Darth Omar
Russian asset
In other words, it's not nearly as rock solid a case as it's been presented.
And there are people who were quite aware that all along. Why is it so important to implicate Russia?
trump: oblivious moron or psychotically narcissistic oblivious moron?
- Thread starter RickyTavy
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In other words, it's not nearly as rock solid a case as it's been presented.
And there are people who were quite aware that all along. Why is it so important to implicate Russia?
Let me also refer back to sourced reporting from January 2017 that indicated that the January 6th ICA was suspicious because it more than obviously reached unusually clear judgments on a politically explosive issue with no dissenting views from any of the “hand-selected analysts from the CIA, NSA and the FBI … how unusual and questionable is that – to me it is mind-boggling and reeks of undue influence, biasedness and suspicion, to say the least.
I previously thought the ICA’s unambiguous, dissent-free judgments were the result of limiting the number of intelligence agencies which were allowed to participate in developing the assessment. But based on Director Clapper’s testimony, it appears that politicization of this assessment was much more serious, and quite clear to me that it was both intentional and deliberately designed to both support and to validate the Democrat Party’s narrative of the Trump campaign’s and transition collusion with Moscow.
Mr. Clapper further explained in his testimony that two dozen or so “seasoned experts” were “handpicked” from the contributing IC agencies” and collaborated and drafted the ICA “under the aegis of his former office,” that being the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Meaning, the ODNI had orchestrated, implemented and maintained oversight of the overall process to prepare the ICA.
While Mr. Clapper claimed these analysts, i.e.; “seasoned experts” were given “complete independence” to reach their findings, he added that their conclusions “were thoroughly vetted and then approved by the directors of the three agencies and me.” This process drastically differed from the IC’s normal process and procedures. During my time in Washington and during my career while serving in other key and critical intelligence assignments, I had the privilege to serve on numerous IC panels to debate, corroborated, draft, and prepare Intelligence Estimates, Special Intelligence Estimates, and ICA Assessments – in each and every case, all IC member representatives were always present and both required to submit and argue their respected agencies position and perspectives.
Of deep concern is this so-called “hand-picking” of a handful of analysts from just three intelligence agencies to write such a critical and controversial assessment. And to further allow it to go against standing rules to vet such analysis throughout the entire Intelligence Community within its existing structure. The idea of using hand-picked intelligence analysts selected through some unknown politicized process to write an assessment on such a politically sensitive topic carries a strong stench of politicization, unlike anything I have ever seen. I cannot understand how any member of Congress both in the House or the Senate who claims to have but a single once of integrity, would accept this ICA or Director Clapper’s explanation for the ICA’s methodology, process and findings. As a result, I must emphatically say; shame on them for continuing to tout and reference the ICA, and its politically bogus findings and its conveniently contrived conclusion.
Further, it should be noted that FBI Director James Comey said in his testimony to the House Intelligence Committee that, “the conclusion that Russia tried to affect the outcome of the November election to help candidate Donald Trump win was based on logic, not evidence.” So we now know this was a subjective judgment made again, by the so-called hand-picked group of intelligence analysts. Again, this raises the questions;
et me also add that a major problem with this process is that it gave John Brennan, CIA’s hyper-partisan former Director, enormous influence over the drafting of the ICA. Given Brennan’s blatant bias and his scathing criticism of Mr. Trump before and after the election, he should have had no role whatsoever in the drafting of this assessment. As a result, I highly suspicious and suspect based on his total disregard, distain and anti-Trump stance that Mr. Brennan more than likely selected the CIA analysts who worked on the ICA and reviewed, influenced, and approved their conclusions, as well as colluded with ODNI, NSA and the FBI senior political-appointed leaders to flesh-out the analysts and orchestrate the findings and conclusions of the assessment.
Secondly and finally, I find it ever harder to believe the Intelligence Community’s “logical” conclusion that Russia meddled in the election to help Donald Trump win since this conclusion was the result of intelligence officials breaking the rules on the processes and production of the Intelligence Community’s assessment. An assessment purporting to be an objective and authoritative analysis of such an extremely controversial subject should have gone the extra mile to consider the points of view from all of the seventeen intelligence agencies and their respective intelligence experts, and not be limited to a small group of analysts hand-picked through some unknown political and agenda-driven process
http://americaoutloud.com/u-s-intelligence-communitys-contrived-intelligence-assessment/
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what is the Deep State? CIA was set up as a spy agency to combat Russia. It's innately Russiaphobic.
So is Comey (and the FBI itself) -his testimony that "Russians are coming after America"..
Brennan (CIA under Obama) has long been openly hostile to Trump -even the current CIA director
has an innate hatred of WIKI and Russia..
Wikileaks is a 'hostile intelligence service helped by Russia,' says CIA director Mike Pompeo
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-pompeo-donald-trump-dnc-hacked-a7683341.html
Aside from the politicization, it's who they are.
There is no possible bigger lemming than you, Trump dick sucker.
cancel2 2022
Canceled
So where is this alleged huge IQ you used to boast about, do you think Einstein called his detractors dicksuckers?
Sent from my iPhone 25S with cherries on top
Dropbear1
Verified User
The problem I have with the finding is that the agencies relied on a Private Contractor to examine the DNC server. So they didn't examine it at all. CrowdStrike may be a great company BUT!!!!
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_t...nc_hack_because_it_relied_on_crowdstrike.html
They are NOT the FBI, NSA and CIA!!Plus it's not as if CrowdStrike didn't have a vested interest in it NOT being a 15yo in a basement somewhere.
Greg
Owl'd You're Up!
Verified User
You don't learn, do you?
Putin Ordered Campaign To Influence US Election
We assess with high confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election, the consistent goals of which were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. When it appeared to Moscow that Secretary Clinton was likely to win the election, the Russian influence campaign then focused on undermining her expected presidency.
We assess with high confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election, the consistent goals of which were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. When it appeared to Moscow that Secretary Clinton was likely to win the election, the Russian influence campaign then focused on undermining her expected presidency.
And that is relevant, because? Other than the fact that you love to hyperventilate about that as if it meant something, I mean?
Owl'd You're Up!
Verified User
Ah, you found an illiterate goof over at "americaoutloud.com" who told you what you think.
No kidding.
Why does Trump owe Russian banks almost a billion dollars?
oh please. refute his points, they make a lot of sense.
Yet the NSA did not have high confidence,only moderate.
Then there is the matter of turning the Podesta Emails over to Wiki.
They can't prove it was a Russian actor who gave Wiki the hack so they invent a "cutout" ( and never source that)
that did it.
Darth Omar
Russian asset
The server is relevant because it's the primary source of evidence in the *alleged* cyber crime committed against the DNC.
And no one in government has done a forensic analysis on it.
cancel2 2022
Canceled
Of course Desh would be screaming for a link, but I know you don't do that.
Sent from my iPhone 25S with cherries on top
cancel2 2022
Canceled
Owl'd You're Up!
Verified User
Oh, please! No eff'n way will I give that hyperventilating shit he pulled from his probably cavernous arse the time and effort to "refute" anything, particularly so since this is from beginning to end baseless speculation, innuendo, and the ascription of motivations that satisfy the author's paranoia - and your willingness to join in to the hyperventilating - but have no basis in fact. This is a document so obviously and utterly worthless, the fabrication of some obscure conspiracy crackpot, you should be ashamed to post it, A Nutter.
olde, Austria is about to close the border. The Brenner Pass. A bunch of ignorant racists or what? What say you?
Owl'd You're Up!
Verified User
Now you are down to lying?
Is there something unclear about this? "We assess with high confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election..."
............................................................................
Ah, now you're a cyber security expert, and you know better than the FBI, CIA, and NSA, which conclusions they can reach without examining the server. And you base that formidable assessment on your rightarded sources that told you that you have to hyperventilate about "The FBI did not examine the server! Now!" Yeah, but your useful idiocy is cute.
For one, a lot of the so-called evidence above is no such thing. CrowdStrike, whose claims of Russian responsibility are perhaps most influential throughout the media, says
Next, consider the fact that CrowdStrike describes APT 28 and 29 like this:
Their tradecraft is superb, operational security second to none and the extensive usage of “living-off-the-land” techniques enables them to easily bypass many security solutions they encounter. In particular, we identified advanced methods consistent with nation-state level capabilities including deliberate targeting and “access management” tradecraft — both groups were constantly going back into the environment to change out their implants, modify persistent methods, move to new Command & Control channels and perform other tasks to try to stay ahead of being detected.
Compare that description to CrowdStrike’s claim it was able to finger APT 28 and 29, described above as digital spies par excellence, because they were so incredibly sloppy. Would a group whose “tradecraft is superb” with “operational security second to none” really leave behind the name of a Soviet spy chief imprinted on a document it sent to American journalists?
Would these groups really be dumb enough to leave cyrillic comments on these documents? Would these groups that “constantly [go] back into the environment to change out their implants, modify persistent methods, move to new Command & Control channels” get caught because they precisely didn’t make sure not to use IP addresses they’d been associated before? It’s very hard to buy the argument that the Democrats were hacked by one of the most sophisticated, diabolical foreign intelligence services in history, and that we know this because they screwed up over and over again.
But how do we even know these oddly named groups are Russian? CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch himself describes APT 28 as a “Russian-based threat actor” whose modus operandi “closely mirrors the strategic interests of the Russian government” and “may indicate affiliation [Russia’s] Main Intelligence Department or GRU, Russia’s premier military intelligence service.” Security firm SecureWorks issued a report blaming Russia with “moderate confidence.” What constitutes moderate confidence? SecureWorks said it adopted the “grading system published by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence to indicate confidence in their assessments. … Moderate confidence generally means that the information is credibly sourced and plausible but not of sufficient quality or corroborated sufficiently to warrant a higher level of confidence.” All of this amounts to a very educated guess, at best.
Even the claim that APT 28/Fancy Bear itself is a group working for the Kremlin is speculative, a fact that’s been completely erased from this year’s discourse. In its 2014 reveal of the group, the high-profile security firm FireEye couldn’t even blame Russia without a question mark in the headline: “APT28: A Window into Russia’s Cyber Espionage Operations?” The blog post itself is remarkably similar to arguments about the DNC hack: technical but still largely speculative, presenting evidence the company “[believes] indicate a government sponsor based in Moscow.” Believe! Indicate! We should know already this is no smoking gun. FireEye’s argument that the malware used by APT 28 is connected to the Russian government is based on the belief that its “developers are Russian language speakers operating during business hours that are consistent with the time zone of Russia’s major cities.”
As security researcher Jeffrey Carr pointed out in June, FireEye’s 2014 report on APT 28 is questionable from the start:
To my surprise, the report’s authors declared that they deliberately excluded evidence that didn’t support their judgment that the Russian government was responsible for APT28’s activities:
“APT28 has targeted a variety of organizations that fall outside of the three themes we highlighted above. However, we are not profiling all of APT28’s targets with the same detail because they are not particularly indicative of a specific sponsor’s interests.” (emphasis added)
That is the very definition of confirmation bias. Had FireEye published a detailed picture of APT28’s activities including all of their known targets, other theories regarding this group could have emerged; for example, that the malware developers and the operators of that malware were not the same or even necessarily affiliated.
The notion that APT 28 has a narrow focus on American political targets is undermined in another SecureWorks paper, which shows that the hackers have a wide variety of interests: 10 percent of their targets are NGOs, 22 percent are journalists, 4 percent are aerospace researchers, and 8 percent are “government supply chain.” SecureWorks says that only 8 percent of APT 28/Fancy Bear’s targets are “government personnel” of any nationality — hardly the focused agenda described by CrowdStrike.
Truly, the argument that “Guccifer 2.0″ is a Kremlin agent or that GRU breached John Podesta’s email only works if you presume that APT 28/Fancy Bear is a unit of the Russian government, a fact that has never been proven beyond any reasonable doubt. According to Carr, “
Security researcher Claudio Guarnieri put it this way:
[Private security firms] can’t produce anything conclusive. What they produce is speculative attribution that is pretty common to make in the threat research field. I do that same speculative attribution myself, but it is just circumstantial. At the very best it can only prove that the actor that perpetrated the attack is very likely located in Russia. As for government involvement, it can only speculate that it is plausible because of context and political motivations, as well as technical connections with previous (or following attacks) that appear to be perpetrated by the same group and that corroborate the analysis that it is a Russian state-sponsored actor (for example, hacking of institutions of other countries Russia has some geopolitical interests in).
Finally, one can’t be reminded enough that all of this evidence comes from private companies with a direct financial interest in making the internet seem as scary as possible, just as Lysol depends on making you believe your kitchen is crawling with E. Coli.
full article: https://theintercept.com/2016/12/14/heres-the-public-evidence-russia-hacked-the-dnc-its-not-enough/
But this isn’t a Russian technique any more than using a computer is a Russian technique — misspelled domains are a cornerstone of phishing attacks all over the world. Is Yandex — the Russian equivalent of Google — some sort of giveaway? Anyone who claimed a hacker must be a CIA agent because they used a Gmail account would be laughed off the internet. We must also acknowledge that just because Guccifer 2.0 pretended to be Romanian, we can’t conclude he works for the Russian government — it just makes him a liar.
Next, consider the fact that CrowdStrike describes APT 28 and 29 like this:
Their tradecraft is superb, operational security second to none and the extensive usage of “living-off-the-land” techniques enables them to easily bypass many security solutions they encounter. In particular, we identified advanced methods consistent with nation-state level capabilities including deliberate targeting and “access management” tradecraft — both groups were constantly going back into the environment to change out their implants, modify persistent methods, move to new Command & Control channels and perform other tasks to try to stay ahead of being detected.
Compare that description to CrowdStrike’s claim it was able to finger APT 28 and 29, described above as digital spies par excellence, because they were so incredibly sloppy. Would a group whose “tradecraft is superb” with “operational security second to none” really leave behind the name of a Soviet spy chief imprinted on a document it sent to American journalists?
Would these groups really be dumb enough to leave cyrillic comments on these documents? Would these groups that “constantly [go] back into the environment to change out their implants, modify persistent methods, move to new Command & Control channels” get caught because they precisely didn’t make sure not to use IP addresses they’d been associated before? It’s very hard to buy the argument that the Democrats were hacked by one of the most sophisticated, diabolical foreign intelligence services in history, and that we know this because they screwed up over and over again.
But how do we even know these oddly named groups are Russian? CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch himself describes APT 28 as a “Russian-based threat actor” whose modus operandi “closely mirrors the strategic interests of the Russian government” and “may indicate affiliation [Russia’s] Main Intelligence Department or GRU, Russia’s premier military intelligence service.” Security firm SecureWorks issued a report blaming Russia with “moderate confidence.” What constitutes moderate confidence? SecureWorks said it adopted the “grading system published by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence to indicate confidence in their assessments. … Moderate confidence generally means that the information is credibly sourced and plausible but not of sufficient quality or corroborated sufficiently to warrant a higher level of confidence.” All of this amounts to a very educated guess, at best.
Even the claim that APT 28/Fancy Bear itself is a group working for the Kremlin is speculative, a fact that’s been completely erased from this year’s discourse. In its 2014 reveal of the group, the high-profile security firm FireEye couldn’t even blame Russia without a question mark in the headline: “APT28: A Window into Russia’s Cyber Espionage Operations?” The blog post itself is remarkably similar to arguments about the DNC hack: technical but still largely speculative, presenting evidence the company “[believes] indicate a government sponsor based in Moscow.” Believe! Indicate! We should know already this is no smoking gun. FireEye’s argument that the malware used by APT 28 is connected to the Russian government is based on the belief that its “developers are Russian language speakers operating during business hours that are consistent with the time zone of Russia’s major cities.”
As security researcher Jeffrey Carr pointed out in June, FireEye’s 2014 report on APT 28 is questionable from the start:
To my surprise, the report’s authors declared that they deliberately excluded evidence that didn’t support their judgment that the Russian government was responsible for APT28’s activities:
“APT28 has targeted a variety of organizations that fall outside of the three themes we highlighted above. However, we are not profiling all of APT28’s targets with the same detail because they are not particularly indicative of a specific sponsor’s interests.” (emphasis added)
That is the very definition of confirmation bias. Had FireEye published a detailed picture of APT28’s activities including all of their known targets, other theories regarding this group could have emerged; for example, that the malware developers and the operators of that malware were not the same or even necessarily affiliated.
The notion that APT 28 has a narrow focus on American political targets is undermined in another SecureWorks paper, which shows that the hackers have a wide variety of interests: 10 percent of their targets are NGOs, 22 percent are journalists, 4 percent are aerospace researchers, and 8 percent are “government supply chain.” SecureWorks says that only 8 percent of APT 28/Fancy Bear’s targets are “government personnel” of any nationality — hardly the focused agenda described by CrowdStrike.
Truly, the argument that “Guccifer 2.0″ is a Kremlin agent or that GRU breached John Podesta’s email only works if you presume that APT 28/Fancy Bear is a unit of the Russian government, a fact that has never been proven beyond any reasonable doubt. According to Carr, “
Without that premise, all we can truly conclude is that some email accounts at the DNC et al. appear to have been broken into by someone, and perhaps they speak Russian. Left ignored is the mammoth difference between Russians and Russia.
Security researcher Claudio Guarnieri put it this way:
[Private security firms] can’t produce anything conclusive. What they produce is speculative attribution that is pretty common to make in the threat research field. I do that same speculative attribution myself, but it is just circumstantial. At the very best it can only prove that the actor that perpetrated the attack is very likely located in Russia. As for government involvement, it can only speculate that it is plausible because of context and political motivations, as well as technical connections with previous (or following attacks) that appear to be perpetrated by the same group and that corroborate the analysis that it is a Russian state-sponsored actor (for example, hacking of institutions of other countries Russia has some geopolitical interests in).
Finally, one can’t be reminded enough that all of this evidence comes from private companies with a direct financial interest in making the internet seem as scary as possible, just as Lysol depends on making you believe your kitchen is crawling with E. Coli.
full article: https://theintercept.com/2016/12/14/heres-the-public-evidence-russia-hacked-the-dnc-its-not-enough/
Is this your attempt at civility?