Comment by vonklaus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vonklaus | Hacker News Reader

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> Did you mean to respond to me? I just said that the Russian intelligence services will use..

I am not that poster. However, it seems that many are arguing if the source is legitimate, but tacitly accept it is StateSponsered. Yes, we are actively in a coldwar, however, that does not mean it is Russia.

I am extremely suspect of the sources agenda. I agree with you this has the markings of a manufactured agenda on it. It could certainly be Russian operatives; or some subset of information was handed off from a highlevel RU source, but that is not proveable nor are there a reasonable amount of credible evidence.

The media has spent time discussing "Russian" involvement in near synchronicity-- moreso than the content of the emails.

There has only been limited time to remarks questioning a second Snowden like insider, which on the program I heard (NPR) there was casual speculation they were a Russian plant.

There are many outfits capable of this one might imagine. The "this was so easy"-esqu bit strikes me as utter bullshit. This whole leak seems extremely awkward, and its motivation is unclear.

The lack of real evidence & the unlnowns about the underlying agenda are scary. Clearly, someone who is powerful is behind this, if they are able to evade detenction by the NSA as well as gain entry to one of Americas most powerful correspondence.

I think a preponderance of the evidence would suggest Russian involvement, from the incident response report, the overwhelming agreement of the intelligence community (on background, of course), to the excellent reporting by Joseph Cox of vice who found it odd a Romanian hacker couldn't actually speak Romanian. Also worth noting is 'the equation group' suffered a breach after American officials persisted in talking about Russian attribution after Putin had warned them to move on. Attribution is extremely difficult, but the balance of evidence remains clear.

If you study Vladimir Putin, you'll find this is pretty par the course. He practices what he calls 'asymmetric warfare', an interesting aside in itself - but in short, he's the most skilled propagandist alive today. He's known to have interfered with European elections and funded far-right and far-left groups of almost every shade; anything to destabilize his enemies. His interference with domestic US elections is for the same reasons: to weaken US international standing and NATO, and place someone in office who would be more compliant to his demands than HRC.

Again, I believe we agree on the facts but draw different conclusions. I think it is likely, probable even, that Russia was involved. However, not familiar with what you sourced so going on the post alone, the only evidence appears circumstantial, and one hacker was decidedly not Romanian.

Simply for rhetoric, I will propose a scenario that I do find possible. Guccifer2 was a fairly talented hacker who found and copied the DNC files and disseminated them. However, immediately the weight of NSA & US Intel closed in hard. Captured him, and are executing the scenario you just proposed but from the American angle.

Blame the Russians/anyone else, leak mostly trivial data, and a few larger but not extremely problematic things to feed the narrative, and then gain credibility. From there, you can use the alias as a hunny pot to attract others, destroy the credibility of guccifer2 hopefully calling into question the next persons legitimate attempts at such a feat, or continue shaping the narrative.

This disclosure seems extremely weird. The pay for play directory and the bro-ish shout out to assange are ridiculous. I can't see the payforplay directory being legit (he said that the photo was from dnc dir) and the whole thing just seems absurd. I haven't been following it enough, but hopefully he has been signing messages, and if not cryptographic proof, something nearly as irrefutable.

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