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Comment by colinbartlett | Hacker News Reader

The indictment is a reminder of just how much data can be pieced together about a person's online activity, at least with considerable resources and seemingly proper court authorized warrants. From web searches, to emails, twitter posts, block chain transactions, all of it could be correlated together. The searching for specific phrases that then appeared in a text is particularly damning.

What I could not glean from the indictment is how they could possibly have identified these 12 people individually. The government must have some other sigint or humint for that? Will this ever make it to trial so that evidence can be revealed?

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> What I could not glean from the indictment is how they could possibly have identified these 12 people individually. The government must have some other sigint or humint for that? Will this ever make it to trial so that evidence can be revealed?

These indictments are the result of a massive counterintelligence operation spanning many agencies from several nations. In this case specifically, the AIVD (Dutch intel) hacked the GRU offices where a large part of the hacking was carried out and managed to exfiltrate significant amounts of evidence including CCTV security footage of GRU officers coming and going [1]. The evidence proving the crimes for the purposes of a conviction will be made public but unless lawyers for the defendants come to challenge the warrants and get them unsealed, the evidence that led to the public stuff will likely stay secret for decades.

[1] https://www.volkskrant.nl/wetenschap/dutch-agencies-provide-...

I'm curious why it should stay secret when it's literally world-wide public knowledge they have it.

What would be at risk by sharing what is absolutely known to exist?

Knowing the details is very different from having access to the physical evidence that led to that knowledge. The latter can very often be used to trace intelligence operatives and expose the methods they use - either of which could have life or death consequences for the operatives themselves, the informants and dissidents they work with, and Americans working in the area in general.

For example, when it was exposed that the CIA was using a vaccination program in Pakistan to test for the DNA of known terrorists, their associates, and families, the backlash led to the death of many aid works and a massive drop in vaccinations in the country.

If the evidence used here was obtained via intelligence services partly through hacking, and there is no real "defense" to speak of, why should we take this to be valid? How can we be sure that elements of this evidence haven't been fabricated or tampered with?

The defendants will have the opportunity to dispute the evidence and challenge the legality of its acquisition before a judge and then several layers of appeals courts. What we know is that the prosecutors have already done their due diligence, that warrants were granted after judicial review, and that the evidence obtained from those warrants was enough to convince a grand jury to indict, regardless of whether the highly classified intel used to get that evidence was genuine or not.

More importantly we know that the career Republicans running the office of special counsel, who incidentally all left multi-million dollar a year jobs to be at the center of the most politically charged, controversial, and scrutinized investigations in American history, have staked their reputations and careers on the truth of all of the documents they have filed in court, under oath.

And given those extreme resources I am curious whether there is more or less detail in regards to the US-persons side of this investigation.

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