Brazile breaks it down (2)

One of my favorite moments in this campaign season came in Megyn Kelly’s interview of DNC chair Donna Brazile following the third presidential debate last week. Asking Brazile about an embarrassing email from her that turned up in the WikiLeaks/Podesta email dump, Kelly elicited this quotable quote: “As a Christian woman, I understand persecution. I will not sit here and be persecuted, because your information is totally false….You’re like a thief that wanna bring into the night the things that you found that were in his [?] gutter….I am not going to try to validate falsified information.”

Deep breath. Brazile continued: “I have my documents. I have my files. Thank God I have not had my personal e-mails ripped off from me and stolen and given to some criminals to come back altered. I have my records and files. And as I said repeatedly, CNN, I never received anything.” Brazile implied that that the email in question had been “doctored.” I posted the video of the entire segment in “Brazile breaks it down.”

However, as FOX News reports, the tech blog Errata Security quickly found the email in question could be verified using an everyday verification program:

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is a system employed by many email servers, including HillaryClinton.com, to verify emails to recipients and avoid spam filters. The system sends a DKIM “key” to the receiver to verify the sender and confirm the email hasn’t been tampered with.

Consequently, bloggers ran the DKIM keys included in this and other emails through verification software, which in turn validated the Palmieri email as both real and undoctored. The Daily Caller also ran a similar test and got the same result.

In a blog post for Errata Security, cybersecurity expert Robert Graham presented his results, and showed that if the emails had been altered in any way, the software would have declared the email unverified.

“It took less than five minutes,” Graham told FoxNews.com, noting that such software is common and widely available. “It took me longer to document what I had found.”

But could WikiLeaks have hacked and altered the DKIM key also?

Graham says this is unlikely, since to do so they would have needed to access the HillaryClinton.com server.

Graham is so confident in his finding that he has posted a $600 BitCoin challenge to anyone who can alter an email and have it still come up as verified when run through DKIM software.

“If somebody tells you this blogpost is invalid, then tell them they can earn about $600 (current value of BTC) proving it. Otherwise, no,” he says.

The FOX News report concludes with this widely applicable observation: “Clinton running mate Tim Kaine has also suggested the WikiLeaks emails could be doctored, but so far neither the campaign nor the DNC has presented evidence to support this claim.”

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