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Comment by cowmoo728 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if FB and Twitter are in contact with some of the national intelligence agencies. US intelligence officials talking to NYT suggest that this "leak" is a forgery by the GRU.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/14/us/politics/hunter-biden-...

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This must be it. Facebook has been hand wringing about censorship for the past few years and all of a sudden, Facebook and Twitter immediately act in lockstep? It might explain why the Biden campaign can’t deny it as well.

I don't see that claim anywhere in the article you linked.

> The Times reported last January that Burisma had been hacked by the same Russian GRU unit that was one of two groups that hacked the Democratic National Committee in 2016. Last month, United States intelligence analysts contacted several people with knowledge of the Burisma hack for further information after they had picked up chatter that stolen Burisma emails would be leaked in the form of an “October surprise.”

> Among their chief concerns, according to people familiar with the discussions, was that the Burisma material would be leaked alongside forged materials in an attempt to hurt Mr. Biden’s candidacy — as Russian hackers did when they dumped real emails alongside forgeries ahead of the 2017 French elections — a slight twist on Russia’s 2016 playbook when they siphoned leaked D.N.C. emails through fake personas on Twitter and WikiLeaks.

Right, but this leak didn't come from Burisma.

Now, it could still be a GRU operation, but it's not what the article was talking about.

The article says that US intelligence believes that the GRU was planning on releasing something relating to Burisma and Hunter Biden. Something relating to Burisma and Hunter Biden with very sketchy provenance was just released by someone with known affiliations to people working for GRU. The inference is that this is the disinformation campaign that US intelligence agencies have been worried about.

OK, "forged materials" was in ciarannolan's quote. So, if this is forged, that would still fit. I stand corrected.

This is a fair concern, and it is a tricky issue because if true Twitter might not be able to disclose this fact.

But if it were true, wouldn't Joe Biden have come out already and said "These emails are fake and I never met with that person"? Instead, all we get is the campaign saying that those meetings do not appear on his calendar.

It might be the same problem. Candidates get national security briefings so they might have been advised not to deny it.

I could imagine national security reasons for not saying specifically where one believes the laptop to have come from, but why would the campaign be prevented from simply saying that the emails are fake and that the meeting definitively did not happen?

Well, hypothetically, it could be that the CIA or NSA was spreading misinformation, then tracking its spread, to detect where leaks/spies were. That seems highly unlikely in this case.

Saying the emails are fake would be a direct acknowledgment of the incident that the agency is trying to investigate. This is similar to the “Glomar Response”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_response.

Could be a mix of real and fake emails, or real but slightly altered. They could not have any copies of the originals so they can't say which are real or not.

Plus oh my god if we go into 'but his emails!' and Trump is elected again I will leave this country. Keep 'hacked' 'email' ten thousand miles away from Biden campaign's mouth

Biden was the Vice President; what if he did meet this person in passing and the GRU has a photo of the brief head to head encounter, or there is a doctored photo ready for him to deny a meeting.

So, you're listening to the people to said Iraq had WMDs?

I don't take anything the three letter agencies say at face value. But if I were Twitter leadership and legal and I got a call from the CIA or NSC saying my platform is being used right now for a massive GRU disinformation campaign, I would panic and attempt to shut it down.

No, the Republicans have definitely lost credibility. I think it’s a safe prior that anything a Republican says about weird convoluted plots this close to an election should be discounted.

Why would a well thought out plot be more credible? Is it inconceivable that a crack addict forgets his laptop at a repair store and that the staff recognize him?

If I made up stories they would be mundane and logical to not make people regard it as improbable.

You're saying that the more outlandish a story is the less likely it is made up, because anyone making up a story would just make it boring so as to be believable. Have you never talked to someone who was making up a story?

One example of an outlandish information story is how the passport(s) of 911 hijackers was found on the ground in NY. I mean you can't make this stuff up.

It should mostly be the information on the HD that indicates the validity, not the fantastic way it was recovered.

This is incorrect. The 3 letter agencies refused to say this, which is why Paul Wolfowitz had to create the Office of Special Plans inside the Pentagon so that there was an intelligence agency that produced the sort of analysis results that the White House wanted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Plans

No, the CIA said there was

> High Confidence:

> • Iraq is continuing and in some areas expanding, its chemical, biological, nuclear and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions.

https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-the-full-version-of-th...

Then what’s preventing them from stating this?

The agencies have vast powers over tech companies, and tech companies do not want to cross them. Tech companies are also regularly legally barred from disclosing the mere existence of national security investigations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter

A big tech company openly saying "the CIA just called me up and told me to do something" would be suicide.

“Intelligence officials” means “unreliable politically motivated federal apparatchik”, or at absolute best it means “limited hangout”.

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