William Binney, Ray McGovern and Other Intel Experts Call Russian Hacking Allegations Baseless
This is an open letter, so they intended it posted in full.
If there is some stronger evidence that they overlooked, please post it at the end.
It sounds like the Trump campaign did have contact with Russia, and given the various October Surprises like Nixon in '68 and Reagan in '80, that should still be investigated (the way those weren't).
Heres an excerpt:
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
MEMORANDUM
Allegations of Hacking Election Are Baseless
A New York Times report on Monday alluding to overwhelming circumstantial evidence leading the CIA to believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin deployed computer hackers with the goal of tipping the election to Donald J. Trump is, sadly, evidence-free. This is no surprise, because harder evidence of a technical nature points to an inside leak, not hackingby Russians or anyone else.
Mondays Washington Post reports that Sen. James Lankford, R-Oklahoma, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has joined other senators in calling for a bipartisan investigation of suspected cyber-intrusion by Russia. Reading our short memo could save the Senate from endemic partisanship, expense and unnecessary delay.
In what follows, we draw on decades of senior-level experiencewith emphasis on cyber-intelligence and securityto cut through uninformed, largely partisan fog. Far from hiding behind anonymity, we are proud to speak out with the hope of gaining an audience appropriate to what we meritgiven our long labors in government and other areas of technology. And corny though it may sound these days, our ethos as intelligence professionals remains, simply, to tell it like it iswithout fear or favor.
We have gone through the various claims about hacking. For us, it is childs play to dismiss them. The email disclosures in question are the result of a leak, not a hack. Heres the difference between leaking and hacking:
Leak: When someone physically takes data out of an organization and gives it to some other person or organization, as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning did.
Hack: When someone in a remote location electronically penetrates operating systems, firewalls or any other cyber-protection system and then extracts data.
All signs point to leaking, not hacking. If hacking were involved, the National Security Agency would know itand know both sender and recipient.
In short, since leaking requires physically removing dataon a thumb drive, for examplethe only way such data can be copied and removed, with no electronic trace of what has left the server, is via a physical storage device.
Awesome Technical Capabilities
Again, NSA is able to identify both the sender and recipient when hacking is involved. Thanks largely to the material released by Edward Snowden, we can provide a full picture of NSAs extensive domestic data-collection network including Upstream programs like Fairview, Stormbrew and Blarney. These include at least 30 companies in the U.S. operating the fiber networks that carry the Public Switched Telephone Network as well as the World Wide Web. This gives NSA unparalleled access to data flowing within the U.S. and data going out to the rest of the world, as well as data transiting the U.S.
In other words, any data that is passed from the servers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) or of Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC)or any other server in the U.S.is collected by the NSA. These data transfers carry destination addresses in what are called packets, which enable the transfer to be traced and followed through the network.
Packets: Emails being passed across the World Wide Web are broken down into smaller segments called packets. These packets are passed into the network to be delivered to a recipient. This means the packets need to be reassembled at the receiving end.
To accomplish this, all the packets that form a message are assigned an identifying number that enables the receiving end to collect them for reassembly. Moreover, each packet carries the originator and ultimate receiver Internet protocol number (either IPV4 or IPV6) that enables the network to route data.
When email packets leave the U.S., the other Five Eyes countries (the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) and the seven or eight additional countries participating with the U.S. in bulk-collection of everything on the planet would also have a record of where those email packets went after leaving the U.S.
These collection resources are extensive [see attached NSA slides 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]; they include hundreds of trace route programs that trace the path of packets going across the network and tens of thousands of hardware and software implants in switches and servers that manage the network. Any emails being extracted from one server going to another would be, at least in part, recognizable and traceable by all these resources.
The bottom line is that the NSA would know where and how any hacked emails from the DNC, HRC or any other servers were routed through the network. This process can sometimes require a closer look into the routing to sort out intermediate clients, but in the end sender and recipient can be traced across the network.
The various ways in which usually anonymous spokespeople for U.S. intelligence agencies are equivocatingsaying things like our best guess or our opinion or our estimate etc.shows that the emails alleged to have been hacked cannot be traced across the network. Given NSAs extensive trace capability, we conclude that DNC and HRC servers alleged to have been hacked were, in fact, not hacked.
The evidence that should be there is absent; otherwise, it would surely be brought forward, since this could be done without any danger to sources and methods. Thus, we conclude that the emails were leaked by an insideras was the case with Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. Such an insider could be anyone in a government department or agency with access to NSA databases, or perhaps someone within the DNC.
As for the comments to the media as to what the CIA believes, the reality is that CIA is almost totally dependent on NSA for ground truth in the communications arena. Thus, it remains something of a mystery why the media is being fed strange stories about hacking that have no basis in fact. In sum, given what we know of NSAs existing capabilities, it beggars belief that NSA would be unable to identify anyoneRussian or notattempting to interfere in a U.S. election by hacking.
For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
William Binney, former Technical Director, World Geopolitical & Military Analysis, NSA; co-founder, SIGINT Automation Research Center (ret.)
Mike Gravel, former Adjutant, top secret control officer, Communications Intelligence Service; special agent of the Counter Intelligence Corps and former United States Senator
Larry Johnson, former CIA Intelligence Officer & former State Department Counter-Terrorism Official
Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray, Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Middle East, CIA (ret.)
Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA (ret.)
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/william_binney_ray_mcgovern_intel_experts_russia_hacking_20161213
rzemanfl
(29,557 posts)together to have smoke blown up their asses?
Response to rzemanfl (Reply #1)
emulatorloo This message was self-deleted by its author.
still_one
(92,190 posts)William Binney, and those other cast of characters in that list
yurbud
(39,405 posts)Denzil_DC
(7,241 posts)Really? Larry "Whitey tape" Johnson?
Not an impressive lineup, for sure.
ETA (from the Wikipedia article in the link above):
Johnson is a founding member of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.[34] In September 2015, Johnson and 27 other members of VIPS steering group wrote a letter to the President challenging a recently published book, that claimed to rebut the report of the United States Senate Intelligence Committee on the Central Intelligence Agency's use of torture.
OTOH, VIPS was right on Iraqi WMD, so broken clocks and all that. OTOOH, it claimed an Israeli attack on Iran was "imminent" in 2010.
The_Casual_Observer
(27,742 posts)Knew everything, then why is it impossible for them to even figure out where the bit coins go to pay ransom.
this report is full of $h!t
GeorgeGist
(25,321 posts)emulatorloo
(44,124 posts)yodermon
(6,143 posts)the bitly link he clicked on went to a FancyBear Russian hacking site where he typed in his password. (D'oh.)
duffyduff
(3,251 posts)n/t
BainsBane
(53,032 posts)So they cant possibly claim to know.
It's truly reprehensible how these party hacks so easily sacrifice national security. The GOP has become a party of traitors.
think
(11,641 posts)~Snip~
In September 2002, he, along with J. Kirk Wiebe and Edward Loomis, asked the U.S. Defense Department Inspector General (DoD IG) to investigate the NSA for allegedly wasting "millions and millions of dollars" on Trailblazer, a system intended to analyze mass collection of data carried on communications networks such as the Internet. Binney had been one of the inventors of an alternative system, ThinThread, which was shelved when Trailblazer was chosen instead. Binney has also been publicly critical of the NSA for spying on U.S. citizens, saying of its expanded surveillance after the September 11, 2001 attacks that "it's better than anything that the KGB, the Stasi, or the Gestapo and SS ever had"[10] as well as noting Trailblazer's ineffectiveness and unjustified high cost compared to the far less intrusive ThinThread.[11] He was furious that the NSA hadn't uncovered the 9/11 plot and stated that intercepts it had collected but not analyzed likely would have garnered timely attention with his leaner more focused system.[8]
Read more at Wikileaks. ( A Google URL shortener was used due to problems with the original link.)
https://goo.gl/i1rSTO
Original link which is broken:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_(U.S._intelligence_official)#Whistleblowing
William Binney was considered one of the best analysts in NSA history . I wouldn't dismiss him or the others so readily...
Binney was a Russia specialist and worked in the operations side of intelligence, starting as an analyst and ending as a Technical Director prior to becoming a geopolitical world Technical Director. In the 1990s, he co-founded a unit on automating signals intelligence with NSA research chief Dr. John Taggart.[6] Binney's NSA career culminated as Technical Leader for intelligence in 2001. Having expertise in intelligence analysis, traffic analysis, systems analysis, knowledge management, and mathematics (including set theory, number theory, and probability),[7] Binney has been described as one of the best analysts in the NSA's history.[8]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_(U.S._intelligence_official)#Biography
BainsBane
(53,032 posts)There is nothing substantive in that piece. And the fact is without access to intelligence, they can't possibly claim to know the facts.
People here held up Assange as a whistle blower hero too, to the extent they insisted he shouldn't have to abide by a valid arrest warrant for rape. Now it turns out he is a tool of Putin and working to install far right wing governments throughout the world. I know that does nothing to deter him in the eyes of some, but I myself don't happen to be a fan of white nationalism.