The Intercept has offered a report on a “top secret” NSA document which claims Russian hacking attacks were carried out against companies involved with voter registration and voting software, which they purported amounted to Russian military intelligence attempts to undermine the 2016 election.
The report offers some new accusations of things that were said to have happened in the lead-up to the vote, in keeping with the Obama Administration’s narrative that Russia “hacked the election, but as was so often the case, the document declares that everything was done by the Russians without providing specific intelligence backing up those claims.
This centered on allegations of “spearphishing,” in which the attackers sent unsolicited emails containing infected Microsoft Word documents in hope that the targets would open the documents and in that way get infected. The report concedes it isn’t really sure how well that worked for them.
While the document has that typical lack of meat that is so common in government documents insisting that the hack took place, it is apparently an authentic one, as the FBI has subsequently captured an employee of the Pluribus International Corporation, identified as Reality Winner, for having leaked the document to the Intercept.
The complaint also claims that the top secret level of the document indicates that its release “could reasonably result in exceptionally grave damage to national security,” though again it isn’t clear that’s actually case, and the only damage here seems to be continued embarrassment at losing documents.
The criminal complaint says the Intercept contacted the government with regards to the document, and the pictures of the document showed it had a “fold” in it. Following that they conducted a probe into the six people who had physically printed the document that had the fold in it in the first place, finding that Winner had contact with the Intercept on a computer.
This adds considerable support to the authenticity of the document, which suggests that the NSA actually believes the narrative within. That this is yet another “top secret” document that offers no proper evidence to underpin its allegations, however, speaks volumes about the continued “high confidence” officials insist they have.
That ridiculous presentation is good for convincing a typical politician, but not much else.
And unfortunately, the press and the talking heads.
Intercept: ” A U.S. intelligence officer who declined to be identified cautioned
against drawing too big a conclusion from the document because a single
analysis is not necessarily definitive.”
The Intercept, of course, does not need such caution and frames it, apart from a few weasel words here and there, as being a quite a big, loaded story. Like the Washington Post does like every hour on Trump since the election.
To me it sounds more like the same type of phishing campaigns going on all over the (Western) world at that time in many institutions, governmental, scientific and corporate, all by unverified methods traced to a certain “hostile government”. In other words, how directed was this in particular? For a hacker, all access is good. Worth money, worth new leads into new hacks.
The real news value is how a naive leftish employee wanted to “save the world” from Trump and put herself into jail for leaking something which nobody but a news paper desiring a scoop really was waiting for and is as such hardly blowing any whistle.
More victims of the Trump Derangement Syndrome here then…
Exactly, I’d be surprised if there was a single large or medium sized organization that hasn’t been the target of “spear-phishing” weather they know it or not.
Hackers from everywhere do this all the time. Hackers will either actively or passively trawl fro access credentials, taking whatever they can get – in some cases without having previously thought about what to do with the information.
Some of those attacks must be Russian of course and any decent cybercriminals would scatter their operation and use servers & networks from a diverse group of countries, but the mere fact some of teh activity happens under a country’s roof is not strong indication of a state directed campaign.
The Intercept is doing its job. They aren’t in the business of kissing anyone’s butt. It’s a leaked document and a newsworthy issue. Where the chips fall is not a journalist’s job to worry about. The document might be meaningless in the end but it offers a glimpse into the highly secreted NSA so it’s news.
Solution. Stop megadata collection which is against the 4 th amendment then these contractors are not needed. Get rid of all federal employees hired during the last 8 years as a cost reducing measure, exempt military from this. Not perfect but will go a long way to remedying some of these problems. Go back to paper ballots for elections, they may take longer but they leave an evidence trail.
A leaked document is not automatically newsworthy or even helpful. It’s exactly the journalist’s job to be responsible, to assess the balance between damage and worth. Then after release, others again will judge if any actual ‘job’ was done or if the journalist just messed up. Accountability has to be somewhere in the chain.
Anyway, many stories arising now about how the Intercept might have screwed their own anonymous leaker. So not doing their job after all. Too much scoop hungry perhaps? Next time whistle blowers (and wannabees) will go elsewhere I suppose.
I call bullshit. This seems again like politicized intelligence and wishful thinking. I don’t doubt a second that GRU tries to hack US systems all day long same as we do to them but it’s near impossible to prove who is behind what. This is just inventing more fuel to feed the Establishment agenda as there is a total hypocrisy when Russia is singled out vs a whole host of other states influencing American policy and Trump himself in a much bigger way.
What’s more worrying is that apparently the Intercept has now joined the “resistance”. I get why people don’t like Trump, we prefer a “happy face” on our fascism and imperialism, but that’s no reason to undermine your journalistic integrity and behave like WaPo because some analyst got a hard-on after finding some phishing emails from a russian IP addy..
I have heard this same bullshit before from the warmongering
establishment and its pro-war corporate MSM propaganda machine.
Powell stood before the UN in 2003 and parroted from a ‘document’
that claimed Saddam had WMDs, mobile bio labs mounted on trucks,
and was seeking uranium from Niger to build an A Bomb.
He also claimed having a ‘document’ with proof that the so-called
911 ‘lead’ boogeyman ‘hijacker’ Mohammad Atta was, ‘spotted’ in
Prague receiving ‘US-made’ Anthrax from an agent of Saddam.
Needless to say Powell’s ‘document’ was a complete sham used as
an excuse to destroy Iraq and turn it into the disaster it is today
Make no mistake about it, they will fabricate something, as has always been the case. They won’t let it go, never!
… Proof of the taxpayer’s money in action anyways.
Now who owns The Intercept? Has that owner been found to be involved in ZionCon crimes previously?
google( Pierre Omidyar Co-funded Ukraine Revolution Groups With US Government, Documents Show information clearinghouse )
Does anyone notice that none of the media or politicians are advocating for a return to paper or mechanical balloting ? Of course not. They want this electronic, computerized voting trojan horse to be in place forever, because it can be manipulated. US elections are nothing but pointless dramas designed to convey the illusion of choice and distract away from the most important changes occurring in this world.
Looking at something is not the same as undermining something. Undermining requires ACTION, and even the NSA didn’t say that any ACTION occurred.
In other words; ” Discredited intelligence organization makes yet another baseless accusation.”
If those c*ck-drips had one ounce of proof they would have came out waving it like Charlie Bucket with the Golden f**king Ticket months ago just to prove they do something other than spy on your online pornography habits. They’ve got dick, like always.
Well, at least they didn’t assassinate any candidates, fund a coup, fund candidates, draft a new constitution to insure political structures and policies that benefit them, harass and intimidate voters, rig ballot boxes, and all the things the US government has done in foreign countries around the world for the past 100+ years.