Hacked E-mail Servers
Of course the big news is that Russian hackers (probably linked to the Russian government) hacked Democratic National Committee servers and leaked embarassing e-mails (and deliberately leaked social security numbers) via Wikileaks.
This supports the hypothesis that Putin is trying to get Trump elected.
It sounds like a fringe tinfoil hat conspiracy theory, but I read it on the front pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post
In The PostTom Hamburger and Ellen Nakashima have a major major Ballance fail writing “Although other experts remain skeptical of a Russian role, ” . The problem is that (as far as I can tell) they quote no such skeptical experts. My guess is that, rushing to deadline they wrote “opinions on shape of planet differ” before finding the differing opinions.
boring rant after the jump
I actually came here to link to an old pay walled background article in the WSJ (c)
“Three Months Later, State Department Hasn’t Rooted Out Hackers
Amount of data lost in unclassified email network is unclear; Investigators point finger at Russia”
update: sorry I forgot to include the link (also it was to a pay walled article. Just google state+department+server+hacked.
or click this link.
We have just witnessed a convention dedicated to the argument that Clinton should be sent to jail because she endangered US secrets by storing them on her private server which might have been hacked rather that the official e-mail system which was certainly hacked. It isn’t just the GOP, the MSM has been ignoring this inconvenient fact for months.
The fact that Russians didn’t leak embarrassing e-mails found on Clinton’s server is fairly strong evidence either that they never hacked it or that she is disciplined enough to almost completely avoid embarrassing e-mails. She did overlook a marking which indicates that a document is confidential. The marking is in this post. Did you notice it ?
I am sure that someone will try to Ballance the suspicion that Clinton was hacked by the Russians and the suspicion that Russian hackers are hacking for Trump. But the whole complicated episode reminds me of just how absurd the media’s treatment of Clintons is.
update: I really shouldn’t have gone there. I see that even here at AngryBear there are people who think the Clinton e-mail scandal amounts to something. In this update, I will explain why I think the whole thing is absurd. I think the story is that determined Republicans, partisan media (talk radio and Fox) and a main stream reporters who totally hate Clinton can make a huge issue out of something minor — that is that this is an illustration of the Clinton rules.
I hope that we here can agree that Clintons are held to a completely different standard than other public figures and completely completely different than Republicans (the Clinton rules). OK I don’t hope that, but I am frustrated, because to me the claim should be about as controversial as the claim that the Earth isn’t flat.
I forgot to put in a link to the WSJ article about the hacking. I thank MS 57 for pointing this out. I just googled state + department + server + hacked or something. I added links to the post
I also clicked one of them — a link to the extremely (often absurdly) even handed factcheck.org (from June 3). I read
“there’s no evidence so far that any attempts to hack into Clinton’s server were successful.” I stress that the DNC hack was detected *before* the e-mails were wikileaked (they found malware in DNC servers). The Clinton server drive has been inspected with great care. I understand that hackers can (in principle) hack without leaving traces. I am not convinced that the current level of hacking vs hack detection is such that it is plausible that the Clinton server was hacked but the FBI (assisted by the NSA) couldn’t determine this (that sentence is hard to understand because I am trying to be careful — here in parentheses I confidently guess that the server wasn’t hacked as the US Gov can detect hacks after the fact — this is a confident guess based on almost complete ignorance (but in parentheses and after the jump so it’s OK)).
I believe that the top secret information in the Clinton e-mails was the fact that the US is killing people with drones. This is widely known but officially a secret. I trust Kevin Drum 2nd link on this.
OK, so the unclassified State Department email server, to which Sec. Clinton was routinely sending email, was definitely hacked by Russia. Obviously, then, the Russians knew of Sec. Clinton’s email server, since they got email to and from her off the State Department server.
So why would anyone think that Sec. Clinton’s server, which had LESS security than the State Department server, was not hacked?
In your comment you present no evidence at all that Clinton’s server had less security.
My understanding is that it is believed that the DNC server was hacked by phishing (tricking someone into entering their username and password at another site). The key barrier to phishing is the intelligence of the people with passwords. If few, smart and paranoid people knew the Clinton server password, it would be very hard to hack it by phishing.
I can tell a story about how a shared server was hacked but a private server was too hard to hack (attempts failed).
In contrast you have an assertion made without supporting reasoning or evidence of any kind (not that there is anything wrong with that in a comment)
The (c) was pretty obvious. One could, say, ctrl+f “(c)”, and find out in a second if a document was so classified.
“The fact that Russians didn’t leak embarrassing e-mails found on Clinton’s server is fairly strong evidence either that they never hacked it or that she is disciplined enough to almost completely avoid embarrassing e-mails.”
If I was a putin operative and wanted to provide Trump with the best chance of winning (that seems to be the crux of the theory) I would release the emails in october or thereabouts so Dems have no way to replace HRC and the info is close enough to the election it would be fresh in the minds of the voters. So the fact there have been no emails leaked from HRC’s email server proves nothing.
I hope you don’t try to whatabout HRC’s hacked private sever (if it was hacked, it may not have been) by saying the state dept. email was hacked. If HRC used the state dept. server for her communication and it was hacked there would be no issue about the hacking per se because HRC did as much as she could possible do to keep the documents secure.
Are you going to tell us what the marking is?
The private account was intended to be for non-classified material only, and per James Comey, out of 60,000 emails, not a single one was marked classified in a manner that Secretary Clinton would recognize as signalling its classified status. The decision to classify about 100 of them (0.2 % of the total) came later, and only eight (8) of them were given a retroactive “top secret” designation, one that the State Dept continues to dispute.
Accordingly, Clinton not only was 100% truthful when she stated her belief that the account had been used solely for non-confidential material, but she was justified in that belief. Not only that, but because it was intended to be used only for non-classified material, it was no different from a security standpoint from a .gov account. Who cares if the Russians hacked it?
The marking is the “(c)” after WSJ.
Warren,
Can you please show me a link showing that Russia hacked State’s email server? I missed that.
I’ve been looking into this. The questions have to include why would Putin want to help Trump and what are the connections linking them.
I know that Manafort worked for Yanukovych, the President of Ukraine who was ousted in the coup in Ukraine (Yanukovych was Putin’s man). But the connections go deeper than that.
Here are more stories I have found fleshing out the story.
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-03-30/trump-russia-adviser-carter-page-interview
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/07/2016-trump-putin-russia-gop-platform-214074
http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2016/07/how-putin-weaponized-wikileaks-influence-election-american-president/130163/
Tin-foil hat conspiracies are only tin-foil hat conspiracies when there is no evidence. This is not conspiracy but fact.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump-putin-yes-it-s-really-a-thing
US national insecurity apparatus has two systems one unsecure, but protected for carrying information that does not cause harm if hacked. The secure system has more bells and whistles so you can put information that could damage the US interest into the ether.
Clinton’s servers are more vulnerable than the unclassified US systems.
That said, the Clinton wind machine has no experts to say it was the Russian. If the Russians hacked DNC they would not use it until later, bc the use of knowledge is lesser if the mark knows it is out.
Clinton’s e-mails allegedly contained “information that in enemy hands” would cause severe damage to US interests, to be damaging does not require the data or e mails be marked.
To get to the root of Clinton’s security issues demands a jury trail.
Urban legend,
Clinton is dumb if she did not recognize the “stuff” she was writing or receiving was damaging to the national interests.
If she defends herself saying that “no one marked the e-mails I wrote or received” that is expecting a level of belief in malarkey very rare among rational beings.
I could appeal to authority having handled similar issues, but I think the lack of logic in her defense suffices.
Ms.
Both Trump and Clinton deserve a jury trail.
There is so little sound reason and valid evidence running around deduction must be voted on by a jury of their peers.
@ms 57 sorry I left the link out. the word “link” in “I actually came here to link to an old pay walled background article in the WSJ” should have been a clickable link.
ILSM Kevin Drum asserts that the “top secret” information in the Clinton server e-mails was the Afg. Pak Yemen Somalia drones killing people program. Not the current targets or anything but the existence of the program. The program is classified as covert so any mention of it is considered (at least by the FBI) to be top secret.
According to Drum, anyone who hacked the account would learn the US has a drone program. The fact that this is well known and regularly discussed in private doesn’t mean it isn’t considered top secret by the FBI.
By the same standard, the fact that the USA is aiding Syrian rebels via the CIA is top secret (while the fact that the USA is aiding other Syrian rebels via the DOD isn’t).
The idea of putting Clinton on trial for this is totally crazy. Also if she is is put on trial, to be fair so should be Colin Powell and C. Rice’s aids who used private e-mail for official business (I dismiss the possibility that close examination would find nothing that the FBI considers top secret given that they consider publicly known facts to be top secret secrets).
RW,
You are wasting your time telling Ilsm any facts. He has made this same claim constant times in here. and ignores all requests to provide any facts.
People would be well advised to just ignore Ilsm.
For those of you that are far, far more educated about hacking, cybersecurity, etc., you really ought to read this, which I included earlier.
http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2016/07/how-putin-weaponized-wikileaks-influence-election-american-president/130163/
Trump, in yet another demonstration of his ignorance – political and otherwise — has been trolling for Bernie supporters for a long time. It is certainly not a coincidence that on the day the DNC leaks were dumped he responded immediately to the effect that Bernie supporters were betrayed by Hillary, nor is it a coincidence that Manafort on some talk show over the weekend was making the same point. They are trolling and Putin is helping them.
The links between Trump, Putin and his Russian oligarchs, which have been primarily financial but which also involve a shared predilection to authoritarianism, are becoming much more well-known and coming from a wide range of sources. Hard evidence exists that Russians hacked the DNC (see the link above). They released the emails right before the Convention to sow discord between Bernie and HRC; there would be no reason to release them later because the alliance between Bernie and HRC would already have been cemented during the Convention – an alliance, by the way, that is already cemented.
Vladimir Putin is actively interfering on behalf of Trump and is playing Trump, this monumental dunce, like a cheap violin. Vladimir is actively seeking to prevent HRC’s election and, in the process, subverting both our sovereignty and our democratic process. Putin has said that the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century was the demise of the USSR. His primary drive is to reestablish Russia as the superpower it once was. He has been funding the ascendant far-right parties in Europe and his diplomats are working overtime to unsettle and divide both the EU and NATO.
If anyone wants to know more about Putin and the state he has created, I suggest they read Annie Applebaum or Masha Gessen in the NYRB. Or they can start here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/02/how-the-1980s-explains-vladimir-putin/273135/
Russian hackers not only stole internal emails relating to Sanders, they also exfiltrated research files on Trump.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/14/russian-dnc-hack-donald-trump-files-us-election
RW,
Drum has a clearance? Drum worked in either State, DoD or DoE on classified stuff? I doubt he would be saying these thing.
The presumption (rather wild) that an operating plan (OPSEC) document is stale does not make the elements of the plan less dangerous if released. Operations security is a component, things in the stale data are dangerous.
Drum knows what was in the e mails. Drum does not know the rules, presumption is not enough!
There are bits of information that make things classified. Specific rules that themselves are classified.
Most stuff has a date when it can be reviewed for declass. Usually decades later.
Those rules are specific to the document and the data.
I
,
http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2016/07/how-putin-weaponized-wikileaks-influence-election-american-president/130163/
The article is a marketing piece for cybersecurity firms.
Read any defense blogger and most are selling!
The evidence…..
be afraid very afraid and hire cybertrolls.cm!
“The recent hack of the Democratic National Committee’s computers has left U.S. officials scrambling over how to respond to a cyberattack that may have crossed a new line in the secretive world of state-sponsored spying and computer warfare.
One government official equated the hack against one of America’s main political parties to an assault on the nation’s “critical infrastructure,” such as the electrical grid…
But the specter of Russia’s involvement has begun to loom larger and is far more concerning to former FBI officials, diplomats and cybersecurity experts who expressed concerns that Russia could be seeking to tip the electoral scales in favor of Clinton’s Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump.”
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-pol-fbi-hack-dnc-russia-20160725-snap-story.html
To dismiss the theft as merely a “marketing ploy” is, at the very least, an unsophisticated and intellectually dishonest response.
Efc (July 25, 2016 12:57 am) anticipated my remarks. Julian Assange of Wikileaks has virtually promised future email releases. Timing is everything, and after Hillary’s nomination she’ll be most vulnerable.
So going out on a slight limb here, Hillary is looking at a world of hurt down the road. There has been plenty of time to sift out the worst messages, and IF there are any they’ll very probably be released. Hillary’s low trust ratings will be hammered even more.
Zachary,
What you say is true — right up until the point when US Intelligence and the White House announce formally that the Russians hacked the DNC, but not the RNC. All attention will shift on a dime to the relation between Putin and Trump, and further demands will be made that Trump release his tax returns to prove there is no connection. George Will suggested as much yesterday. The entire foreign policy establishment will come out in force. This is Watergate, but worse. Nixon ordered the break-in at the DNC. It’s a whole other matter when an adversarial foreign power does it in order to defeat HRC and see Trump is elected. This will be a shit storm.