Grand Jury Indicts Russian Officers for Hacking Related to the 2016 Election

Two things stand out to me here:

(1) CrowdStrike, for all intents and purposes, failed. Russia had access to dem servers for four months after they were hired

(2) Donors trying to use ActBlue (fairly major way dems raise money) were taken to a spoofed Russian site. Stealing democratic campaign donations feels like a very direct attack on the democratic process

> At trial, prosecutors must introduce credible evidence that is sufficient to prove each defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, to the unanimous satisfaction of a jury of twelve citizens.

> This case was investigated with the help of the FBI’s cyber teams in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and San Francisco and the National Security Division.

Assuming this never goes to trial, could the DOJ ever be compelled to release the evidence used to attribute the defendants? Or will it remain "pending arraignment" indefinitely?

I'd love to see an in-depth technical analysis of how they were able to substantiate these allegations

Full indictment document: https://www.justice.gov/file/1080281/download

Replying to an unfortunately killed comment which raised common, potentially legitimate (given the success of various spin efforts) though naive and poorly informed questions:

> Just checking... But in the Russian Hacking Scandal... Was any of the information released to the public wrong or fake?

It's the Russian election meddling scandal, the hacking was just one piece of it, and, yes, much of the information fed to the public in the course of that operation was false.

Some of that has been covered in the special counsel’s previous indictment of Russian organizations and individuals involved in the propaganda end of the operation.

> Because if the issue is that "Russia meddled!" by showing true things

It's not; the issue is that a US Presidential campaign actively collaborated in an influence operation by a hostile foreign power directed against the US (that is itself part of a larger operation being conducted not only the US but the entire Western Alliance), that that influence operation was integral to the success of the Presidential campaign, and that the US President (who is, by virtue of that position, also effective head of a major US political party) may, therefore, effectively be an agent of a hostile foreign power working against the interests of the US and her allies.

"On the evening of June 15, 2016 between 4:19PM and 4:56PM, defendants used their Moscow-based server to search for a series of English words and phrases that later appeared in Guccifer 2.0’s first blog post..."

That has got to be one of the scarier things I've read in some time as to the depth and breadth of current surveillance.

I wonder what the folks that kept claiming an inside job have to say about this?

There's been a longstanding struggle between the design principles of cryptocurrency - i.e. private payments - and the public policy goals of monitoring our payments infrastructure for criminal activity. What are cryptocurrency advocates saying now about e.g. FinCEN's jurisdiction over exchanges? Is KYC now standard? Do they submit SARs? Do they agree with the principles, or are they opposed to any sort of oversight?

Rod Rosenstein said he briefed the president that this indictment was coming today. The president chose today to attack, from Buckinghamshire, Mueller and the probe as a rigged witch hunt yet again. The White House statement amounts to "it proves we did nothing, Americans weren't involved" but no statement pushing back on Russia at all. No condemnation at all.

But this is from a president who has said about Putin:

"He said he didn't meddle. He said he didn't meddle. I asked him again. You can only ask so many times"

"Every time he sees me, he says, 'I didn't do that"

"And I believe, I really believe, that when he tells me that, he means it."

"I think he is very insulted by it."

The timing of this indictment is obvious to probably most people, but in particular to people who have studied or are professionals in international relations - it is to give the president the option to cancel the meeting in Helsinki. To give him the option to recalibrate and criticize Putin.

But instead what we've got so far is more "witch hunt" paranoid conspiratorial nonsense which is identical to the single public contribution of significance Trump produced before becoming president: five years of the racist lie of birtherism, followed by an admission otherwise while simultaneously lying again by blaming Clinton for having started the conspiracy. This is a man who will make up anything, do anything, lie about anything, and blame anyone for all of it without any reluctance whatsoever.

And it will continue that way.

The storyline behind the charges is self-contradictory -- according to Muller's indictments:

a) Russian intelligence tried to hack Hillary's personal email system for the first time on July 27 2016.

b) Russian cutout Joseph Mifsud told George Papadopoulos on April 26 2016 that Russia already had thousands of her emails.

Personally I have no doubt that many US persons (R.S. is probably one of them) sought the aid of Russia to elect Trump. They thought that Hillary was corrupt or whatever and Russia could unmask her. The fact that Russia did it, to them is irrelevant, the "truth" was revealed. I am also certain that the end didn't justify the means in this case, USA is right to through the kitchen sink at the people involved...we have elections every 2-4 years and a message should be sent. (USA did the same is not a moral equivalent to me)

From the indictment with my comments in []

22. On or about July 27 2016 the Conspirators attempted after hours to spearphish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a 3rd party provider and used by Clinton's personal office. At or around the same time, they also targeted seventy-six email addresses at the domain for the Clinton Campaign.

[July 27 2016 is the date on which Trump said on national TV "Russia if you're listening..." and invited Russia to commit a crime to hack and find Clinton's 'missing' emails.]

34. In or around Sep 2016 the Conspirators successfully gained access to DNC computers hosted on 3rd party cloud-computing services. These computers contained test applications related to the DNC's analytics. After conducting reconnaissance, the Conspirators gathered data by creating backups, or snapshots, of the DNC's cloud-based systems using the cloud provider's own technology. The Conspirators then moved the snapshots to cloud-based accounts they had registered with the same service, thereby stealing the data from the DNC.

[Trump claims the DNC did not turn over the hacked (physical) server to the FBI. And per this indictment it's clear it was a virtual server hosted in the cloud and at least Mueller's team does have quite a bit of forensic evidence to show how the theft occurred.]

43a. On or about Aug 15 2016, the Conspirators posing as Guccifer 2.0 recieved a request for stolen documents from a candidate for the U.S. Congress. The Conspirators responded using the Guccifer 2.0 persona and sent the candidate stolen documents related to the candidate's opponent.

[Let's pretend this candidate didn't know Guccifer 2.0 was the GRU. He still knew he was asking for and receiving illegally obtained documents.]

72. In or around July 2016, KOVALEV and his co-conspirators hacked the website of a state board of elections (SBOE 1) and stole information related to approximately 500,000 voters including names, addresses, party affiliation, social security numbers, dates of birth, and driver's license numbers.

There are quite a few Americans "involved" either by being affected by ID theft by a crime organization purporting to be a government[1]; an American soliciting a foreign government to commit a crime the proceeds of which would likely benefit his campaign; and at least one American who solicited materials obtained in course of a crime who then received those materials to use against a competing candidate for Congress.

So the idea that American's aren't involved is nonsense. There are no Americans indicted for crimes in this particular filing, however.

[1] This is diplomatic. The less diplomatic version is that this is one nation attacking another, and is an act of war. That's how spy games get characterized when you get caught and revealed to the public.

Hopefully Craig Murray is not on suicide watch.

What will be America's next move here? They are looking awful weak right now.

Expect some countries to start charging US IC operators, for hacking and interference in their own electoral processes.

Reminder: the NSA has been hacking into governments and businesses all over the world.

"Prosecutor in [*] Files Charges against American NSA Officers" Just a question of time, I suppose.

>The Internet allows foreign adversaries to attack America in new and unexpected ways,”

>“Together with our law enforcement partners, the Department of Justice is resolute in its commitment to locate, identify and seek to bring to justice anyone who interferes with American elections.

Sounds like Don Quixote is fighting the internet now. Unless you just shut it down how is it possible to not have world wide "interference" on the world wide web? Perhaps we need to think about how the instantaneous global communications network is obsolescing the concept of the nation state which was formed as a result of the printing press.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gutenberg_Galaxy

>Free and fair elections are hard-fought and contentious, and there will always be adversaries who work to exacerbate domestic differences and try to confuse, divide, and conquer us.

That sounds like a fitting description of mass media/news corporations everywhere.