacks by the anonymous hacker group. They announced their intention ahead of time. We infiltrated their chat rooms and saw them say, "now" and the DoS attacks begin. I've had to clean up hacked corporate systems. I literally worked on one of the major security companies' hardware/software appliance, and examined and handled hundreds of malicious programs. I have been logged into systems at the same time the hacker was, and chatted with him. I even hired several teenage hackers, one of them a 400 lb kid who hacked from his bedroom. This site is under 24/7 constant assault by hackers. I see the evidence in the server logs all the time. I don't think it's the Russian government. I know evidence tracing the source to Russia when I see it. The 25 page document and associated csv and xml files contain no such proof. People who have dug further into the claimed sources find they're TOR endpoints or open VPN, that anyone can use. I already posted that the tools used could be created by one guy with the skills to do so, and share them with tens of thousands of hackers who need little skill. Read my previous post - it talks about how old the JAR was that enabled the breach. That the software is a maintained and updated means they build upon their knew knowledge and fix issues with the previous version. That large software projects can be jointly developed by non professionals (e.g. Not getting paid to do so) is evident. Google Chrome, Linux, FreeBSD, FireFox, and 10s of thousands of projects on sites like github are that evidence. The closest thing I've seen is the company that the DNC hired to review the hack were logged in to the server while it was sending files to some distant server. There's been nothing convincing about who controlled that remote server at the time and from where. The hackers aren't going to connect from their laptop directly to that server to download the files. They'll log in to a machine in India, then from that machine to a machine in South Africa, from that machine to a machine in Maryland, to a machine in London, then to the machine with the files. All those links have to be made to prove its true origin. Plus, if this is a Russian government sponsored program ongoing since the 1990s as claimed, these hackers would be the most advanced of all haCkers and simply wouldn't get caught. But do pretend whatever it takes to make you happy. In the meantime, I await even a little direct (not circumstantial) evidence, and I will say it's Putin if it is.
The same McCain that went to Syria and had his picture taken with the bad guys he said we should be arming? Not swayed. But hey, Bill Clinton said Saddam had WMDs, and he had the highest level clearance of all, and daily briefings.
Valerie Plame. These agencies aren't biased, eh? The reports are loaded with loaded terms like "we assess...". In other words, they are guessing. I am looking at any and all evidence available. I have no reason to lie about it, or I'd look like a fool (e.g. barfo). I've now posted reports by 3 security experts who say the evidence isn't conclusive. The last one went into great detail why.
John McCain would claim Disneyland hacked the DNC if it meant we could bomb some people. Interesting seeing "progressives" suddenly backing the likes of John McCain and Lindsey Graham lol.
