An interesting twist in the DNC-Guccifer hacking story

On Jeremy Scahill's current podcast, ex-CIA officer Ray McGovern tells Jeremy that Bill Binney, ex-NSA intelligence officer, computer programmer and whistle-blower, has researched the DNC hack and determined it was an inside job. The reason he gives is that the download time to get the files was too short to have been done outside the system. The time it took to download the emails suggests it was done from the internal system onto a thumb drive. IF that's true, who would have done that and then turned the file over to the Russian Guccifer? Or is that how it happened?

Lots of questions, lots of answers. Are any of them right?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Russian's Did(n't Do) It - Part 2

The DNC and Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks came from a “disgusted” whistleblower, not from hackers, the whistleblower site’s associate Craig Murray said, as US intelligence veterans question Washington’s version, which blames a Russian cyberattack.

“Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,” Murray, a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan who is now a close associate of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, told The Daily Mail in an interview published on Wednesday.

“The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks,” he said.

The source, identified by Murray as an American, was motivated by “disgust at the corruption of the Clinton Foundation and the tilting of the primary election playing field against Bernie Sanders,” he said.

Murray went on to explain that the documents were passed to him during a meeting in a wooded area near American University in Washington, DC. The individual he met with was an intermediary, not the person who originally obtained the information.

[...]

“Regardless of whether the Russians hacked into the DNC, the documents WikiLeaks published did not come from that.”

[...]

Murray’s statements are also consistent with those of WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, who told Australian journalist John Pilger in November that “the Clinton camp has been able to project a neo-McCarthyist hysteria that Russia is responsible for everything.”

“Hillary Clinton has stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 US intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That’s false – we can say that the Russian government is not the source,” Assange said at the time.

  RT

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Russians Did(n't Do) It

“[The CIA] haven’t come out with the evidence to show the tracing of the data from the DNC server to, for example the Russians, or anybody else, or going from them to WikiLeaks, which is a high priority target for NSA, in terms of network monitoring,” [former National Security Agency technical director and NSA whistleblower William] Binney told RT.

  RT

Here are some excerpts from Binney's posted memorandum at Consortium News:

A New York Times report on Monday alluding to “overwhelming circumstantial evidence” leading the CIA to believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin “deployed computer hackers with the goal of tipping the election to Donald J. Trump” is, sadly, evidence-free. This is no surprise, because harder evidence of a technical nature points to an inside leak, not hacking – by Russians or anyone else.

[...]

Reading our short memo could save the Senate from endemic partisanship, expense and unnecessary delay.

  Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity @ Consortium News

Yes, but then how could they justify their likely conclusions that Russia hacked our election and keep the public's mind full of Russia as evil enemy?

All signs point to leaking, not hacking. If hacking were involved, the National Security Agency would know it – and know both sender and recipient.

In short, since leaking requires physically removing data – on a thumb drive, for example – the only way such data can be copied and removed, with no electronic trace of what has left the server, is via a physical storage device.

[...]

Thanks largely to the material released by Edward Snowden, we can provide a full picture of NSA’s extensive domestic data-collection network.

[...]

[A]ny data that is passed from the servers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) or of Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC) – or any other server in the U.S. – is collected by the NSA.

[...]

When email packets leave the U.S., the other “Five Eyes” countries (the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) and the seven or eight additional countries participating with the U.S. in bulk-collection of everything on the planet would also have a record of where those email packets went after leaving the U.S.

[...]

The bottom line is that the NSA would know where and how any “hacked” emails from the DNC, HRC or any other servers were routed through the network. This process can sometimes require a closer look into the routing to sort out intermediate clients, but in the end sender and recipient can be traced across the network.

[...]

The various ways in which usually anonymous spokespeople for U.S. intelligence agencies are equivocating – saying things like “our best guess” or “our opinion” or “our estimate” etc. – shows that the emails alleged to have been “hacked” cannot be traced across the network.

[...]

The evidence that should be there is absent; otherwise, it would surely be brought forward, since this could be done without any danger to sources and methods.

[...]

Given NSA’s extensive trace capability, we conclude that DNC and HRC servers alleged to have been hacked were, in fact, not hacked.

[...]

Thus, we conclude that the emails were leaked by an insider – as was the case with Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning.

Now that's a different  - and bold - take on the situation.  And it makes perfect sense.

[Binney] citied a previous occasion when the NSA showed the trace route of a hack from China back to a specific building in China.

“If you did it then, why are not going to do it now when this is a very serious allegation?” Binney said.

[...]

“When you send something across the network you are sending it into NSA land, and they own everything,” Binney said. “They have tens of thousands of embedded implants in terms of hardware and software around switches of the world, and they got trace route programs by the hundreds all around the switches, and they are collecting at different points throughout the network in the entire world, redundant collection. So, there is no excuse for them not to have both the content and the trace route, anything going across the network.”

[...]

“[A] new Cold War” [means] trillions of dollars going into the coffers of [people wanting to sustain a large military budget], they would certainly be advocates for this thing. There is a lot of vested interest to keep this kind of thing going,” Binney added.

[...]

“If the CIA is alleging a different story, they need to produce the evidence like they did on the Chinese hack,” Binney said. “There is no reason to withhold this kind of information, especially if they can prove it and so far as I can see they won’t even brief the House Intelligence Committee on the evidence they are using to make this statement. That tells me that what they are saying is a pack of crap.”

  RT

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

October 31 Anniversary: American Hero Bill Binney Resigns

Happy Anniversary William Binney

Today marks the anniversary of whistleblower William Binney's resignation from the NSA.  If you need refreshing, read this Frontline interview from December 2013.

A 36-year NSA veteran, William Binney resigned from the agency and became a whistleblower after discovering that elements of a data-monitoring program he had helped develop -- nicknamed ThinThread -- were being used to spy on Americans.

  Frontline

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Irony, Thy Name Is US Government

An employee of Germany's intelligence agency has been arrested on suspicion of spying for the US, reports say.

The man is said to have been trying to gather details about a German parliamentary committee that is investigating claims of US espionage.

[...]

German media say the man arrested this week is a 31-year-old employee of the federal intelligence agency, known as the BND.

[...]

US officials at the embassy in Berlin have declined to comment on the latest development.

  BBC

Two American whistleblowers, Thomas Drake and William Binney, gave testimony in Germany.



...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Program

Part I of a Frontline special report is available here. It's a nice recap of the beginnings of the collect it all program of the NSA, the attempts of people in the past to have it reined in and/or stopped, repercussions for them, and a lead in to the Snowden leaks. Not just reminders of how we got here, and where we are, but revelations of things I had not known about the people involved in trying to get the information out.

You’ve seen the history of how the Bush administration launched an unprecedented surveillance campaign after 9/11 at the National Security Agency, and how Obama later expanded what had become known as “The Program.”

Now find out how the NSA got all that data.

On May 20, FRONTLINE continues the story of mass surveillance in America in part two of United States of Secrets, an investigation into the secret relationship between Silicon Valley and the National Security Agency.

  PBS

Trailer for part 2.


Petition re government attempt to force reporter James Risen to reveal his sources:

Why We Don't Need NSA Bulk Data Collection

[T]he lack-of-enough-intelligence argument is dead wrong. Feinstein’s next dubious premise – that bulk collection is needed to prevent another 9/11 – is unproven and highly unlikely (not to mention its implications for the privacy protections of the Fourth Amendment).

[...]

NSA itself had enough information to prevent 9/11, but chose to sit on it rather than share it with the FBI or CIA. We know; we were there. We were witness to the many bureaucratic indignities that made NSA at least as culpable for pre-9/11 failures as are other U.S. intelligence agencies.

[...]

It is not difficult to connect NSA’s collect-everything approach with one principal finding of the Review Group you appointed to look into NSA programs; namely, that exactly zero terrorist plots have been prevented by NSA’s bulk trawling for telephone call records.

[...]

What passes for a process for collection and analysis at NSA appears to be highly inefficient and ineffective. How else does one explain missing the bombers of Boston, Times Square, and the underwear bomber over Detroit?

[...]

The flood of revelations now in the public domain frees us to address facts and events formerly hidden behind a convenient, cover-up classification regime. We feel bound by the solemn oath we took to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, to make truths known to you that you may find as unconscionable as we do.

  Consortium News

That’s highly doubtful.

These are excerpts from a letter to the President from former NSA professionals William Binney, Thomas Drake, Edward Loomis, and Kirk Wiebe. Of course, they are also whistle blowers who have been prosecuted by the Obama administration, so I’m pretty sure the President has no interest in what they have to say.

Mr. President, we have given up hope that your palace guard will let us in. Our chances of reaching you seem far better via this Memorandum, the 28th of its kind issued since early 2003, prepared at the behest of the Steering Group of our Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). If this gets past your in-box protectors, we encourage you to pay more heed to it than your predecessor did to VIPS’ warnings in the months before the attack on Iraq.

I think they’re giving him too much credit. If he doesn’t know what they’re trying to tell him, he’s the only person in the country. Or maybe they’re just pretending that they think he doesn’t know.

Let us be clear. Candor dictates that we state up front that the more skeptical among us suspect that you are not as isolated from the truth about NSA activities as it might seem. That notwithstanding, for purposes of this Memorandum we choose to adopt a broader view and assume you would welcome help from former insiders who chose to leave rather than become complicit in NSA abuses.

The letter further describes the, by now, well publicized case of the program William Binney, et al., developed while in the NSA for legal collection of data on specific targets that was tossed aside in favor of privately contracted programs. In part:

THINTHREAD was developed precisely to unite data associated with terrorists/criminals from all databases. An analyst was able to do one simple query on participants on a targeted activity and get access to all related content – be it from computer, phone, or pager.

[...]

[S]ince THINTHREAD was developed in-house at NSA, it cost about $3 million to build and to make operational at three sites. Members of Congress, however, had political incentive (the imperative to appear to be doing something against terrorism) and financial interest (no need to spell that out) in throwing billions at NSA.

[...]

In 2000, as THINTHREAD was beginning to show promise, the head of the NSA Transformation Office (NTO) asked the creators of THINTHREAD (Loomis, Binney, and Wiebe) what they could do with $1.2 billion. We told him that, with that amount of funding, we could upgrade every one of our field installations that had access to foreign Internet sources, as well as upgrade collection equipment to access greater bandwidths available on fiber. But for the equipment, maintenance, and other costs for THINTHREAD, we only needed about $300 million.

Director Hayden reacted swiftly on learning of this. He removed the NTO chief, replacing him with a senior vice president of Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), which became one of the leading contractors for a replacement project called TRAILBLAZER. TRAILBLAZER was originally budgeted for $3.8 billion, but after burning away most of that money, it had to be jettisoned in 2006.

No functioning components had been produced, much less delivered; Gen. Hayden had been forced to confess to the Senate Intelligence Committee that TRAILBLAZER was vastly over budget as well as well behind schedule. And our (Binney/Loomis/Wiebe) complaint to the Department of Defense Inspector General had generated a highly critical report on TRAILBLAZER, which was also a factor in its termination. SAIC, though, continued to serve as one of NSA’s major prime development contractors and remains so to this day.

[...]

This particularly unconscionable (Hayden-SAIC-Congress) corruption is a case study in how the drive for big money and the power can squander big taxpayer bucks, chip away at our constitutional protections – and, more important, as we shall explain below – play a crucial role in the worst intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor – 9/11.

[...]

You will hear the usual denials. With all due respect, we think caution is indicated in thinking about taking them at face value. We would encourage you to get ahead of the curve this time.

This is not the president to do that. I don’t foresee a president in the next term who would do that, either. Our country is on the road to Hell and picking up speed.

You can read the rest of the letter/report yourself, which includes the fact that the NSA had pre-9/11 intelligence on the planners of the attack and “a critical long-term analytic report unraveling the entire heart of al-Qaeda and associated movements,” all of which was not shared outside the NSA; that whistleblower accounts to the Joint Congressional Inquiry on 9/11 and the Defense Department Inspector General were ignored; and why it is a lie when Washington insiders claim that had the NSA total data collection program been in effect before 9/11 it might have prevented the attacks on that day.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

William Binney Resignation Day

When I see little spooks going door to door this evening, I will think of it as National William Binney Resignation Day - a hallowed eve indeed.  On October 31, 2001, Binney resigned his position at the NSA and blew the whistle, for which he was soundly hauled through the mud, smearing his name and ruining his business.

  Business Insider

Binney disclosed in a sworn affidavit for Jewel v. NSA that the [NSA] was "purposefully violating the Constitution".

[...]

After he left the NSA in 2001, Binney was one of several people investigated as part of an inquiry into the 2005 New York Times exposé on the agency’s warrantless eavesdropping program. Binney was cleared of wrongdoing after three interviews with FBI agents beginning in March 2007, but one morning in July 2007, a dozen agents armed with rifles appeared at his house, one of whom entered the bathroom and pointed his gun at Binney, still towelling off from a shower. In that raid, the FBI confiscated a desktop computer, disks, and personal and business records. The NSA revoked his security clearance, forcing him to close a business he ran with former colleagues at a loss of a reported $300,000 in annual income.

  Wikipedia

Thanks to NSA whistleblower/leaker Edward Snowden, documents detailing the top-secret surveillance program [Stellar Wind] have now been published [...].

And they corroborate what Binney has said [...] .

  Business Insider

Kill the Messenger

The company that cleared CIA employee-turned whistleblower Edward Snowden in a security review is being probed by a federal grand jury. There are suspicions the firm may have blundered Snowden’s background check by cutting corners.

  RT

SOMEbody has to pay. Somebody other than the people actually committing crimes.

If discrepancies are found in the investigation that they carried out on Edward Snowden, it could potentially amount to a violation of the False Claims Act, which punishes persons and companies that defraud US government programs.

I don’t see the irony in that, do you?

And it makes me wonder, who besides whistleblowers William Binney and Thomas Drake faced harassment and prosecution for having foisted the Trailblazer fiasco on the NSA? 

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

William Binney and the Program

William Binney — one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in National Security Agency (NSA) history — worked for America's premier covert intelligence gathering organization for 32 years before resigning in late 2001 because he "could not stay after the NSA began purposefully violating the Constitution."

Binney claims that the NSA took one of the programs he built, known as ThinThread, and started using the program and members of his team to spy on virtually every U.S. citizen under the code-name Stellar Wind.

[...]

On July 2 Binney, along with two other former NSA employees, agreed to provide evidence in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit (Jewel vs. NSA) that alleges the U.S. government operates an illegal mass surveillance program.

Given the latest leaks, that testimony looks rock solid.

  Business Insider

Here’s a post of mine from just about one year ago:

[NSA whistleblower William] Binney, who resigned from the NSA in 2001 over its domestic surveillance program, had just delivered a keynote speech in which he revealed what [journalist Geoff] Shively called “evidence which we have not seen until this point.”

“They’re pulling together all the data about virtually every U.S. citizen in the country … and assembling that information,” Binney explained. “So government is accumulating that kind of information about every individual person and it’s a very dangerous process.” He estimated that something like 1.6 billion logs have been processed since 2001.
  Raw Story

And here’s another one from a month later that links a video of Binney talking about the program. Worth another look in light of the Snowden revelations. Both he and the documentary filmmaker were repeatedly harassed and intimidated by federal agents.

Why Didn't Ed Snowden Go Through "Proper" Channels?

Like a "good" American. Let these guys tell you.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

And, just for the YWA record, there have been media/government claims that Snowden is a braggart and a liar; that he couldn’t do the things he said he could do. William Binney would like you to know otherwise:

Part of his job as the system administrator, he was to maintain the system. Keep the databases running. Keep the communications working. Keep the programs that were interrogating them operating. So that meant he was like a super-user. He could go on the network or go into any file or any system and change it or add to it or whatever, just to make sure — because he would be responsible to get it back up and running if, in fact, it failed.

So that meant he had access to go in and put anything. That's why he said, I think, "I can even target the president or a judge." If he knew their phone numbers or attributes, he could insert them into the target list which would be distributed worldwide. And then it would be collected, yeah, that's right. As a super-user, he could do that.

  USA Today

Where We're Going

William Binney talks about Stellar Wind.

Click the picture for the video at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-security-agencys-domestic-spying-program.html?_r=1&ref=opinion.

A little bit tangential:  Anyone considering or currently working in a government/military agency, who is the type of person who would have a problem with the government using the fruits of your labor against your fellow citizens (or you, for that matter), would probably be well advised to seek other employment.

Binney tells the audience that he created this program for the US military/government to collect data that would help us against our enemies, and "they took those programs and they turned them on you."  He says he's sorry.  He didn't intend that. 

I believe him.  And now he's paying a pretty high price in an unexpected turn of events for him.  With any amount of forethought, however, it could have been - should have been - expected.  Ask any number of people who've tried to keep wild animals as "pets".   There's always that possible day in the future where it turns on you.  It's the nature of the beast.  It's not your friend.   

While I give the man kudos for coming out and reporting what's going on, I will never quite be able to excuse people who work for the government developing tools that can be used to suppress and annihilate because, wake up, that's what a government that requires those tools does with them.  And there is no reason to believe that it won't eventually use those tools against its own citizens (as if it's not bad enough it uses them against people in other countries).  In fact, there's every reason to believe that it will.  It's one thing to be a scientist or inventor working on some theoretical or even practical problem or idea and have the government take your work and twist it to military or tyrannical purposes, and yet another to work for an agency that already has those purposes.

It's not that I don't understand American citizens' desire to protect and further their own country's interests (above other countries'); it's that I don't understand how after centuries and centuries of war and devastation and oppression, they don't one day look up from their handywork and say, "Oh.  I see.  I'm just perpetuating evil."

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

To those who understand state surveillance as an abstraction, I will try to describe a little about how it has affected me. The United States apparently placed me on a “watch-list” in 2006 after I completed a film about the Iraq war. I have been detained at the border more than 40 times. Once, in 2011, when I was stopped at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and asserted my First Amendment right not to answer questions about my work, the border agent replied, “If you don’t answer our questions, we’ll find our answers on your electronics.”’ As a filmmaker and journalist entrusted to protect the people who share information with me, it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to work in the United States. Although I take every effort to secure my material, I know the N.S.A. has technical abilities that are nearly impossible to defend against if you are targeted.

The 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which oversees the N.S.A. activities, are up for renewal in December. Two members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, both Democrats, are trying to revise the amendments to insure greater privacy protections. They have been warning about “secret interpretations” of laws and backdoor “loopholes” that allow the government to collect our private communications. Thirteen senators have signed a letter expressing concern about a “loophole” in the law that permits the collection of United States data. The A.C.L.U. and other groups have also challenged the constitutionality of the law, and the Supreme Court will hear arguments in that case on Oct. 29.

Laura Poitras

If you're not doing anything wrong, you've got nothing to hide. Right? This is another disconnect I see with right wing politics. People claiming to be Conservatives say they want smaller government - they want government out of their personal affairs. But they want government in your reproductive affairs. And they're okay with having government collect all your personal information and search you every time you board a plane, because if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide. I understand how they can rationalize having government involved in your reproductive affairs - because that's YOU, not them. But the other constitutes government infringement on THEIR privacy as well. And both constitute government empowerment over citizens' rights, which they claim not to want. I have no other response to them than, "Huh? Are you dishonest or just deluded?"

Big Brother

[NSA whistleblower William] Binney, who resigned from the NSA in 2001 over its domestic surveillance program, had just delivered a keynote speech in which he revealed what [journalist Geoff] Shively called “evidence which we have not seen until this point.”

“They’re pulling together all the data about virtually every U.S. citizen in the country … and assembling that information,” Binney explained. “So government is accumulating that kind of information about every individual person and it’s a very dangerous process.” He estimated that something like 1.6 billion logs have been processed since 2001.
  Raw Story

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

"The Land of the Free"

Whether a country is actually free is determined not by how well-rewarded its convention-affirming media elites are and how ignored its passive citizens are but by how it treats its dissidents, those posing authentic challenges to what the government does. The stories of [...] three Democracy Now guests — and so many others — provide that answer loudly and clearly.

[...]

We love to tell ourselves that there are robust political freedoms and a thriving free political press in the U.S. because you’re allowed to have an MSNBC show or blog in order to proclaim every day how awesome and magnanimous the President of the United States is and how terrible his GOP political adversaries are — how brave, cutting and edgy! — or to go on Fox News and do the opposite. But people who are engaged in actual dissent, outside the tiny and narrow permissible boundaries of pom-pom waving for one of the two political parties — those who are focused on the truly significant acts which the government and its owners are doing in secret — are subjected to [...] intimidation, threats, surveillance, and [a] climate of fear .

  Salon/Greenwald

Not to mention, arrests and trials for whistleblowers. *

Read Glenn Greenwald's entire post (Surveillance State evils) for summaries of the Democracy Now! trio:

William Binney: he worked at the NSA for almost 40 years, and resigned in October, 2001, in protest of the NSA’s turn to domestic spying. Binney immediately went to the House Intelligence Committee to warn them of the illegal spying the NSA was doing, and that resulted in nothing. In July, 2007 — while then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was testifying before the Senate about Bush’s warrantless NSA spying program — Binney’s home was invaded by a dozen FBI agents, who pointed guns at him, in an obvious effort to intimidate him out of telling the Senate the falsehoods and omissions in Gonzales’ testimony about NSA domestic spying (another NSA whistleblower, Thomas Drake, had his home searched several months later, and was subsequently prosecuted by the Obama DOJ — unsuccessfully — for his whistleblowing).

Jacob Appelbaum: an Internet security expert and hacker, he is currently at the University of Washington and engaged in some of the world’s most important work in the fight for Internet freedom. He’s a key member of the Tor Project, which is devoted to enabling people around the world to use the Internet with complete anonymity: so as to thwart government surveillance and to prevent nation-based Internet censorship.[...] For the last two years, Appelbaum has been repeatedly detained and harassed at American airports upon his return to the country, including having his laptops and cellphone seized — all without a search warrant, of course — and never returned. The U.S. Government has issued secret orders to Internet providers demanding they provide information about his email communications and social networking activities. He’s never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime.

Laura Poitras: she is the filmmaker about whom I wrote two weeks ago. After producing an Oscar-nominated film on the American occupation of Iraq, followed by a documentary about U.S. treatment of Islamic radicals in Yemen, she has been detained, searched, and interrogated every time she has returned to the U.S. She, too, has had her laptop and cell phone seized without a search warrant, and her reporters’ notes repeatedly copied. This harassment has intensified as she works on her latest film about America’s Surveillance State and the war on whistleblowers, which includes — among other things — interviews with NSA whistleblowers such as Binney and Drake.

The Democracy Now! video episode is also posted at the end of Greenwald's article.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

* bears reposting:.