The Blabbermouth angle (2)

It is among our national misfortunes that the ineffable Debbie Wasserman Schultz remains in the middle of the drama implicit in the great Russian hack attack of 2016. She served as Barack Obama’s appointed leader of the Democratic National Committee at the time. Her cooperation with federal authorities in that capacity appears to have been something less than wholehearted. The mainstream media have nevertheless swallowed whole the intelligence community report on Russian interference.

Moreover, as a faithful reader reminds me, we have heard nothing concerning Madam Wasserman Schultz’s congressional laptop computer for a long time. Placed or misplaced by a rogue aide and found by the Capitol Police, the laptop would have opened many doors protecting prized information of all kinds for the shady friends of DWS. Where is the laptop? Cherchez l’ordinateur portable.

After I wrote here yesterday about Madam Wasserman Schultz in the context of the alleged hacking of the DNC servers by the friends of Vladimir Putin, a Canadian Power Line reader directed my attention to the work of Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit. I don’t have the expertise necessary to evaluate McIntyre’s work, but our reader vouched for McIntyre as an extraordinary fellow Canadian: “He is a statistics genius who spent his life in mining, reviewing data. Since retiring he has applied himself to the ‘science’ behind anthropogenic global warming. He is detested by the usual climate con artists…because he has frequently exposed their fake science…After climategate he spent a long time researching that data leak.”

Then he came to the work of CrowdStrike, the consultant retained by the DNC to examine their servers and respond to the hack (I have slightly altered the formatting and corrected a typo or two in the quotes) and on whose “forensics” the FBI et al. appear to have relied for that part of their analysis:

To summarize McIntyre’s findings, there are two very odd things here:

1. CrowdStrike was called in and supposedly installed its anti-breach software on May 6, 2016. However, much of the leaked emails were extracted from the DNC servers AFTER that date. Indeed, the leaked emails have clearly been “curated” based on his analysis of the dates in the metadata (e.g., there are few emails dated prior to April 19, when the hack is meant to have started, but hackers would have taken everything they could extract once they got it in).

Steve writes: “There were no fewer than 14409 emails in the Wikileaks archive dating after Crowdstrike’s installation of its security software. In fact, more emails were hacked after Crowdstrike’s discovery [of the breach] on May 6 than before. Whatever actions were taken by CrowdStrike on May 6, they did nothing to stem the exfiltration of emails from the DNC”; and

2. “The DHS-FBI intel assessment of the DNC hack [linked above] concluded with ‘high confidence’ that Guccifer 2 was a Russian operation, but provided (literally) no evidence in support of their attribution. Ever since Guccifer 2’s surprise appearance on June 15, 2016 (one day after CrowdStrike’s announcement of the DNC hack by ‘Russia’), there has been a widespread consensus that Guccifer 2 was a Russian deception operation, with only a few skeptics (e.g., Jeffrey Carr questioning evidence but not necessarily conclusion, Adam Carter challenging attribution). Perhaps the most prevalent argument in attribution has been the presence of ‘Russian’ metadata in documents included in Guccifer 2’s original post – the theory being that the ‘Russian’ metadata was left by mistake. I’ve looked at lots of metadata both in connection with Climategate and more recently in connection with the DNC hack, and, in my opinion, the chances of this metadata being left by mistake is zero. Precisely what it means is a big puzzle though.”

Our reader concludes: “Mysterier and mysterier…”

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