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Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

No, that’s not illegal for somebody without a clearance.

The crime he’s charged with is that he was willing to (and I think did?) assist in breaking into a computer system to get the docs. I think under the CFAA. They have communication records of this because the person he was talking to was working for the USG.

Had he just been accepting docs as he was initially that would have been fine.

It’s hard to know the truth here though when nation state interests are at play. To what extent were the sex related charges against him political or flared up by nation state meddling?

At some point Russia was also using Wikileaks as a place to target the USG with some plausible deniability and Assange’s personal anti-US politics became a corrupting influence too.

So, who knows?

View on HN

>The crime he’s charged with is that he was willing to (and I think did?) assist in breaking into a computer system to get the docs. I think under the CFAA. They have communication records of this because the person he was talking to was working for the USG.

The US government claims this, but it's not been proven.

>At some point Russia was also using Wikileaks as a place to target the USG with some plausible deniability and Assange’s personal anti-US politics became a corrupting influence too.

This is just more Russiagate nonsense: https://pics.me.me/russiagate-explained-wikileaks-posted-the...

>To what extent were the sex related charges against him political or flared up by nation state meddling?

There are no charges. There never were any charges. There was an investigation and that's as far as it went.

>UPDATE GREAT NEWS: Swedish prosecutors are about to announce the dropping of the investigation into Julian Assange on sexual offence allegations. There never were any charges and the allegations were always nonsense, as detailed in the below article I wrote a month ago:

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2017/05/no-rape-char...

I think you’re overconfident in what you believe to be true based on the evidence that exists.

The Russian bit can be politically inconvenient for you and yet also be true.

It is interesting that apparently the GOP's email server was hacked as well, but nothing was ever released publicly. I'm no fan at all of the DNC but if "all politicians are dirty" is a thing, then why did no dirt spill out from the other side?

Was it more valuable as kompromat?

Highly misleading. The DNC’s mail servers got hacked and they got everything done

The “RNC hack” was one guy’s old laptop with a years out of date local outlook db. Not even in the same league.

> The “RNC hack” was one guy’s old laptop with a years out of date local outlook db.

You have proof of that? This says otherwise.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/us/obama-russia-election-...

I'm replying for the sake of challenging your statement but I know it's likely not possible to have an honest discussion about it because you appear to be taking a partisan stance. I have no love for either party, and even if I did love the Dems, I'd be more than happy to acknowledge any and all failings of theirs.

Can you say the same thing?

That article literally agrees with the GP that the RNC was not hacked but the DNC was...

What do you mean by "they got everything done"?

Let's see your source for the claim that the GOP server was hacked

Assumptions are be made, yes. But my comment was not intended to be tribalistic -- shit's being hacked everywhere.

https://www.wired.com/2017/01/russia-hacked-older-republican... https://www.politico.com/story/2018/12/04/exclusive-emails-o...

If WikiLeaks is about exposing corruption doesn't it seem like they'd do so across party lines?

I don't trust either party but I also don't trust WikiLeaks to be operating without agenda as well.

You've provided nothing suggesting Wikileaks was offered the RNC hack and chose not to publish it.

Yup. Looks like it still is. You don't burn your own people unless they are very bad.

Idle conspiracy speculation you’ve provided here.

Also note that, at that time, the Trump organisation was running an EOL’ed MS Exchange server. It’s reasonable to assume it was vulnerable and that all information it contained was leaked.

Extraordinary claims (Trump colludes with Russians, Russians hack DNC) requires extraordinary evidence. In over 5 years, this has not been presented.

Plenty of evidence has been shown for this part:

>Russians hack DNC

No. There isn't. There are lots of people saying they have evidence and referring to other people who say no its true they really have evidence. When you dig it's just circular self-references all the way down.

There’s a whole mueller report that was started and run by GOP. Person who started it was Rosenstein, a republican. Who picked Mueller another Republican. Why would they fake evidence against their own president?

This is idle speculation at best. It doesn’t attach to evidence, and it cannot be dispositive.

Mueller charged Russians for the hack.

Indicted. Famously prosecutors can indict ham sandwiches. Conviction is different. No such thing here.

He convicted everyone that they could actually arrest.

If you twist it around enough, it sounds substantial. Then we have to slowly and tediously dig out that your end claim has utterly nothing to do with your beginning claim. Not the same countries, people, timelines, relationships, nothing.

Again, "Muller has the evidence!" is pointing at someone and making a claim that never seems to have been backed up.

It seems to be rather hard to actually cite this mountain of evidence without looking like a partisan hack.

Nope: https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/24/intel-vets-challenge-r...

Yep.

The Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity has members who have done good work for the public and the country. However, the memo referenced in your link did not even have the backing all the group's members and its arguments have been persuasively criticized.

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

These results are debatable and inconclusive, which is the entire point. If you're going to accuse a sitting President of collusion, you had best have all your ducks in a row. Anything less can be perceived as, or even be indeed, partisan hackery.

Why are you bringing up Trump? This is about whether Russians hacked the DNC's email, that doesn't require collusion or even awareness from the Trump campaign.

But since you did bring him up, it reminded me that in July 2016, weeks after the DNC announced being breached, he publicly called on Russia to release information about Clinton. Candidate Donald J. Trump, verbally and in writing, called on a foreign government to interfere with the presidential campaign against his opponent; doing it in public doesn't make it okay.

"Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens. […] By the way, they hacked — they probably have her 33,000 emails. I hope they do. They probably have her 33,000 emails that she lost and deleted because you'd see some beauties there. So let's see."

I don't think "collusion" is the right term for what he did (the attempts to access emails had started in March); I don't know what the right term is, I just know it's not okay.

Yeah, we get it. Years of life invested in following the mumbling press who assured with certainty that overturning just one more insider-source stone would reveal that holy grail, all for naught. The real “collusion” was hoping for transparency and accountability, which was denied by our intel agencies from the get-go. Everything after was merely a tail-chasing exercise.

Negative. No. Nothing of the sort. We have singularly a “trust me” from several deeply partisan individuals who have been caught directly in other lies.

That said, if you have this “plenty of evidence” please lay it forth at the feet of humanity very clearly. It would be tremendously valuable and conclusive.

In practice we have waving again and again with more hand waving and assurance on top. A heroic confabulation of nonsense.

> this has not been presented.

s/presented/investigated

There's a lot of things to investigate https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/12/21/how-russian-money-helpe... but since the whole world saw what happened on the 6th and what did not after I don't think there'll ever be evidences extraordinary enough to act on any kind of claims.

What happened on the sixth? You mean the Reichstag Fire?

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/questions-about-the-fbis-ro...

The whole world saw what the FBI wanted them to see on the sixth. Time will tell what actually happened.

Lots of "evidence" in the form of breathless articles quoting anonymous sources who say they really have a smoking gun. This evidence is convincing only to those who are inclined to believe it. What we need is extraordinary evidence that is unambiguously convincing to everyone. That we do not have

To this day most people are still in denial about US involvement in that whole Ukraine situation.

Even tho Euromaidan had US senators in person riling up protesters for regime change [0] and the new interim PM, after a bloody revolution, was sponsored by literally the US DoS and NATO [1].

Pointing this pretty blatant evidence out just gets one called a "Russian troll". While in the US some extremely obscure financial connections to Russia, are allegedly responsible for singlehandedly deciding a whole election and making the following one also a rather close call.

Maybe it's just me, but this seems like a pretty blatant double standard, one that also disfranchises a substantial part of the US population, as allegedly being nothing than "idiots" brainwashed by Russia.

It's no wonder how this kind of narrative keeps increasing the hostility and tribalism, even if Russia wouldn't do anything at all.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/15/john-mccain-uk...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200328203654/https://openukrai...

The claims are not extraordinary. The Trump Tower meeting [0] is clear evidence Trump campaign members' interest in colluding with foreign agents. Donald Trump personally had a fig leaf of deniability about that meeting but in interviews [1] he expressed his willingness to collude.

The Trump campaign, at minimum Paul Manafort, colluded with agents of Russia [2].

I'm not going to research how strong the public evidence that Russia was behind the DNC hack but again, it's not an extraordinary claim.

  [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Tower_meeting
  [1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/id-exclusive-interview-trump-listen-foreigners-offered-dirt/story?id=63669304
  [2] https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-paul-manafort-russia-campaigns-konstantin-kilimnik-d2fdefdb37077e28eba135e21fce6ebf

Before you continue with a flood of poor and circumstantial evidence that's hard to sort through and falsify, the claim that a President colludes with a foreign power is extraordinary.

If that's "a flood," you must live in a very dry place.

  A. He wasn't president at the time. 
  B. While it's natural to assume that a candidate is aware of, and is ultimately responsible for, everything his campaign does, I've distinguished between his campaign colluding and Trump personally colluding.
  C. Everything that has already been made public about the campaign makes further claims that are less well documented not extraordinary.

> poor and circumstantial evidence that's hard to sort through and falsify

Allow me to spoon-feed an important part to you. Don Jr. publicly released emails about the Trump Tower meeting, those are real and not circumstantial evidence in his desire to collude and others in the campaign attended the meeting with foreknowledge of this. Google 'don jr "i love it"' and there are a zillion news stories about them, I don't know how you missed them at the time. An NPR story linked to a complete PDF [0] of what Don Jr released. Here's the beginning of a NY Times story [1] about them:

> The June 3, 2016, email sent to Donald Trump Jr. could hardly have been more explicit: One of his father’s former Russian business partners had been contacted by a senior Russian government official and was offering to provide the Trump campaign with dirt on Hillary Clinton.

> The documents “would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father,” read the email, written by a trusted intermediary, who added, “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

> If the future president’s eldest son was surprised or disturbed by the provenance of the promised material — or the notion that it was part of a continuing effort by the Russian government to aid his father’s campaign — he gave no indication.

> He replied within minutes: “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”

  [0] https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3892196/Donald-Trump-Jr-Email-Exchange.pdf
  [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/us/politics/trump-russia-email-clinton.html

And there you go with the exact flood I predicted.

Here is my reply. Simple.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/aaugh-a-brief-list-of-official...

This strikes me as whataboutism. It has nothing to do with the message to which you replied.

Your link is primarily about the press being insufficiently skeptical about sources in stories related to foreign intelligence. At yet it contains lines like this:

> No matter what, the clear aim of this report is to cast certain stories about Joe or Hunter Biden as misinformation, when the evidence more likely shows that material like the Hunter Biden emails is real, just delivered from a disreputable source. [emphasis added]

Taibbi is revealing his bias at the same time he's claiming bias influenced the contents of a report.

I'm all for healthy skepticism in the public and especially as a part of journalists doing their jobs. Journalists absolutely consider what sources have to gain or what axes they may have to grid. But reflexively assuming anything from the government is a lie is just as bad as assuming it's true. And when there's a public statement or report, that is news and needs to be reported on.

The guidelines require assumption of good faith. So, if we look at the same evidence and I find it lacking, your first goto assumption should not be "well, you have a cognitive bias while I am free of such".

> reflexively assuming anything from the government is a lie

While true, this is a non-sequitur. "The government" is not a monolith. Some in "the government" insist that Russia hacked the DNC, usually Democrats, while others in "the government" insist that it's nonsense

They traced it back to the IRA and named the specific people involved on the Russian side and the method (email phish of Podesta).

The Mueller report goes into specific detail or you can listen to the lawfare blog podcast that goes through it.

“Collusion” is a poorly defined term, the report found their actions didn’t rise to the level of criminal conspiracy, but there was plenty of evidence that the campaign was interested in support and responded to it (“collusion”).

Donald Trump Jr. just didn’t realize Russia was interested in getting the Magnitsky act revoked when he took the meeting and he was disappointed when the Russians didn’t have the “emails” (from the private server, not the DNC emails). The Russians thought they could manipulate their self-imposed orphan adoption ban issue, but DTJ didn’t care about orphans.

American intelligence agencies (or any intelligence agency) are not going to provide you with the precise methods they use to determine where the attack came from.

I suspect no evidence will meet your extraordinary standard because you’re only looking for evidence that supports an existing position based primarily on political motivated reasoning and cognitive bias.

> I suspect no evidence will meet your extraordinary standard because you’re only looking for evidence that supports an existing position based primarily

Let's s start with even minimal evidence before we get to worrying about my cognitive biases.

Read #8 in this article: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/aaugh-a-brief-list-of-official...

"Shawn Henry of Crowdstrike, testifying in secret to congress, ... saying there was not “concrete evidence that data was exfiltrated from the DNC,”"

You've already been provided and discarded more than minimal evidence.

For example, in the muller report, a more extensive investigation, the specific hacking unit is identified. Whether or not crowdstrike knew in 2017 doesn't matter. Today we know APT-28 was responsible, and they're members of the GRU.

> For example, in the muller report, a more extensive investigation, the specific hacking unit is identified.

How exactly did they arrive at that attribution?

> Today we know APT-28 was responsible, and they're members of the GRU.

How do we know that? No offense, but out of all the places I thought at least people on HN should be aware about the massive caveats that modern-day cyber attribution comes with.

The vast majority of times it's just "educated guesses" based on identifiers that any smart adversary will know how to spoof and thus utilize as false leads.

It's something that feels like was generally recognized and agreed on circa a decade ago, but somehow got lost in the flood of sensationalist headlines trying to sell any nmap scan or somewhat noteworthy ransomware infestation as Russia/China/Iran starting cyber world war 3.

I'd suggest reading the relevant portions of the muller report and the related indictments of the GRU agents.

> The vast majority of times it's just "educated guesses" based on identifiers that any smart adversary will know how to spoof and thus utilize as false leads.

No, I'd say people on hn often vastly overstate the lengths people are willing to go to to create these false flag attacks. If we believed hn, no attacks are done, every cyber attack is actually spoofed by an even more formidable spy ring.

Sometimes the simplest answer is the right one. The attack, carried out with many technical signifiers of a Russian state backed attack, that was used to geopolitically help Russia was Russian.

The alternative is that someone (who?) was capable enough to infiltrate Russian cyber intelligence resources to then launch an attack on the us, which they then used to geopolitically assist Russia.

I'm not sure I can think of any attack where someone tried to successfully frame another nation. This doesn't mean they don't happen, but that they're rare. It also means that if they do happen, they're always successful, which seems unlikely. Far more likely is that successfully impersonating a state cyber attack is actually really really difficult, because doing so successfully would in general require persistent access to the state actor you're impersonating.

> I'd suggest reading the relevant portions of the muller report and the related indictments of the GRU agents.

Why can't you just spell out the method of attribution, instead requiring me to read trough dozens of, mostly political, reports?

> The attack, carried out with many technical signifiers of a Russian state backed attack, that was used to geopolitically help Russia was Russian.

Technical signifiers are not difficult to spoof, nothing about them requires any nation state backing as they rely on heuristics which are semi-public.

That's been the reality of the "cyber theater" for decades: It's asymmetric, there's been more than one example of some lone kid on the spectrum, living in their parents basement, pwning very important and advanced national infrastructure at scale.

That's why I'm very skeptical when a cyber incident is instantly declared as "state level!", usually that's just part of PR and damage control script, along the lines of: "The adversary was a whole nation state, there's nothing we could have done to prevent this from happening!".

Even when the methods deployed are anything but exclusive to nation state actors: Spear-phishing and social engineering are not types of attacks that require nation state resources or knowledge, there's a whole grey market industry offering such attacks as a service.

> The alternative is that someone (who?) was capable enough to infiltrate Russian cyber intelligence resources to then launch an attack on the us, which they then used to geopolitically assist Russia.

Why would that be the only alternative? Your alternative assumes that the attribution to the Russian cyber intelligence is a fact beyond doubt.

> I'm not sure I can think of any attack where someone tried to successfully frame another nation.

That's because if said attack is successful, you wouldn't even know about it being such an attack, that's the crux of the problem.

> Far more likely is that successfully impersonating a state cyber attack is actually really really difficult, because doing so successfully would in general require persistent access to the state actor you're impersonating.

As mentioned before: Nobody needs to impersonate a state cyber attack because by now that's the default assumption not just by media but often enough by those affected themselves to cover up for their own InfoSec negligence.

"We got pwned by the whole Russian intelligence apparatus using massive resources!" sounds much more impressive, and sympathy inducing ,than "We got pwned by some kid from Ukraine because we don't patch our stuff/one of our employees got phished".

As I understand it, signifiers included command and control servers known to be under Russian state control.

So, yes, someone would need to have piggybacked on Russian state controlled servers.

> Technical signifiers are not difficult to spoof, nothing about them requires any nation state backing as they rely on heuristics which are semi-public

Do you work in this field? I've basically only seen lay people suggest this.

> That's because if said attack is successful, you wouldn't even know about it being such an attack, that's the crux of the problem.

Hence my second point: that we've never seen evidence of an unsuccessful attempt, meaning that there's a 100% success rate of spoofing. You're telling me that's realistic? That the spoofers are just so incredibly more competent than everyone else that they never fuck up? That the random Ukrainian kid is so much better at hacking than various state agencies that when he impersonates them he always does it perfectly? That every Ukrainian kid is that competent? Come on.

Your thesis is essentially that state actors are the least competent "cyber actors", because everyone can impersonate them and none of them can tell. That's counter to basically everything else we know.

> As I understand it, signifiers included command and control servers known to be under Russian state control.

If you could be more specific, we could address this. However, you cannot, because the allegations are all this vague. If it's the assertion that I think it is, the "command and control servers" were asserted by Crowdstrike to be under Russian control, and its evidence for this, again, were somewhere deep in a rabbit warren of cross- and circular references[1].

> Do you work in this field? I've basically only seen lay people suggest this.

I have seen journalists claim that only lay people suggest this.

To your vague and amorphous allegations of "state actors", I reply with this specific analysis of the few concrete indicators of compromise supplied by the departments of the government making the allegation. It's farcical. If Russiagate were to be true, the Russian hackers are no better than script kiddies, using outdated PHP malware as they do. https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2016/12/russia-malware-ip-hac...

[1] Furthermore, IP addresses change constantly. Again, if you're referring to the assertion I think you are, that IP address had been defunct for over 2 years before the attack See https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2017/01/election-hack-faq/

An IP that was being used by Russian Intelligence today to hack a target may be used by another attacker to hack a different target a few days later. This can happen for several reasons:

- A hacked IP can be used by one attacker and then be compromised by a different attacker later on to also launch attacks.

- IP addresses change ownership from time to time. A Linode IP may be hacked by Russia and used to launch attacks. Then it may be shut down by Linode, change ownership and the new owner’s site can get hacked. Then that IP address is attacking once again, but the attacker is someone else.

- IP addresses are also dynamic if they belong to an internet service provider (ISP). Some of the IP’s in the Grizzly Steppe report do belong to ISP’s. For example we can see IP’s belonging to Yota.ru, a Russian internet service provider. The hostnames are ‘wimax-client.yota.ru’ which suggests that they are wifi customers. These IP’s are probably dynamic and regularly change hands. They may be used by one attacker today and a different attacker tomorrow.

All of your articles are from 2016 and 2017, meaning they predate the indictments and muller report.

Why do you cite older and less extensive reporting as though it debunks more recent and more thorough investigation?

> Furthermore, IP addresses change constantly

Yes, and if this was the only evidence, you'd maybe have a point. But, the collection of evidence is:

    - a russian-state associated IP was used to
     - deploy software developed by the Russian government
     - to steal data that would be beneficial to Russia if published
     - and was ultimately published via channels known to be associated with Russia (I'm not talking strictly WikiLeaks here, but also how they got the data)

For each of these bullet points, there are multiple pieces of supporting data.

Your alternative explanation is what, exactly? A random ukranian group hacking for the lulz successfully stole this info and either did it so well that the us thought it was actually Russia, or the us lied and claimed it was Russia. That lulzy group proceeded to publish the data via russian-appearing channels or Russia then stole the data from the hackers to publish it. And said group never took credit, even though "we tricked the CIA" is about as much cyber hacker cred as you can get.

I apply Occam's razor. What's your excuse?

Keep in mind, I can apply exactly your logic and say that appearing amateurish is good operational practice for a state actor as it will make it more likey for people to claim that the attacker wasn't a state actor. That's the problem with unfalsifiable claims like yours, I can simply invent a better conspiracy, so to speak.

> Why do you cite older and less extensive reporting as though it debunks more recent and more thorough investigation?

Not an argument or a refutation. A fallacy, in point of fact. Its age has nothing to do with the correctness of its argument.

Have you not read any of the comments above? All of these "more recent and thorough reports" - and again, here, as to which specific reports you're being as vague as the "reports" themselves - are obfuscating, designed to confuse and redirect, at the end of which is always "trust us, here are some other trustworthy reports that say the same thing".

By contrast, the word fence report goes through specific allegations and adresses them point by point. Clear, simple, straightforward. In all of the reports demonstrating that Russians hack the DNC, not one is as clear and straightforward, because it never can be.

Your alternative explanation is what, exactly?

You haven't really refuted anything here, and your reference to Occams Razor should come only after clear logical steps from evidence to conclusion, which you do not have.

I don't know who did it. Which is the point. No one does, and no one can know, given the evidence presented so far.

I can tell you this, though: politically, the content of the emails themselves were deeply embarrassing to the DNC. Collusion with the media, including the Washington Post and the New York Times, to kneecap Sander's campaign; Donna Brazile passing debate questions to Clinton; Clinton's strategy to promote Trump as the easy win, etc.

Now, however, any time anyone discusses the content of the emails, true believers such as yourself will interrupt to talk about how Trump won only because of Russians. It was such a stupidly transparent strategy I was stunned it actually grew legs and walked. Skeptical, but open, I eagerly awaited the evidence which never materialized, sadly.

...us lied and claimed it was Russia. That lulzy group proceeded to publish the data via russian-appearing channels or Russia then stole the data from the hackers to publish it. And said group never took credit, even though "we tricked the CIA" is about as much cyber hacker cred as you can get.

Here you kind of rhetorically descend into incoherence. I get it. You don't want to steel-man alternative ideas, because "Russians" is what you have been told and "Russians" is what you believe. But almost any other explanation is as plausible as Russians.

> You haven't really refuted anything here, and your reference to Occams Razor should come only after clear logical steps from evidence to conclusion, which you do not have.

I listed 4 bullet points. You've agreed with 2 of them (the first, that a russian-state associated IP was used in the hack), and 3, that the data if published would be beneficial to russia (by being beneficial to trump). Those 4 evidence based claims, some of which you've admitted you agree are true, point to a simple answer: Russia was the culprit.

Yes, there are other alternative explanations, but all are vastly more complex, or fail to sufficiently address all of the evidence presented, hence my reference Occam's razor.

> Now, however, any time anyone discusses the content of the emails, true believers such as yourself will interrupt to talk about how Trump won only because of Russians.

I've never said this.

> I get it. You don't want to steel-man alternative ideas, because "Russians" is what you have been told and "Russians" is what you believe. But almost any other explanation is as plausible as Russians.

No, that's my point. That was my steel man. Your argument is incoherent. You're free to prove me wrong. Its easy: provide the alternative explanation that is more likely than it haivng been russia. Provide an explanation that better explains the facts we agree on:

     1. A russian state-affiliated IP was used in the attack
     2. The data stolen and leaked was geopolitically beneficial to russia.

Again, here's my simple explanation of these facts that we agree on: "A russian state-backed attack stole and leaked these documents". What's your simpler explanation? Prove me wrong. It should be easy.

Looking directly at the evidence, the simplest, and far and away most likely answer, is that Russia was the culprit. Other answers are, perhaps, possible, but that doesn't make them as likely, unless you want to pretend that two explanations of the same phenomena are always equally likely. That's simply a failure to reason correctly, and I'd expect better of someone who wants to bring up fallacies.

Put another way, there's some evidence that supports the claim that it was Russia. There's no evidence that supports the claim that it was the Ukraine. This doesn't mean that it had to be Russia, yes, alternative explanations are possible, but looking solely at the evidence, all of it points to Russia, and none of it points to anyone else.

You can create alternate hypothesis, but they all rely on the evidence being somehow misleading ("The US government is lying", "The Ukranian teenager spoofed a Russian attack"). By Occam's Razor, those explanations are less likely, because they are more complex. You're welcome to present some additional evidence that makes those explanations more likely, but you haven't presented any, you've simply said the evidence we have isn't conclusive (which I agree with), and because of that all possibilities are equally likely, which is terrible reasoning.

No, I disagree with all 4 points, in point of fact. All of those points which you attribute agreement to me, that you assert to be known are not, actually known, but again, are assertions only. The proof of all of which, if it exists at all, is buried under a warren of circular self-references, and journalists who breathlessly report them as known.

An extraordinary claim should have unambiguous, clear, unassailable proof. A skeptic should be able to look at all the evidence and verify it for oneself. One cannot do that with each important assertion. Instead, one must rely on assertions by "persons familiar with the matter".

A flood of circumstantial evidence of dubious provenance, no matter how earnestly believed by the politically motivated, should not be enough to destabilize the Office of US Presidency (no matter how much one finds the holder of the office distasteful) nor make dangerous accusations of foreign nations.

This is a no-brainer. Yet here we are, talking about 2-year old IP addresses as if it were some smoking gun.

> No, I disagree with all 4 points, in point of fact

Perhaps I'm confused here, what do you believe the facts are? I don't want to misrepresent you, so here are my questions, numbered for easy reference:

1. Was the IP address in the crowdstrike report you cited ever affiliated with the Russian government?

2. Who or what developed the X-Agent software?

3. Do you believe the X-agent software was used in the DNC attack? If not, how do you believe the DNC hacked?

4. Do you believe the data stolen in the DNC hack and later leaked was geopolitically useful to the Russian government? (keep in mind that the Democratic party has recently been far more anti-Russia than the Republican Party, so the evidence I have suggests that Democratic foreign policy would be more aggressive towards Russia than Republican. Obama, Trump, and Biden's actual foreign policy actions, e.g. in Syria, support this hypothesis)

5. Do you believe the account in [0] is reliable? If not, what is your explanation of what occurred, and what evidence do you use to reach your conclusion?

6. Do you believe that this[1] highly redacted senate report is evidence? That is, do you put believe that anything can be inferred from the fact that US intelligence services believe that this attack was undertaken by Russia, and have presented that conclusion (and, presumably, some evidence supporting this conclusion) to the Senate Intelligence Committee? Related does it hold any value to you that no one on the SIC has denied that this hack was Russian-originated (and in fact a number of Repulbican members have agreed that he hack was done by Russian state actors)?

Please note "I don't know" isn't a valid answer to any of these questions, you must have some belief that is most likely, even if none is held with much confidence, please provide that belief.

> An extraordinary claim should have unambiguous, clear, unassailable proof.

My claim is that based on the evidence we have, the most likely explanation is that the attack was undertaken by Russia. What about this is "extraordinary"? If you mean the broader claim, "Russia did a successful cyberattack against the US", I again don't see what is extraordinary about that claim.

> A flood of circumstantial evidence of dubious provenance, no matter how earnestly believed by the politically motivated, should not be enough to destabilize the Office of US Presidency (no matter how much one finds the holder of the office distasteful) nor make dangerous accusations of foreign nations.

I'm confused, I'm not making any claim about the any president. I'm making claims about a cyberattack.

I'm unclear what about "The Russian government undertook cyber-espionage against the US" is a dangerous claim. I'd make the same claim, in general, about the US. I'm quite confident that the US undertakes cyber-espionage against Russia too. I just don't have any particular examples at hand, but if you cited one, I wouldn't consider it "dangerous".

> The proof of all of which, if it exists at all, is buried under a warren of circular self-references, and journalists who breathlessly report them as known.

I'm confused, I'm referencing an[0] indictment by Robert Muller against the named GRU agents accused of carrying out the attack in question. There's no journalists involved at all.

[0]: https://www.justice.gov/file/1080281/download

[1]: https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...

> Please note "I don't know" isn't a valid answer to any of these questions

Wait, what? I don't know most of these answers. Neither do you.

"Who wrote X-Agent?" "It was definitely Russians" is not a valid answer, either.

An indictment is not evidence. It's an accusation. Show the evidence, let it be examined, cross-examined, etc.

No, spooks' testimony is not credible by itself, not after they repeatedly lied under oath, to both congress and the public.

> "Do you believe the data stolen in the DNC hack and later leaked was geopolitically useful to the Russian government? "

"geopolitically" not to nitpick, but you probably mean plain "politically"

Not necessarily. Clinton was already cosy with the Russians as State Secretary. Trump was an unknown quantity. Asserting anything else is a retcon.

> "The Russian government undertook cyber-espionage against the US"

You're literally putting quotes around something I did not write. The accusation was far stronger than that. The accusation was that the Russians, WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign colluded to get Trump elected in exchange for preferential treatment. The DNC hack was a small part of it. But no, there's no evidence of that small part, either.

Ok, I think it's clear that there's no more fruitful exchange to happen on this topic. I tried to demonstrate that the evidence must be extraordinary and that it does not rise to that level. You disagree. You tried to demonstrate to me that the evidence is extraordinary. I disagree.

Know that I'll read your reply, and absorb it, and think on it, but likely won't answer. Let us amicably agree to disagree on this.

> Wait, what? I don't know most of these answers. Neither do you.

You're absolutely correct, but based on the weight of the evidence we have, we can find a most likely explanation. You've previously stated that all explanations bare equally likely, but that's not true. Bayesian reasoning allows us to look at various pieces of evidence and priors and weigh them, even when all are individually of dubious use.

It's clear you don't want to answer any of those questions. They're simpler questions, my assumption here, again based on the weight of the evidence is that you're avoiding answering them because they demonstrate that Russia being responsible is the most likely answer.

As another user mentions, you're showing lots of examples of motivated reasoning, and that's unfortunate. Even more so that you're then projecting these accusations upon me. Hopefully your inability to engage with the substance of what I've presented will demonstrate that to any other readers.

> You're literally putting quotes around something I did not write.

Yes and, this is a valid rhetorical act when, for example suggesting the abstract idea one is discussing.

> The accusation was far stronger than that. The accusation was that the Russians, WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign colluded to get Trump elected in exchange for preferential treatment. The DNC hack was a small part of it. But no, there's no evidence of that small part, either.

That's not an accusation I made. Nor did any one else in this thread. And I'd agree that it is less likely than what I'm actually suggesting, which is that there wasn't collusion per say, but simply mutually beneficial actions. This is what is supported by the weight of the evidence and claimed in government reports, for example. That Russia hacked and leaked DNC data, to the benefit of the trump campaign and Russia itself, obviously. I'm unclear why you feel it necessary to inflate the accusations made to something less likely. This feels very motte-and-bailey, although I can't tell if it was intentional or a subconscious way to protect your preconception.

> “An extraordinary claim should have unambiguous, clear, unassailable proof.”

This level of requirement is beyond what’s required to convict someone of murder in a court of law. It’ll basically never be met under any conditions.

It’s also almost certainly selectively applied to cases where they don’t want to accept a conclusion.

It’s admirable to lay out details, but I’m skeptical you’ll make any progress here. If their responses are in good faith maybe it’ll have some affect, maybe they think they’re responding in good faith? It feels strongly driven by motivated reasoning rather than a genuine interest in what’s likely to be true.

For as informed as you claim to be, everything you’ve linked to, claimed, and insinuated is vague, indirect, unsubstantiated, and disappears into a cloud of boring political talking points.

Reference Lawfare as a source of unbiased truth in an article about Assange being framed by the intel agencies? The irony could hardly be higher. Ben Wittes, Lawfare editor (Brookings sponsored), claimed counsel status to the head of the FBI in legal proceedings. The streets of Russiagate are paved with agency partisans.

>The Russian bit can be politically inconvenient for you and yet also be true.

I'm not sure how it's politically inconvenient for me when I'm a registered Pacific Green.

People need to stop "thinking" in false dichotomies like left vs right or liberal vs. conservative. Astrology is six times smarter.

> I'm not sure how it's politically inconvenient for me when I'm a registered Pacific Green.

The West being less hostile to and more willing to collaborate with Russia is a frequent position promoted in Pacific Green circles; Russia being tied to active hostile activity against Western regimes is politically inconvenient to that message.

>The West being less hostile to and more willing to collaborate with Russia is a frequent position promoted in Pacific Green circles

Pure DNC propaganda. Zero basis in reality.

I assume by "Pacific Green" you mean the Pacific Green Party of Oregon. A quote from the party platform:

> We the People must: […] End the cold war with Iran and the resurgent cold war with Russia, forestall the emerging economic war with China, and withdraw from NATO.

You might argue that this doesn't require being more willing to collaborate with Russia but it absolutely means being less hostile to Russia.

https://www.pacificgreens.org/platform

I had not heard of that political party. Those positions seem smart and reasonable for a country drowning in deficit spending.

Withdraw from NATO would be a good start.

The not-to-be-praised former President attempted troop drawdown from Germany, which was quickly reversed earlier this year.

> The West being less hostile to and more willing to collaborate with Russia is a frequent position promoted in Pacific Green circles

This should be a frequent position promoted in sane circles. What is the alternative, promoting war between nuclear powers? A permanent campaign of bullying, hoping that the Russians never get into a position to do anything about it?

If the US can be close allies with the Saudis and the Israelis at the same time, they can collaborate with Russia.

> This should be a frequent position promoted in sane circles

The merits of the idea are irrelevant to whether an American politician corruptly colluding with Russia is politically inconvenient to those holding it.

Doesn’t have to be left vs. right.

Politically motivated reasoning can come from any party or person.

The comic’s content suggested some anti-Hillary sentiment, that paired with “Russiagate” suggested some pro-Bernie political lean, Green Party probably fits with that? Aren’t they more hard-left?

Sister reply is also relevant.

Reading the article it looks like the accusations have been fabricated by a pathological liar. Their star witness against JA is coming out and saying essentially he did it to run from Assange since he ripped WL off for $50k and now he's coming clean about making the whole thing up. The witness is a pedo/criminal as the witness for this whole case.

The bar for extradition doesn't require the US to prove it - the only place they need to prove it is in court when he's in the US.

And "Russiagate" is a bit more nuanced than that - Wikileaks claimed to have GOP emails as well but for some reason never released them.

>Wikileaks claimed to have GOP emails as well but for some reason never released them.

[citation needed]

I haven't heard that claim before either.

The Wikipedia sources for the DNC hack article [0] say the RNC wasn't successfully hacked. "GOP" refers to the entire Republican Party so I suppose there could be emails from a different Republican origin than the RNC.

> intelligence organizations additionally concluded Russia attempted to hack the Republican National Committee (RNC) as well as the DNC but were prevented by security defenses on the RNC network.

Searching for a source for the GOP claim did remind me of internal WikiLeaks messages from 2015 showing at least Assange's preference for the GOP over Hilary Clinton.

  [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_National_Committee_email_leak#United_States_intelligence_conclusions
  [1] https://theintercept.com/2018/02/14/julian-assange-wikileaks-election-clinton-trump/

Emails specifically? I'm not sure if that has ever been confirmed, but this is directly from Assange[1]:

>“We do have some information about the Republican campaign,” he said Friday, according to The Washington Post.

>“I mean, it’s from a point of view of an investigative journalist organization like WikiLeaks, the problem with the Trump campaign is it’s actually hard for us to publish much more controversial material than what comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth every second day," Assange said.

When it comes to leaks about Democrats, everything is worth publishing. When it comes to leaks about Republicans, it needs to "controversial" to be worth publishing.

[1] - https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/2934...

You took that quote, which simply doesn’t say what you want. Then you slapped your take on the end, which is what you want the quote to say, but it doesn’t. Wrong.

Ok, what does the quote actually say?

It says “we have some information that is not worth publishing.” Your filigree about relative hurdle for publication is your invention entirely.

Guess what? I have some information that is not worth publishing too. I bet you do too. So what would you propose the action be there?

That sounds good in a vacuum, but it is logic that necessitates that everything they do publish is therefore worth publishing. How many of the tens of thousands of emails they leaked from Democrats were worthy of publishing? How many of them had information that had public value in exposing? If the answer is not “all of them” then why would the standard be different for Republicans?

Yes. Wikileaks' statement is a tautology. It is a neutral statement. Your assumptions beg your answer.

You've asked fair questions, but you cannot presume the answers. Maybe you should start a blog and see if you can make such decisions yourself about what's worth publishing. Some people might even harangue you about your decisions and declare that you're a malicious foreign agent.

I'm not making any assumptions, I am simply describing their behavior. They leaked tens of thousands of mundane and uninteresting documents about Democrats, but when it comes to Republicans the documents won't be published unless they are "controversial" to use Assange's exact wording. There is no explanation for that which meshes with the idea that they are a neutral platform.

You assume WL published all Democrat documents. You presume those documents were mundane and uninteresting, and not controversial (most of the world disagrees). You presume they did have Republican documents that would not be mundane and uninteresting.

You simply disagree with their judgment in theory without having information about what you’re disputing, the magnitude, and the quality of your critique. You’ve clearly filled in the blanks with what you want to validate your criticism.

>You presume those documents were mundane and uninteresting, and not controversial (most of the world disagrees).

Once again, I am not assuming or presuming anything. I am judging the documents directly. Have you looked at them? Because it doesn't get any more mundane and uninteresting than people taking office lunch orders[1], people reporting they are at the dentist, or even over a hundred automatic out of office replies[3]. If these emails are worthy of publishing, everything is worthy of publishing.

If anything, these emails have negative public value because they drown out the leaked emails that might have actually interesting content and many of them, especially the out of office emails, end up leaking totally innocent people's contact information.

[1] - https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/21638

[2] - https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/23479

[3] - https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/?q=&title=automatic+reply&c...

WL batch processed sources. You get the boring ones with the salacious ones, possibly useful for context. I listed three assumptions and you denied one. Since you want more disclosure that goes against the judgment of the site owners, why not just start your own site?

Here’s an example of reality that violates your set of assumptions. Wikileaks on Palin in 2008. How does your complaint comport with this reality? It doesn’t.

https://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Sarah_Palin_Yahoo_account_200...

The statement from Wikileaks is inarguable given the information available. You have simply extrapolated a talking point that they discriminated against one side. That is simply second-order, non-provable agitation.

>The US government claims this, but it's not been proven.

Well now with their only witness coming out and saying that he lied about the whole thing and is receiving immunity for his testimony they've got shit-all.

> It’s hard to know the truth here though when nation state interests are at play. To what extent were the sex related charges against him political or flared up by nation state meddling?

I think that, even in and of itself, if a nation state intelligence agency is attempting a smear campaign or outright character assassination, and the very best they can manage is "may have had sex that was consensual but unprotected without agreement"?

That's one hell of a sad state of affairs for that intelligence agency.

Like beyond "never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity", "government incompetence" cliches. Like amazingly pathetic. I can't fathom that being the line they'd go for.

"Sir, we came up with a plan to destroy his character in the public's eye!"

"Great, what is it?"

"Well, uhh, he had a bit of a threesome-like affair, and he may not have used a condom even though he said he would... we can spin that so well that everyone will disown him!"

"..."

> I can't fathom that being the line they'd go for.

That's literally the line they went for, thanks to Snowden we do know Five Eyes runs programs exactly for these kinds of character assassinations [0].

Or why do you think we had all these amazing headlines about how badly Assange allegedly treats his cat and how dirty his bathroom is? How is that of relevance to anybody on a global scale?

It's all pure ad-hominem to keep the narrative about him as a person, and not what he actually did and blew the whistle on.

[0] https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/

> No, that’s not illegal for somebody without a clearance.

Yeah, but that's not stopping the US for charging him with the Espionage act for it anyway. Most of his charges are for leaking/seeking secret info. The charge for assisting Manning is 5 potential years of the 175 he faces.

His crime was that he ran hashcat https://blog.erratasec.com/2019/04/assange-indicted-for-brea...

> Had he just been accepting docs as he was initially that would have been fine.

They would just invent something else.

> It’s hard to know the truth here though when nation state interests are at play.

Not really and not after they faked witness reports. It is completely in line with what was published and there was no alternative in acquiring this information, which there certainly being enough public interest.

> At some point Russia was also using Wikileaks as a place to target the USG with some plausible deniability and Assange’s personal anti-US politics became a corrupting influence too.

There's a passage in Sarah Kendzior's book (Hiding in plain sight: the invention of Donald Trump and the erosion of America) which clicked (to me): ultimately things like wikileaks damage societies and governments that are transparent. You will always find more dirt and problems in public/accessible records than in dictatorships. These initiatives are doomed to be used at some points as tools against healthy democracies/open states.

edit: the passage

> Among the few who saw the threat clearly was computer scientist Jaron Lanier, who, in 2010, warned the public of a new danger: WikiLeaks. At the time, free speech advocates were hailing WikiLeaks, and its founder, Julian Assange, as defenders of government transparency. Their lionization of the leaker organization was largely due to frustration with the criminal impunity of the Bush administration. In February 2010, soldier Chelsea Manning exposed war crimes by sending classified documents to WikiLeaks, which WikiLeaks then published online. The emphasis on civilian victims led human rights advocates to believe that WikiLeaks would prove a formidable opponent for autocratic regimes. But after WikiLeaks dropped hacked documents from the US State Department in November, Lanier predicted the opposite—that WikiLeaks would ultimately ally with dictators and that social media networks would abet them:

>> The WikiLeaks method punishes a nation—or any human undertaking—that falls short of absolute, total transparency, which is all human undertakings, but perversely rewards an absolute lack of transparency. Thus an iron-shut government doesn’t have leaks to the site, but a mostly-open government does.

>> If the political world becomes a mirror of the Internet as we know it today, then the world will be restructured around opaque, digitally delineated power centers surrounded by a sea of chaotic, underachieving openness. WikiLeaks is one prototype of a digital power center, but others include hedge funds and social networking sites.

>> This is the world we are headed to, it seems, since people are unable to resist becoming organized according to the digital architectures that connect us. The only way out is to change the architecture.

> Social media sites didn’t change the architecture. Instead, over the course of the 2010s, the architecture changed us. The calculus of post–Cold War politics—that democracy spreads through engagement, that technology enhances freedom—was reversed. Hostile states used digital technology not only to attack their own citizens but to attempt to transform foreign democracies into dictatorships. We saw this with Russian influence operations in elections in the United States, France, and in the Brexit referendum, among others.10 The social media corporations that had once bragged of the internet’s liberating power now helped the hijackers of democracy. Networks like Facebook abetted, whether intentionally or not, the “iron triangles” of organized crime, state corruption, and corporate criminality, and they were aided by complicit Western actors content to let their own countries die while turning a profit.

I believe the reason you are getting down voted isn't because you don't cite your source, but because the reasoning is absurd.

  > You will always find more dirt and problems in public/accessible records than in dictatorships.

Wikileaks isn't some sort Wikipedia of public/accessible records, it's a platform to publish confidential information.

If the US gov is a healthy, democratic, open gov, how and why can Wikileaks be so damaging?

Should we stop newspapers?

> If the US gov is a healthy, democratic, open gov, how and why can Wikileaks be so damaging?

Because we are still humans and fallible. No matter how healthy, open gov or democratic our governing bodies are I suppose there will always be something going off rails at some points and it's much easier to spot it in transparent governing structures (which usually means democracies) than in non-transparent ones (which usually means dictatorships).

> > You will always find more dirt and problems in public/accessible records than in dictatorships.

> Wikileaks isn't some sort Wikipedia of public/accessible records, it's a platform to publish confidential information.

Yes, yes. But it's easier to feed wikileaks with information from democracies than from dictatorships.

> I believe the reason you are getting down voted isn't because you don't cite your source, but because the reasoning is absurd.

I am okay with downvotes ^^ as long as it's not a flamewar.

> Because we are still humans and fallible.

Did you look at what Wikileaks revealed? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks#Leaks

I don't think you realize the scale of what is happening. These aren't some cute human mistakes or tax evasion.

We are talking war crimes, environmental disasters, political corruption, ...

And yes - lots of it targets the US gov, maybe time to rethink what the US (and others) gov is and isn't ?

This isn't the work of fallible humans, this is the work of malfunctioning states.

Without Wikileaks, medias and investigation that reveals the wrongdoings ... dictatorship is at the end of the road.

This is why the reasoning that Wikileaks helps dictatorships and hurts democracies is absurd.

> This is why the reasoning that Wikileaks helps dictatorships is absurd.

I never wrote that nor implied it. I wrote and I maintain that wikileaks deals more blows to democracies than dictatorships and that it's because of the very nature of democracies (edit: notwithstanding the whole anti-US bias of Assange).

I don't know how to make my point clearer:

- Wikileaks's leaks are mainly about democracies, not dictatorships.

- It creates tensions in these democracies and it does not in dictatorships.

- This consumes resources and has consequences in democracies (civil unrest, lack of trust from the population, investigations, weakening of governments, tensions in relationships with other nations, etc.)

- Whether it's a good thing or not, it's desirable or not doesn't change the fact that dictatorships are not diminished and are not the target of wikileaks while democracies are.

> We are talking war crimes, environmental disasters, political corruption, ...

And regarding my last point: I do not believe for a second that we should ignore those facts in order to appear strong or clean or whatever.

>wikileaks deals more blows to democracies than dictatorships

I think the central fallacy here is seeing the central operating principle of democracy, which is the informed public feeding their knowledge and judgement back in, as a blow to democracy. It is like a automotive mechanic saying "there's your problem, the fuel air mixture in your engine is exploding." The press reporting on the government is one link in democracy's central cycle.

Your are right about seeing reporting as a blow to dictatorship, of course. In their case the action of an informed public really is a blow to the state, following the fact that the public is not part of the state.

So in that light it's true that journalism does more to help free societies than it does to hurt dictatorships, since there's more of it in freer societies.

>it's a platform to publish confidential information.

Phrasing it like this is misleading as it implies that Wikileaks is a neutral platform, a dumb tool that acts at the leaker's discretion. That isn't what we see when we look at their actual behavior. They do not publish every leak they receive and therefore they have editorial control over their platform. Assange himself has said they have received leaks about the Trump campaign that they wouldn't publish. That shifts Wikileaks from a neutral platform to publish confidential information to a political entity that uses leaked confidential information to achieve political goals.

EDIT: This is being downvoted so here is a source in which Assange talks about having leaked info about Trump and not publishing it.[1]

[1] - https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/2934...

Lol no. The reason there is not as much damaging information leaked from dictatorships, is because any leakers are guaranteed to be executed. Reality Winner and Chelsea Manning would have been executed after a 30 minute show trial in a dictatorship.

That's not in contradiction of what I wrote. By their very nature transparent and healthy democracies have a larger surface attacks for leaks than dictatorships.

> Reality Winner and Chelsea Manning would have been executed after a 30 minute show trial in a dictatorship.

And Snowden, having escaped overseas but not being particularly hidden, would have had an encounter with some kind of nerve agent delivered by someone totally unconnected to the government he had leaked info from.

None of which endorses the US treatment of any of them.

I’m not sure why you’re being downvoted so much, the point is definitely interesting

Imagine a leak comes out about Putin (you don’t have to imagine that hard..). It would hardly make any noise: there’s no more free press to raise a stink about it, and the population is so used to swimming in the post-truth sewage spewing from the top that they’ll just ignore it

Our elites would be more secure and less embarrassed if they didn't have to deal with a free press but society is made up more than the elites and we need weigh the utility of the rest of society as well.

> I’m not sure why you’re being downvoted so much, the point is definitely interesting

I have observed a `shark smelling blood` thing going sometimes on HN. If the timing is right and if a child comment in an upvoted parent that is at the top of post gets one or two downvotes then it has some visibility and then it attracts downvote clicks. If there are 4 or 5 other children they get ignored (I believe the last one gets all the downvote because people parse from top to bottom and only bother interacting with first or last elements... so some posts will get buried while others will sail through) shrug, it might be all in my head though ;).

Don’t think so. Reddit suffers heavily from this and is a known phenomenon.

Lanier's smart, isn't he? It sounds like he was ahead of the curve, here.

A vehicle that publishes anything without restraint is just a loudspeaker. When Wikileaks got hold of leaked emails in the middle of a political smear campaign, I expected it to be better and delay the publishing.

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