I think the idea is that if this is the rule, a lot of Republicans think it has already been broken a number of times against them.
https://twitter.com/blue_leaks
This one is more also nefarious than it looks, because it includes private information on victims of crime.
But you're right. Blue Leaks, if they share hacked personal data on Twitter, should absolutely be banned under the same policy.
They allegedly have a contractual right to the laptop due to non-payment. It's a damn good reason not to take your PC there for repairs, though.
I've heard rumors that Hunter was allegedly hacked to get them, but I have yet to see media reports of this from prior to this story breaking. If you can provide some, please do!
Right now, my take is that, at best, this is an elaborate cover story for releasing real dirt and at worst, it's legit, like the time Hunter returned a rental car with a crack pipe in it. We'll need to dig into it further, though, I want to see if the emails have DKIM validation with a body hash parameter, etc.
Fundamentally, the reason this got banned and then ignored is that that need is SUPPOSED to be supplied by the journalists doing the research, not random conspiracy nerds on the internet.
> I've heard rumors that Hunter was allegedly hacked to get them, but I have yet to see media reports of this
Exactly! Which is the level of rigor you should expect to see from your sources. Which makes it doubly frustrating that you seem not to be applying that same logic to the original story.
FWIW: I'll bet you anything that no headers ever appear for those emails anywhere (at least none from western domains -- I'll admit to the possibility that the Kremlin could forge a DKIM signature for a Burisma address). They're almost certainly forgeries, which is why they're being distributed in the crazy obfuscated way they are.
Oh, and the relevant DKIM key in that case came from Hillary's DNS server, I know because I pulled it myself. Maybe the Kremlin hacked that, but that would implicate a lot more reporting than just Donna's claims.
So yes, I do want to see more journalism regarding this, but it also needs sufficient rigor. I don't just believe any random person who claims XYZ, whether or not I tend to agree with them, I want to see verifiable facts.
And yeah, those are in pretty short supply. I've seen tons of anonymous rumors, various forms of citogenesis, etc. far more often than I've seen things that can be subjected to some kind of objective fact finding process.
Uh... why would the journalist "validate" the DKIM signature? Publish the RFC822 content of the email and let everyone do it themselves. That's the whole point of public key encryption. And the fact that the Post skipped that very obvious and easy step tells me that this is almost certainly faked data.
> I don't just believe any random person who claims XYZ
With all respect: you clearly seem inclined to believe this nonsense about the emails with only the barest of evidence. It's only the attempts to refute it that have you worried about "rigor".
> With all respect: you clearly seem inclined to believe this nonsense about the emails with only the barest of evidence.
I haven't said anything about the email content, though. I investigated a photo of Hunter sleeping with a meth pipe using hackerfactor.com's tools to look for manipulation and did not find any. That doesn't mean they're real, but it gives them some level of credence, given that there are old reports about his rental car substantiated by police reports.
You're right that it doesn't validate the email content. I plan to withhold judgement until we have more data, but it looks like they do have some files of his.
It doesn't help that the last time we went through this sort of thing, there were spurious claims of manipulated documents which were actively disproved and some of the denials I've read parse very narrowly, which isn't right.
Actually, and this is coming from someone who is definitely not a Democrat: I'd think that picture points towards planted evidence. The picture is probably real for what I know, but why would he keep it on his laptop?
I mean, how many times have we heard variations on "Idiot caught doing drugs after posting pics on Facebook/Instagram/etc."?
Maybe Twitter would have found other reasons to block the story if it didn't violate an explicit policy literally, for example it being fake news. Calling something fake news takes more investigation and judgement so the reason they gave was simplest.
It's like, boy, they sure have it in for a sleazy and deceptive hit-piece meant to influence an election at the last moment. Unfair!
This sums up the central problem in modern politics as a whole right here.
George Washington on “the spirit of party” in his farewell address:
> It serves always to distract the Public Councils, and enfeeble the Public Administration. It agitates the Community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.