Emails were leaked, not hacked

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President Barack Obama retaliated against Russia for cyberattacks aimed at interfering with the 2016
the presidential campaign, imposing sanctions on top Russian intelligence officials and agencies and
expelling 35 Russian operatives from the U.S.

Emails were leaked, not hacked
JANUARY 5, 2017, 12:34 PM
By William Binney, Ray McGovern
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-hacking-intelligence-20170105-story.html

  "Op-ed: DNC and Podesta emails were leaked, not hacked, op-ed writers
   say.
   
   It has been several weeks since the New York Times reported that
   "overwhelming circumstantial evidence" led the CIA to believe that
   Russian President Vladimir Putin "deployed computer hackers" to help
   Donald Trump win the election. But the evidence released so far has
   been far from overwhelming.
   
   The long anticipated Joint Analysis Report issued by the Department of
   Homeland Security and the FBI on Dec. 29 met widespread criticism in
   the technical community. Worse still, some of the advice it offered led
   to a very alarmist false alarm about supposed Russian hacking into a
   Vermont electric power station.
   
   Advertised in advance as providing proof of Russian hacking, the report
   fell embarrassingly short of that goal. The thin gruel that it did
   contain was watered down further by the following unusual warning atop
   page 1: "DISCLAIMER: This report is provided 'as is' for informational
   purposes only. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not
   provide any warranties of any kind regarding any information contained
   within."
   
   Also, curiously absent was any clear input from the CIA, NSA or
   Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Reportedly, Mr.
   Clapper will get a chance tomorrow to brief an understandably skeptical
   Donald Trump, who has called the briefing delay "very strange," even
   suggesting that top intelligence officials "need more time to build a
   case."
   
   Mr. Trump's skepticism is warranted not only by technical realities,
   but also by human ones, including the dramatis personae involved. Mr.
   Clapper has admitted giving Congress on March 12, 2013, false testimony
   regarding the extent of NSA collection of data on Americans. Four
   months later, after the Edward Snowden revelations, Mr. Clapper
   apologized to the Senate for testimony he admitted was "clearly
   erroneous." That he is a survivor was already apparent by the way he
   landed on his feet after the intelligence debacle on Iraq.
   
   Mr. Clapper was a key player in facilitating the fraudulent
   intelligence. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put Mr. Clapper in
   charge of the analysis of satellite imagery, the best source for
   pinpointing the location of weapons of mass destruction — if any.
   
   When Pentagon favorites like Iraqi émigré Ahmed Chalabi plied U.S.
   intelligence with spurious "evidence" on WMD in Iraq, Mr. Clapper was
   in position to suppress the findings of any imagery analyst who might
   have the temerity to report, for example, that the Iraqi "chemical
   weapons facility" for which Mr. Chalabi provided the geographic
   coordinates was nothing of the kind. Mr. Clapper preferred to go by the
   Rumsfeldian dictum: "The absence of evidence is not evidence of
   absence." (It will be interesting to see if he tries that out on the
   president-elect Friday.)
   
   A year after the war began, Mr. Chalabi told the media, "We are heroes
   in error. As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful." By
   that time it was clear there were no WMD in Iraq. When Mr. Clapper was
   asked to explain, he opined, without adducing any evidence, that they
   probably were moved into Syria.
   
   With respect to the alleged interference by Russia and WikiLeaks in the
   U.S. election, it is a major mystery why U.S. intelligence feels it
   must rely on "circumstantial evidence," when it has NSA's vacuum
   cleaner sucking up hard evidence galore. What we know of NSA's
   capabilities shows that the email disclosures were from leaking, not
   hacking.
   
   Here's the difference:
   
   Hack: When someone in a remote location electronically penetrates
   operating systems, firewalls or other cyber-protection systems and then
   extracts data. Our own considerable experience, plus the rich detail
   revealed by Edward Snowden, persuades us that, with NSA's formidable
   trace capability, it can identify both sender and recipient of any and
   all data crossing the network
   
   Leak: When someone physically takes data out of an organization — on a
   thumb drive, for example — and gives it to someone else, as Edward
   Snowden and Chelsea Manning did. Leaking is the only way such data can
   be copied and removed with no electronic trace.
   
   Because NSA can trace exactly where and how any "hacked" emails from
   the Democratic National Committee or other servers were routed through
   the network, it is puzzling why NSA cannot produce hard evidence
   implicating the Russian government and WikiLeaks. Unless we are dealing
   with a leak from an insider, not a hack, as other reporting suggests.
   From a technical perspective alone, we are convinced that this is what
   happened.
   
   Lastly, the CIA is almost totally dependent on NSA for ground truth in
   this electronic arena. Given Mr. Clapper's checkered record for
   accuracy in describing NSA activities, it is to be hoped that the
   director of NSA will join him for the briefing with Mr. Trump.
   
   William Binney (williambinney0802@comcast.net) worked for NSA for 36
   years, retiring in 2001 as the technical director of world military and
   geopolitical analysis and reporting; he created many of the collection
   systems still used by NSA. Ray McGovern (rrmcgovern@gmail.com) was a
   CIA analyst for 27 years; he briefed the president's daily brief
   one-on-one to President Reagan's most senior national security
   officials from 1981-85.
   
   Copyright © 2017, The Baltimore Sun, a Baltimore Sun Media Group
   publication | Place an Ad
   
   This article is related to: Russia, Europe, Jarmes R. Clapper, Central
   Intelligence Agency, Vladimir Putin, FBI "

[pdf]https://www.us-cert.gov/sites/default/files/publications/JAR_16-20296A_GRIZZLY%20STEPPE-2016-1229.pdf[/pdf]
https://www.us-cert.gov/sites/default/files/publications/JAR_16-20296A_GRIZZLY%20STEPPE-2016-1229.pdf

[MikeWB]

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/817712516491018240

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January 6-8, 2017 -- Unprecedented: CIA attempting to undermine president-elect (in: GENERAL ARCHIVES January 2017)
Jan 6, 2017    The CIA uses blackmail to apply Senate and House pressure on Trump.
McCain's Largely Unreported Treachery Against the US
WAYNE MADSEN | 06.01.2017 | OPINION
http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/01/06/mccain-largely-unreported-treachery-against-us.html

  "Arizona's recently re-elected Republican senator John McCain, along
   with his faithful «drama queen» accomplice South Carolina senator
   Lindsey Graham, recently met with a contingent of Ukrainian troops at a
   «forward combat zone» in Shyrokyne in eastern Ukraine and publicly
   questioned president-elect Donald Trump's plans to defrost America's
   chilly relations with Russia. For McCain, his return to his personal
   war front in Ukraine came three years after he stood with Ukrainian
   neo-Nazis and fascists on Kiev's Maidan Square calling for the ouster
   of president Viktor Yanukovych.
   
   Meanwhile, McCain, Graham, and their neo-conservative allies within the
   Republican and Democratic parties, as well as press outlets like The
   Washington Post, have questioned Trump's ultimate loyalty to the United
   States. The neocons' angst arises from their anger over the incoming
   president wisely doubting the efficacy of Central Intelligence Agency
   «intelligence» linking Russia to a spate of computer penetrations of
   U.S. computer systems and networks, including pre-election hacks of the
   Democratic National Committee (DNC) and private email of Hillary
   Clinton's top campaign officials.
   
   After President Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats from Washington, DC
   and San Francisco and shut down two Russian diplomatic compounds in
   Maryland and New York in retaliation for unproven Russian government
   involvement in the hacking, McCain and his neocon war hawks doubled
   down by claiming that Russian hacking of U.S. computer systems amounted
   to an «act of war». Seizing on the neocons' war frenzy, the CIA and
   Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced that Russian hackers
   had penetrated the electrical power grid operated by Vermont's
   Burlington Electric. The Washington Post, owned by Amazon billionaire
   and CIA cloud computing contractor Jeff Bezos, echoed the grid hacking
   story as factual.
   
   There was only one problem with the Russian electrical grid hacking
   headline: it was not true. Burlington Electric revealed that a laptop
   computer in the possession of a Burlington Electric employee, which
   allegedly was infected by a malware program linked by the U.S.
   government to Russian hackers, was never connected to the Vermont
   electrical grid. The laptop contained a hackers' software package
   called Neutrino, which is not linked, in any way, to Russia. An attempt
   by the «Amazon Post» and the war hawks to pin the Vermont grid story on
   Russia and link it to the DNC hacking fell flat on its face.
   
   Burlington Electric issued a statement on December 30, 2016,
   identifying DHS as the «boy who cried wolf» that issued the same
   «Russian malware» scare to electric utilities across the United States.
   The statement read, «Last night, U.S. utilities were alerted by the
   Department of Homeland Security (DHS) of a malware code used in Grizzly
   Steppe, the name DHS has applied to a Russian campaign linked to recent
   hacks. We acted quickly to scan all computers in our system for the
   malware signature. We detected the malware in a single Burlington
   Electric Department laptop not connected to our organization's grid
   systems».
   
   It turned out that Ukraine, the country where McCain, Graham, and
   Minnesota's rather myopic Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar were
   kibitzing with army troops and neo-Nazi armed militia members over the
   holidays, was the source of the malware hacking program used to hack
   into DNC computers. The Washington Post was also forced to shamefully
   retract its grid hacking story. The episode was yet another example of
   the haste at which the outgoing Obama administration and the neocon
   toadies in the Republican Party led by McCain were apt to blame any bad
   news on «the Russians». It was as if the Cold War witch hunter senator
   Joseph McCarthy had met the Keystone Kops. The situation would have
   been funny had it not been for the fact that the actions of Obama and
   the neocons propelled the world closer to cataclysmic warfare with the
   likes of McCain, Graham, and others beating the war drums.
   
   The Federal Bureau of Investigation and DHS amateurishly coined the
   alleged Russian hacking of the DNC computers with the cover term
   «Grizzly Steppe», a code phrase that would have been rejected by any
   legitimate Hollywood movie script writer as being too cartoonish and
   campy. Moreover, the malware used in the hacking of the Democrats'
   computers was an antiquated version of PHP, a program originally
   designed for personal home pages, hence the abbreviation PHP, but which
   now stands for «PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor».
   
   The PHP malware was found to be freely distributed by a Ukrainian
   hacker group as a hackers' tool. Although the FBI, DHS, and CIA did not
   bother to investigate whether the Ukrainian hackers were linked to
   McCain's and Graham's friends in the Ukrainian intelligence service,
   the Ukrainians would have had every reason to initiate a further
   damaging fracture in relations between the United States and Russia.
   Furthermore, the Ukrainians could have availed themselves of «network
   weaving» tools to run their malware through servers in Russia.
   
   In fact, the amateurish FBI/DHS «Grizzly Steppe» report found that the
   Ukrainian malware, later blamed on the Russians, had passed through the
   IP [Internet Protocol] addresses of 389 organizations in 61 different
   countries. None of the 389 malware pass-through IPs, including those of
   the University of Michigan; University of North Carolina at Chapel
   Hill; Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York; Datasource AG in
   Ingmarso, Sweden; Hunenberg, Switzerland; Kustbandet AB in Johannes
   Kepler University in Linz, Austria; Voxility S.R.L. of Bucharest; and
   Amazon.com – the company owned by none other than Washington Post owner
   and CIA contractor Mr. Bezos! – were linked to the Russian government.
   These include the United States, Ukraine, Russia, China, France,
   Germany, Seychelles, Moldova, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland,
   Montenegro, Romania, and Israel. Such a rich global network, which
   included several TOR anonymous browsing gateways, would have provided
   more than ample network weaving opportunities to mask the original
   Ukrainian digital fingerprints on the actual hacking of DNC computers.
   
   The malware program, called P.A.S. version 3.1.7., is contained in a
   web shell of PHP code. The malware program states that it is «Made in
   Ukraine» and the date of the program, 2011-2016 is followed by the
   letters «UA,» the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)
   two-letter code for Ukraine
   
   In eastern Ukraine, standing alongside a camouflage-festooned chocolate
   mogul president Petro Poroshenko, McCain and Graham accused Russia of
   «attacking» the United States, with Graham accusing Russian President
   Vladimir Putin of «hacking our election». Both called for increased
   sanctions against Russia. However, the sum-total of computer security
   knowledge of these two Republican fossils would not exceed that
   possessed by a kindergarten student in Arizona or South Carolina.
   
   Rather than accuse other Americans, including Mr. Trump, of engaging in
   potentially treasonous activities, perhaps Mr. McCain should recall the
   charges made by several U.S. prisoners-of-war about his «singing» to
   his North Vietnamese captors after his plane was shot down over Hanoi
   in October 1967. McCain, according to some fellow POWs who later spoke
   out, gladly gave his captors about six months' worth of U.S. Navy
   operational plans for the bombing of North Vietnam and Laos. McCain's
   psychosis about Russia reportedly could stem from his time at the
   «Hanoi Hilton» POW prison. McCain was given the Russian KGB code name
   «Jack Mouse» and, per Chan Chong Duet, the commander of the prison, the
   downed Navy pilot and son of the U.S. Pacific Forces Commander, Admiral
   John McCain, Jr., was quite free with the information he passed to
   North Vietnamese, Cuban, and Soviet officers while being treated for
   his wounds by Soviet doctors. If McCain wants to question the loyalty
   of any American, he should look into a mirror. He should also seek out
   psychiatric assistance.

   Tags: CIA  US  McCain  "

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POLITICS
Intelligence Report on Russian Hacking
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/06/us/politics/document-russia-hacking-report-intelligence-agencies.html?_r=1
  "The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released on Friday
   a report that detailed what it called a Russian campaign to influence
   the election. The report is the unclassified summary of a highly
   sensitive assessment from American intelligence and law enforcement
   agencies. JAN. 6, 2017 Related Article
  [ ... ]
  [pdf]https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3254237/Russia-Hack-Report.pdf[/pdf]
  https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3254237/Russia-Hack-Report.pdf



For a detailed analysis listen e.g. to the 21st Century Wire Sunday [Jan 8, 2016]  report :


https://www.spreaker.com/user/acrnetwork/sunday-wire-ep-168-hacking-the-world-wit
https://api.spreaker.com/download/episode/10264152/sunday_wire_ep_168_hacking_the_world_with_patrick_henningsen_guest_steven_sahiounie_v2.mp3


Episode #168 – SUNDAY WIRE: 'Hacking the World' with Patrick Henningsen, guest Steven Sahiounie
JANUARY 8, 2017 BY 21WIRE 4 COMMENTS
http://21stcenturywire.com/2017/01/08/episode-168-sunday-wire-hacking-the-world-with-patrick-henningsen-guest-steven-sahiounie/

  "Episode #168 of SUNDAY WIRE SHOW resumes this January 8, 2017 as host
   Patrick Henningsen brings a 3 HOURS special LIVE New Year's Day
   broadcast on the Alternate Current Radio Network...
 
   LISTEN LIVE ON THIS PAGE AT THE FOLLOWING SCHEDULED SHOW TIMES:
   
   LIVE BROADCAST TIMINGS:
   
   5pm-8pm UK Time | 12pm-3pm ET (US) | 9am-12am PT (US)
   
   This week's edition of THE SUNDAY WIRE is a very special LIVE
   broadcasting connecting North America and Europe this week, as host
   Patrick Henningsen covers the top stories in the US and
   internationally. In the first hour, we'll look at the Fort Lauderdale
   'ISIS voices' attack, and also the post-comical farce that is the US
   Intelligence Report of the 'Russian Hack'  and Obama last minute power
   grab – handing over  control of US election systems to the DHS. We'll
   also go on the ground in Syria to connect with Syrian-American
   investigative writer Steven Sahiounie to discuss his latest story on
   NATO-backed death squads in Syria. In the third hour we'll talk to a
   few SUNDAY WIRE and ACR regulars including Hesher and Spore about
   Trump's chances in light of this week's US intelligence debacle.
   
   SUPPORT 21WIRE – SUBSCRIBE & BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV
   
   MAKE A DONATION TO 21WIRE HERE
   
   Strap yourselves in and lower the blast shield – this is your brave new
   world...
   
   *NOTE: THIS EPISODE MAY CONTAIN STRONG LANGUAGE AND MATURE THEMES* "

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Intelligence report on Russian hacking focuses instead on RT reporting
by RT America , Published on Jan 6, 2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVnvnjz5TPg
  "The US intelligence community has declassified its report concerning
   the supposed 2016 "election hack." The highly anticipated report was
   released ahead of time and contained 12 pages devoted to RT and its
   coverage of the election. The report cites multiple corroborating ‒ but
   unnamed ‒ sources noted for their expertise in "Russian behavior," but
   presents no hard evidence. RT America's Alexey Yaroshevsky joins RT's
   Manila Chan to bring us the details."