The hack of the Democrat National Committee’s email server is the centerpiece of the Russia scandal.
The intelligence community claims this is the key piece of evidence that shows Russia acted on behalf of Donald Trump.
But one NSA expert just revealed the shocking truth about the hack.
The media has made much hay out of the fact that the intelligence community — really only three agencies — produced an assessment claiming the Russians were behind the DNC hack.
To date, no proof has been offered to back up this assertion.
But it makes a convenient anti-Trump narrative, so the media was all too eager to run with the claim.
The Russians meddling in the election to elect Trump has been the narrative that has overtaken the first months of the Trump presidency.
It has crippled his ability to conduct foreign policy with regards to Russia, and it has distracted his administration through a witch hunt special counsel investigation.
A key question remains, though — is the story true?
Four NSA experts says no, and one journalist claims the emails being passed to Guccifer 2.0 was an inside job.
Patrick Lawrence of The Nation reports:
“Qualified experts working independently of one another began to examine the DNC case immediately after the July 2016 events. Prominent among these is a group comprising former intelligence officers, almost all of whom previously occupied senior positions. Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), founded in 2003, now has 30 members, including a few associates with backgrounds in national security fields other than intelligence.
The chief researchers active on the DNC case are four: William Binney, formerly the NSA’s technical director for world geopolitical and military analysis and designer of many agency programs now in use; Kirk Wiebe, formerly a senior analyst at the NSA’s SIGINT Automation Research Center; Edward Loomis, formerly technical director in the NSA’s Office of Signal Processing; and Ray McGovern, an intelligence analyst for nearly three decades and formerly chief of the CIA’s Soviet Foreign Policy Branch. Most of these men have decades of experience in matters concerning Russian intelligence and the related technologies. This article reflects numerous interviews with all of them conducted in person, via Skype, or by telephone.”
Lawrence laid out the forensic evidence that he believes blows up the hack theory and proves the emails were stolen in an inside job:
“Forensicator’s first decisive findings, made public in the paper dated July 9, concerned the volume of the supposedly hacked material and what is called the transfer rate—the time a remote hack would require. The metadata established several facts in this regard with granular precision: On the evening of July 5, 2016, 1,976 megabytes of data were downloaded from the DNC’s server. The operation took 87 seconds. This yields a transfer rate of 22.7 megabytes per second.
These statistics are matters of record and essential to disproving the hack theory. No Internet service provider, such as a hacker would have had to use in mid-2016, was capable of downloading data at this speed. Compounding this contradiction, Guccifer claimed to have run his hack from Romania, which, for numerous reasons technically called delivery overheads, would slow down the speed of a hack even further from maximum achievable speeds.”
One of the experts who worked on the forensic analysis of the data — Skip Folden, a former IBM program manager — said the speed at which the data was downloaded could only have been achieved through the use of a USB drive.
Lawrence reports:
“A speed of 22.7 megabytes is simply unobtainable, especially if we are talking about a transoceanic data transfer,” Folden said. “Based on the data we now have, what we’ve been calling a hack is impossible.” Last week Forensicator reported on a speed test he conducted more recently. It tightens the case considerably. “Transfer rates of 23 MB/s (Mega Bytes per second) are not just highly unlikely, but effectively impossible to accomplish when communicating over the Internet at any significant distance,” he wrote. “Further, local copy speeds are measured, demonstrating that 23 MB/s is a typical transfer rate when using a USB–2 flash device (thumb drive).”
Lawrence also reports the time stamp of the download reveals the leaker was on the east coast — where the DNC is located — and not Russia:
“Time stamps in the metadata provide further evidence of what happened on July 5. The stamps recording the download indicate that it occurred in the Eastern Daylight Time Zone at approximately 6:45 pm. This confirms that the person entering the DNC system was working somewhere on the East Coast of the United States. In theory, the operation could have been conducted from Bangor or Miami or anywhere in between—but not Russia, Romania, or anywhere else outside the EDT zone. Combined with Forensicator’s findings on the transfer rate, the time stamps constitute more evidence that the download was conducted locally, since delivery overheads—conversion of data into packets, addressing, sequencing times, error checks, and the like—degrade all data transfers conducted via the Internet, more or less according to the distance involved.”
This forensic examination of the DNC email hack calls into question not only the entire Russia story, but also the special counsel investigation.
We will keep you up to date on this developing story.
