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Comment by 0xy | Hacker News Reader

Even if Guliani got the source from Russian intelligence, that does not mean the emails are automatically not authentic. Does it mean the Russians are interfering? Probably. Does it mean their evidence of corruption is void? Not really.

If this is the Russians (unproven speculation on your part), it does not mean the emails are not authentic.

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Two organizations have these supposed emails, Fox and NYPost. They could mathematically prove their legitimacy by simply posting the entire raw messages, with headers. DKIM was active at the time these messages were supposedly sent, so if the signatures match up, authenticity is confirmed.

The fact that this hasn't been done is concerning, unless it's being sat on for future impact.. the "drip drip drip" method of political bombshell news isn't a new tactic. If we're still here in a week with nothing other than screenshots, we can probably write the messages off as frauds. I'm withholding my judgement for a few days.

You're assuming they have the emails in the raw form. It's possible they just have PDFs and not the full content. You're also assuming Fox and NY Post have journalists on staff who know what DKIM is, let alone how to verify it's genuine. They're journalists, not CompSci majors.

The "drip drip" is an intentional strategy, of course. This smells like a setup to me. They leak the lukewarm email, get a denial from Biden, then leak a smoking gun that cannot be denied (speculation).

I think you might be overestimating the level of technical sophistication at play here—if you asked me “how can we verify that these emails are real,” I might’ve been able to come up with this idea, but it certainly wasn’t the first thing that jumped into my head reading the article, and I doubt NYPost has anyone on staff who thought to do this either (unless perhaps verifying leaked emails is something they do regularly?).

I wouldn't trust NYPost to have that knowledge, fair. Fox, though..

Really though, even if DKIM wasn't a thing, there's little-to-no reason to only post screenshots if the actual raw files are available.

There is no indication of ANY attempt (technical or not) to verify that the emails were real. They did not even perform the basic due diligence of asking the Biden campaign to comment prior to publication.

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