FBI Never Saw CrowdStrike Unredacted or Final Report on Alleged Russian Hacking Because None was Produced

Ray McGovern
Consortium News

CrowdStrike, the controversial cybersecurity firm that the Democratic National Committee chose over the FBI in 2016 to examine its compromised computer servers, never produced an un-redacted or final forensic report for the government because the FBI never required it to, the Justice Department has admitted.

The revelation came in a court filing by the government in the pre-trial phase of Roger Stone, a long-time Republican operative who had an unofficial role in the campaign of candidate Donald Trump. Stone has been charged with misleading Congress, obstructing justice and intimidating a witness.

The filing was in response to a motion by Stone’s lawyers asking for “unredacted reports” from CrowdStrike in an effort to get the government to prove that Russia hacked the DNC server. “The government … does not possess the information the defandant seeks,” the filing says.

In his motion, Stone’s lawyers said he had only been given three redacted drafts. In a startling footnote in the government’s response, the DOJ admits the drafts are all that exist. 

“Although the reports produced to the defendant are marked ‘draft,’ counsel for the DNC and DCCC informed the government that they are the last version of the report produced,” the footnote says.

In other words CrowdStrike, upon which the FBI relied to conclude that Russia hacked the DNC, never completed a final report and only turned over three redacted drafts to the government.

These drafts were “voluntarily” given to the FBI by DNC lawyers, the filing says. “No redacted information concerned the attribution of the attack to Russian actors,” the filing quotes DNC lawyers as saying.

In Stone’s motion his lawyers argued: “If the Russian state did not hack the DNC, DCCC, or [Clinton campaign chairman John] Podesta’s servers, then Roger Stone was prosecuted for obstructing a congressional investigation into an unproven Russian state hacking conspiracy … The issue of whether or not the DNC was hacked is central to the Defendant’s defense.”

The DOJ responded: “The government does not need to prove at the defendant’s trial that the Russians hacked the DNC in order to prove the defendant made false statements, tampered with a witness, and obstructed justice into a congressional investigation regarding election interference.”

Thousands of emails from the DNC server were published by WikiLeaks in July 2016 revealing that the DNC interfered in the Democratic primary process to favor former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over Senator Bernie Sanders for the party’s presidential nomination. The U.S. indicted 12 Russian military intelligence agents in 2018 for allegedly hacking the DNC server and giving the emails to WikiLeaks.

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Could DNA Be Hacked, Like Software?

mindmatters.ai

People often say that our genome is like a language. For example, a recent science paper explains that “genomes appear similar to natural language texts, and protein domains can be treated as analogs of words.”¹

For that reason, DNA can be used to encode messages:

If just encoding text, one way is to convert each letter of the alphabet into a three-letter code. Using three bases, such as A, C, and T, gives 27 combinations—enough for the English alphabet plus a space—with a code such as AAA = A, AAC = B, and so on (1 in graphic below). However, researchers often want to encode more than just text, so most current methods instead first translate data into binary code—the language of 1s and 0s used in electronic media. Using binary, the four bases of DNA could theoretically store up to two bits of information per nucleotide, with a code such as A = 00, C = 01, and so on Catherine Offord, “Infographic: Writing with DNA” at The Scientist

In 2017, one Harvard group encoded a video, an image of one of the earliest surviving motion pictures, in a DNA sample from bacteria:

Courtesy Seth Shipman, Harvard University

But in some ways, our genomes are much more powerful than words. They are part of a process that utters not just ideas but living beings. Including human beings, who ourselves have ideas. 

In August 2017, researchers announced that they had used DNA to encode malware to hack a computer program that reads genetic sequences:

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Documents Expose British Government Covert Anti-Russian Propaganda and Truth Behind Skripal Case

"We have a programme, the Integrity Initiative, whose entire purpose is to pump out covert disinformation against Russia, through social media and news stories secretly paid for by the British government. And we have the Skripals' MI6 handler, the BBC, Porton Down, the FCO, the MOD and the US Embassy, working together in a group under the auspices of the Integrity Initiative."  

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Craig Murray
Craigmurray.org.uk

It is worth starting by noting that a high percentage of the Integrity Initiative archive has been authenticated. The scheme has been admitted by the FCO and defended as legitimate government activity. Individual items like the minutes of the meeting with David Leask are authenticated. Not one of the documents has so far been disproven, or even denied.

Which tends to obscure some of the difficulties with the material. There is no metadata showing when each document was created, as opposed to when Anonymous made it into a PDF. Anonymous have released it in tranches and made plain there is more to come. The reason for this methodology is left obscure.

Most frustratingly, Anonymous' comments on the releases indicate that they have vital information which is not, so far, revealed. The most important document of all appears to be a simple contact list, of a particular group within the hundreds of contacts revealed in the papers overall. This is it in full: 

Tantalisingly, Anonymous describe this as a list of people who attended a meeting with the White Helmets. But there is no evidence of that in the document itself, nor does any other document released so far refer to this meeting. There is very little in the documents released so far about the White Helmets at all. But there is a huge amount about the Skripal case. With the greatest of respect to Anonymous and pending any release of further evidence, I want you to consider whether this might be a document related to the Skripal incident. 

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The NSA Wants a Skeleton Key to Everyone’s Encrypted Data

Gavin Hanson
Activist Post

Like it or not, you are your data. In this day and age, your receipts, social media activity, public records, GPS data, and Internet search history are the proof of who you are. And while you may have thought you had secrets, the Federal Government would like the rest of them.

The seemingly innocuous pieces of information we trade away every day create a detailed mosaic of our lives used to target advertising and create personality profiles that are exploited by the FBI, political operatives like Cambridge Analytica, and Russian propagandists.

And those are just the legal shenanigans! Instances of malicious hacking that jeopardize social security numbers and other important data are on the rise as well.

But all hope is not lost! There is but one meaningful defense against such intrusions, one used by whistleblowers, banks, the government (often poorly), and college students: encryption.

Encryption, to oversimplify, is the process of putting your data in a combination locked safe, and it’s becoming more popular. Like all passcodes, these combinations are best stored non-electronically.

Automatically encrypted search engines and Internet services simplify the process for users. They protect individuals’ data from hacking, theft, and even the government, but they also retain a repository for all the combinations they use to lock data up.
But that may soon change.

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Ross Ulbricht Appeals Double-Life Sentence 'For Building a Website' to The Supreme Court

Aaron Kesel
Activist Post

Imprisoned Silk Road creator, Ross Ulbricht, has one last chance at reducing his sentence with an appeal to the Supreme Court. After that, his options in court for appealing his double-life sentence (for victimless crimes) will be extinguished.

Ross Ulbricht was arrested in 2013 for running the infamous darknet marketplace Silk Road. Ross admitted in trial that he helped create the site but denies that he was the only “Dread Pirate Roberts” (DPR) admin of Silk Road. Ross claims he sold the website and stated he was set up as the “ultimate fall guy.”

In fact, Ross Ulbricht’s defense team revealed in 2016, that one month after Ulbricht’s arrest (October 1st) on November 18, 2013, someone logged into “Dread Pirate Roberts” account on the Silk Road forum. The team has also disclosed that “evidence-tampering” may have taken place; these facts were documented in a discovery letter, Bitcoin Magazine reported.

“We have recently learned that someone using the Dread Pirate Roberts account logged into the Silk Road forum nearly seven weeks after Ross was arrested. A record of this was buried deep within the five to six terabytes the government produced in the discovery. The evidence shows that the last login by DPR was made November 18, 2013, four days before the Silk Road forum was taken offline on November 22, 2013. Ross Ulbricht was arrested on Oct. 1, 2013, and has been in custody ever since.”
Lyn says that the recently uncovered evidence is mentioned in the demand for additional discovery that was sent to the AUSA in Maryland:
“There is a record in the database for every account, showing the most recent login. We don’t know when that person or persons originally gained access, or how many times they logged into Silk Road as DPR. We don’t know how many DPRs there were. What we now know from the discovery evidence provided by the government is that the last time someone using the DPR account logged into the Silk Road Forum was November 18, 2013, when Ross Ulbricht had been in prison for nearly seven weeks.”
She continues:
“Joshua Dratel, Ross’ lawyer, said a long time ago that we only know the tip of the iceberg regarding the corruption in this case. This week we have seen another big chunk of ice revealed: evidence tampering and apparently at least one additional DPR. If this backup of the forum database had not been saved or discovered; if logins made by DPR after Ross’ arrest were not found, no one would be the wiser. This begs the question: how much more is there? Unfortunately we may never know, as it’s the nature of digital evidence that it’s easily changed, planted or deleted without a trace. That my son — or anyone — would get a life sentence without parole based on vulnerable digital evidence, especially when it’s been corrupted, puts us all in peril.”

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Forget Russiagate, the REAL scandal is Israelgate

James Corbett
Steemit

Almost exactly a year ago, just as the "Russia hacked the election!" delirium was taking shape, I pooh-poohed the idea that "Russiagate" (as it has come to be known) would persist for very long. Once the Trump administration started plowing ahead with its agenda, I argued, the Dems would toss Hillary aside and move on with politics as usual.

Russiagate fading away as Democrats come to terms with the 2016 election? Really, James?

Now I've made some inaccurate predictions before (OK, a lot of inaccurate predictions), but that one takes the cake in terms of how wrong I ended up being.

If you want a demonstration of this point, just type "russia collusion" or "russia interference" into your search engine of choice and feast on the millions and millions of nothingburgers that have been produced this past year chasing this non-story. It would almost be comical how stupid these stories were if it wasn't for the fact that they have real world consequences.

Remember when the evil Russkies hacked the Vermont electrical grid?! Of course you do. But do you remember when the MSM presstitutes immediately amended their fear porn story to admit that the grid had not, in fact, been hacked at all? Of course you don't, because the headlines are reported breathlessly and the "corrections" are issued quietly.

And do you remember when the dastardly Russians hacked into the voting systems of 39 states before the 2016 presidential election? Yeah, that didn't actually happen, either.

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The U.S. Media Yesterday Suffered its Most Humiliating Debacle in Ages: Now Refuses All Transparency Over What Happened

The Intercept

 

Friday was one of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in quite a long time. The humiliation orgy was kicked off by CNN, with MSNBC and CBS close behind, with countless pundits, commentators and operatives joining the party throughout the day. By the end of the day, it was clear that several of the nation’s largest and most influential news outlets had spread an explosive but completely false news story to millions of people, while refusing to provide any explanation of how it happened.

The spectacle began on Friday morning at 11:00 am EST, when the Most Trusted Name in News™ spent 12 straight minutes on air flamboyantly hyping an exclusive bombshell report that seemed to prove that WikiLeaks, last September, had secretly offered the Trump campaign, even Donald Trump himself, special access to the DNC emails before they were published on the internet. As CNN sees the world, this would prove collusion between the Trump family and WikiLeaks and, more importantly, between Trump and Russia, since the U.S. intelligence community regards WikiLeaks as an “arm of Russian intelligence,” and therefore, so does the U.S. media.

This entire revelation was based on an email which CNN strongly implied it had exclusively obtained and had in its possession. The email was sent by someone named “Michael J. Erickson” – someone nobody had heard of previously and whom CNN could not identify – to Donald Trump, Jr., offering a decryption key and access to DNC emails that WikiLeaks had “uploaded.” The email was a smoking gun, in CNN’s extremely excited mind, because it was dated September 4 – ten days before WikiLeaks began promoting access to those emails online – and thus proved that the Trump family was being offered special, unique access to the DNC archive: likely by WikiLeaks and the Kremlin.

It’s impossible to convey with words what a spectacularly devastating scoop CNN believed it had, so it’s necessary to watch it for yourself to see the tone of excitement, breathlessness and gravity the network conveyed as they clearly believed they were delivering a near-fatal blow to the Trump/Russia collusion story:

There was just one small problem with this story: it was fundamentally false, in the most embarrassing way possible. Hours after CNN broadcast its story – and then hyped it over and over and over – the Washington Post reported that CNN got the key fact of the story wrong.

The email was not dated September 4, as CNN claimed, but rather September 14 – which means it was sent after WikiLeaks had already published access to the DNC emails online. Thus, rather than offering some sort of special access to Trump, “Michael J. Erickson” was simply some random person from the public encouraging the Trump family to look at the publicly available DNC emails that WikiLeaks – as everyone by then already knew – had publicly promoted. In other words, the email was the exact opposite of what CNN presented it as being.

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Top NSA Official Says Russia Election Meddling is Propaganda to Increase War-Spending—Media Silent

Activist Post
Jay Syrmopoulos

William Binney is a 30-year National Security Agency veteran, who served as the global Technical Director for geopolitical analysis at the NSA and was an architect of its surveillance program before becoming a famed whistleblower upon resigning in 2001.

Binney was persecuted for attempting to expose lies and distortions of intelligence by the George W. Bush administration used to justify systematic, massive, and all-encompassing surveillance into all Americans’ private electronic communications.

In regards to Russiagate, Binney has been a strong proponent of the idea that the Democratic National Committee was not hacked by Russians, and in a November 15 interview, published on the Washingtonsblog news-site, titled “How to Instantly Prove (Or Disprove) Russian Hacking of US Election”, he provides a technical analysis that exposes how the Democratic party allegations of “Russian hacking” are a part of an operation of intentional deception backed by the military-intelligence-industrial complex.

The former NSA tech guru says the agency he worked at for decades has evidence of exactly who hacked… or instead, proves that the emails were leaked by a Democratic party insider.

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