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Why Trump is once again claiming that he was spied upon in 2016
This article sort of explains why the MAGA nut cases are so excited. These MAGA nut cases are really stupid and their excitement amuses me
Link to tweet
You’ll recall that Trump’s core complaint as president was that the investigation into Russian interference and possible overlap with his campaign was unfounded. It wasn’t, involving probes into a number of individuals with obvious links to Russian actors. But Trump and his allies crafted a countervailing narrative centered on malfeasance by government officials — again, a claim downstream from Trump’s initial response to reports about the probe in which he asserted that government officials might be out to get him......
The theory behind the Alfa Bank rumor is complicated. Sussman’s law firm, Perkins Coie, had been retained by Clinton’s campaign (leading it, separately, to engage the investigative firm Fusion GPS that later generated the infamous dossier of reports alleging a more robust connection between Russia and Trump’s team). An unidentified individual first noticed traffic between the Trump server and the Russian bank and brought it to an executive at a technology firm who had retained Perkins Coie and was working with Sussman. (Wheeler has an excellent timeline of all of this.) That triggered an effort to examine the scope of those connections, one that at least some of those involved in the research apparently understood to be an effort to create a jumping-off point for further research that could bolster a Trump-Russia narrative. (The tech executive, I’ll note, wasn’t sold on the Alfa-Trump link even back in August 2016.) Durham’s filing ties the campaign to Sussman and Sussman to the executive, but it’s not explicitly argued that the probe flowed down from Clinton’s team — or up to it.......
t’s important here to know why those records might have been collected. An expert on the technology with whom I spoke on Monday explained that Internet service providers often allow third parties to collect domain name lookups because the information is useful for tracking bad actors on the Internet. If, for example, there are suddenly a number of lookups to we11sfargo.com, with ones replacing the Ls in the domain name, that might suggest some effort to redirect traffic away from the bank to some spoof site. Or organizations might similarly have a passive DNS collection process in place so that they might know if there’s a sudden spike in lookups for unusual servers in, say, Russia — an early indication that maybe someone is trying to run a scam targeting employees.....
It’s useful to note that Durham’s claim about data being “exploited” emerged early. Both Wheeler and Graham elevated questions about the ethics of digging through collected DNS records to investigate something that was probably outside of any agreement governing what the data was being collected for. But that doesn’t mean 1) that any laws were violated or 2) that this constitutes “hacking.” If I give you a key to my house and you use it to come in and read my diary, I will certainly be angry with you, but it’s not like you committed burglary.
The theory behind the Alfa Bank rumor is complicated. Sussman’s law firm, Perkins Coie, had been retained by Clinton’s campaign (leading it, separately, to engage the investigative firm Fusion GPS that later generated the infamous dossier of reports alleging a more robust connection between Russia and Trump’s team). An unidentified individual first noticed traffic between the Trump server and the Russian bank and brought it to an executive at a technology firm who had retained Perkins Coie and was working with Sussman. (Wheeler has an excellent timeline of all of this.) That triggered an effort to examine the scope of those connections, one that at least some of those involved in the research apparently understood to be an effort to create a jumping-off point for further research that could bolster a Trump-Russia narrative. (The tech executive, I’ll note, wasn’t sold on the Alfa-Trump link even back in August 2016.) Durham’s filing ties the campaign to Sussman and Sussman to the executive, but it’s not explicitly argued that the probe flowed down from Clinton’s team — or up to it.......
t’s important here to know why those records might have been collected. An expert on the technology with whom I spoke on Monday explained that Internet service providers often allow third parties to collect domain name lookups because the information is useful for tracking bad actors on the Internet. If, for example, there are suddenly a number of lookups to we11sfargo.com, with ones replacing the Ls in the domain name, that might suggest some effort to redirect traffic away from the bank to some spoof site. Or organizations might similarly have a passive DNS collection process in place so that they might know if there’s a sudden spike in lookups for unusual servers in, say, Russia — an early indication that maybe someone is trying to run a scam targeting employees.....
It’s useful to note that Durham’s claim about data being “exploited” emerged early. Both Wheeler and Graham elevated questions about the ethics of digging through collected DNS records to investigate something that was probably outside of any agreement governing what the data was being collected for. But that doesn’t mean 1) that any laws were violated or 2) that this constitutes “hacking.” If I give you a key to my house and you use it to come in and read my diary, I will certainly be angry with you, but it’s not like you committed burglary.
After reading this article, it become even clearer that there were no laws breached and that Durham is wasting everyone's time
16 replies
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