Responding to yesterday’s leak of NSA documents by the Intercept, the Kremlin has held a conference call during which spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied the claim that the Russians had attempted to hack American voting equipment, saying it was “false and unfounded.”
Peskov noted that there was nothing that proved any accuracy to the claims made in the NSA document, saying that because of that Russia is discounting the possibility that this could have even happened in the first place.
The Intercept was given the “top secret” documents from a contractor, and those documents made the allegations, though like most official US documents on the “Russian hack” they continued no evidence that Russia was specifically involved in anything.
Rather, the documents made some allegations of a spearphishing effort carried out against companies involved in voter registration and voting software, and just tacked that on to the long list of things Russia is being accused of. In the US these specific claims have largely fallen by the wayside, with much of the focus shifting to the arrest of the apparent leaker, one Reality Winner.
NPR excepted it as absolute truth and for ten minutes
compiled one conspiracy theory after another.
Shamefully, so did Democracy Now! They accepted as a given that because some in the intelligence community apparently believe Russia tried to hack the US election, that could only mean that overwhelming evidence of that exists, somewhere. Innuendo as news, belief as evidence. It’s more comfortable to believe our favorite boogyman inflicted Trump on us than to confront how flawed our country is. They think the only way to stop Trump is to make him guilty by association, not guilty for what he actually does.
That’s what hey’re there for. Maybe the NSA should focus on finding out about the 43 hard drives ‘stolen’ from the FBI and the persinal information on 20 million Americans gathered without a FISA warrant.
They probably already know about that info since the FBi would have copied it to them – the theft is apparently a surprise for the FBI as it appeared before a court in relation to a lawsuit. .
Do we have an apology from The Intercept?
Their actions made her subject to 10 years prison.
Their actions? Her actions too.
Somebody patriotic gave the NSA (as proof they really had it) a copy of the document she gave them. It was marked with invisible coding that identified almost everything about its time and place of origin. Computer access logs gave the rest of the information.
Maybe if she had been on the job longer, she might have realized that. But then, what are newbies doing with Top Secret security clearances?
How do you hack voting equipment? Diddle the software to change the way votes are registered?
While anything is possible, it also doesn’t account for voters actually watching to see what happens when thy pull the lever, and somebody human checking the machines regularly during the votiing period to ensure they are registering correctly. Or is it a possible GiGo situation working because the machine ‘lights up and beeps’.
Anybody dumb enough to have voting machines successfully hacked (and the story DIDN’t say that, did it?) deserves to have ttheir voting machines hacked.
If the hackers weren’t successful, and they’d know that before we did, why not just let it go at that and pass out the proficiency badges.