Elizabeth Vos — Guccifer 2.0’s American Fingerprints Reveal An Operation Made In The USA

In his final report in a three-part series, Guccifer 2’s West Coast Fingerprint, the Forensicator discovers evidence that at least one operator behind the Guccifer 2.0 persona worked from the West Coast of the United States.

The Forensicator’s earlier findings stated that Guccifer 2.0’s NGP-VAN files were accessed locally on the East Coast, and in another analysis they suggested that a file published by Guccifer 2.0 was created in the Central time zone of the United States.

False flag operation?

Disobedient Media
Guccifer 2.0’s American Fingerprints Reveal An Operation Made In The USA

Elizabeth Vos

Also

Each day brings more evidence of a plot involving intelligence and law enforcement officials to destroy Donald Trump using the pretext of Russia. This is not a theory. It is a fact. While many of the specific details about who actually made key decisions remains to be revealed, there is abundant evidence in the public record that exposes the skeletal framework of this plot. To put it bluntly, Trump has been a target of a coup d'etat that has relied of information warfare rather than actual arms. But the objective of the plotter was no different from a traditional coup, such as the one that removed Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973. In fact, it appears that the CIA has been involved in both efforts.

Let's go through the evidence.….

Sic Semper Tyrannis
The Plot to Slaughter Donald Trump
Publius Tacitus

Update

Zero Hedge
London-to-Langley Spy Ring; The Roots Of Obamagate Become Clearer

Tyler durden

William Binney and Ray McGovern — More Holes in Russia-gate Narrative

It is no secret that our July 24 VIPS Memorandum for the President, entitled “Was the ‘Russian Hack’ an Inside Job?,” gave rise to some questioning and controversy – nor was it a surprise that it was met with almost total silence in the mainstream media.

The ongoing U.S. media campaign against Russia has been so effective that otherwise intelligent people have been unable even to entertain the notion that they may have been totally misled by the intelligence community. The last time this happened in 2003, after a year of such propaganda, the U.S. attacked Iraq on fraudulent – not “mistaken” – intelligence....

But is it not already too late for such an investigation? We hope that, at this point, it is crystal clear that the answer is: No, it is not too late. All the data the FBI needs to do a proper job is in NSA databases – including data going across the Internet to the DNC server and then included in their network logs.

If President Trump wants to know the truth, he can order the FBI to do its job and NSA to cooperate. Whether the two and the CIA would obey such orders is an open question, given how heavily invested all three agencies are in their evidence-impoverished narrative about “Russian hacking.”

Let us close with the obvious. All three agencies have been aware all along that NSA has the data. One wonders why it should require a Presidential order for them to delve into that data and come up with conclusions based on fact, as opposed to “assessing.”

Consortium News
More Holes in Russia-gate Narrative

William Binney and Ray McGovern

William Binney (williambinney0802@comcast.net) worked for NSA for 36 years, retiring in 2001 as the technical director of world military and geopolitical analysis and reporting; he created many of the collection systems still used by NSA. Ray McGovern (rrmcgovern@gmail.com) was a CIA analyst for 27 years; from 1981 to 1985 he briefed the President’s Daily Brief one-on-one to President Reagan’s most senior national security officials.

Mike Whitney — The Russian Hacking Story Continues to Unravel

A new report by a retired IT executive at IBM, debunks the claim that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential campaign by hacking Democratic computers and circulating damaging information about Hillary Clinton. The report, which is titled “The Non-Existent Foundation for Russian Hacking Charge“, provides a rigorous examination of the wobbly allegations upon which the hacking theory is based, as well as a point by point rejection of the primary claims which, in the final analysis, fail to pass the smell test. While the report is worth reading in full, our intention is to zero-in on the parts of the text that disprove the claims that Russia meddled in US elections or hacked the servers at the DNC....

Counterpunch
The Russian Hacking Story Continues to Unravel

Mike Whitney

Note: Skip Folden is a Private Intelligence analyst and a retired IBM Program Manager for Information Technology. His report has been submitted to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, the Office of Special Council (Robert Mueller), and the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein. The report was released on September 13, 2017 

Read the whole report here: “Non-Existent Foundation for Russian Hacking Charge“, Skip Folden, Word Press.

Publius Tacitus — The So-called Russian Hack of the DNC Does Not Make Sense

Notwithstanding the conventional wisdom that Russia hacked into the DNC computers, downloaded emails and a passed the stolen missives to Julian Assange's crew at Wikileaks, a careful examination of the timeline of events from 2016 shows that this story is simply not plausible.

Let me take you through the known facts:

Sic Semper Tyrannis
The So-called Russian Hack of the DNC Does Not Make Sense

Publius Tacitus

Intel Today Seymour Hersh: “Russia Election Hack is a CIA Hoax” [UPDATE — CIA Baer and FBI Marquise]

Stranger than fiction.

Intel Today
Seymour Hersh: “Russia Election Hack is a CIA Hoax” [UPDATE — CIA Baer and FBI Marquise]

Joe Lauria — A New Twist in Seth Rich Murder Case

Best summary of the story to date, that I am aware of anyway.

More questions than answers and a lot hangs on it.

Consortium News
A New Twist in Seth Rich Murder Case

Joe Lauria

Zero Hedge — "Guccifer 2.0" Chat With Nude Model Sparks New Conspiracy Theories About Seth Rich Murder

Right out of a spy novel. I can't wait for the movie.

Zero Hedge
"Guccifer 2.0" Chat With Nude Model Sparks New Conspiracy Theories About Seth Rich Murder
Tyler Durden

Miami Herald — Were the hackers who broke into the DNC’s email really Russian?

Is the narrative breaking down owing to lack of evidence?

Miami Herald
Were the hackers who broke into the DNC’s email really Russian?
Glenn Garvin

Voice of America — Cyber Firm Rewrites Part of Disputed Russian Hacking Report

Voice of America

Cyber Firm Rewrites Part of Disputed Russian Hacking Report

Oleksiy Kuzmenko and Pete Cobus – WASHINGTON, March 25, 2017

U.S. #cybersecurity firm #CrowdStrike has revised and retracted statements it used to buttress claims of #Russian #hacking during last year’s American presidential election campaign. The shift followed a VOA report that the company misrepresented data published by an influential British think tank.

In December, CrowdStrike said it found evidence that Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery app, contributing to heavy losses of howitzers in Ukraine’s war with pro-Russian separatists.

VOA reported Tuesday that the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), which publishes an annual reference estimating the strength of world armed forces, disavowed the CrowdStrike report and said it had never been contacted by the company.

Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense also has stated that the combat losses and hacking never happened.

CrowdStrike was first to link hacks of Democratic Party computers to Russian actors last year, but some cybersecurity experts have questioned its evidence. The company has come under fire from some Republicans who say charges of Kremlin meddling in the election are overblown.

After CrowdStrike released its Ukraine report, company co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch claimed it provided added evidence of Russian election interference. In both hacks, he said, the company found malware used by “Fancy Bear,” a group with ties to Russian intelligence agencies.

CrowdStrike’s claims of heavy Ukrainian artillery losses were widely circulated in U.S. media.

On Thursday, CrowdStrike walked back key parts of its Ukraine report.

The company removed language that said Ukraine’s artillery lost 80 percent of the Soviet-era D-30 howitzers, which used aiming software that purportedly was hacked. Instead, the revised report cites figures of 15 to 20 percent losses in combat operations, attributing the figures to IISS.

The original CrowdStrike report was dated Dec. 22, 2016, and the updated report was dated March 23, 2017.

The company also removed language saying Ukraine’s howitzers suffered “the highest percentage of loss of any … artillery pieces in Ukraine’s arsenal.”

Finally, CrowdStrike deleted a statement saying “deployment of this malware-infected application may have contributed to the high-loss nature of this platform” – meaning the howitzers – and excised a link sourcing its IISS data to a blogger in Russia-occupied Crimea.

In an email, CrowdStrike spokeswoman Ilina Dmitrova said the new estimates of Ukrainian artillery losses resulted from conversations with Henry Boyd, an IISS research associate for defense and military analysis. She declined to say what prompted the contact.

“This update does not in any way impact the core premise of the report that the FANCY BEAR threat actor implanted malware into a D-30 targeting application developed by a Ukrainian military officer,” Dmitrova wrote.

This is apparently a false claim:

"Crowdstrike, along with FireEye and other cybersecurity companies, have long propagated the claim that Fancy Bear and all of its affiliated monikers (APT28, Sednit, Sofacy, Strontium, Tsar Team, Pawn Storm, etc.) were the exclusive developers and users of X-Agent. We now know that is false.

"ESET was able to obtain the complete source code for X-Agent (aka Xagent) for the Linux OS with a compilation date of July 2015. [5]

"A hacker known as RUH8 aka Sean Townsend with the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance has informed me that he has also obtained the source code for X-Agent Linux. [11]

"If both a security company and a hacker collective have the X-Agent source code, then so do others, and attribution to APT28/Fancy Bear/GRU based solely upon the presumption of “exclusive use” must be thrown out.

"This doesn’t mean that the Russian government may not choose to use it. In fact, Sean Townsend believes that the Russian security services DO use it but he also knows that they aren’t the only ones."

Reached by VOA, the IISS confirmed providing CrowdStrike with new information about combat losses, but declined to comment on CrowdStrike’s hacking assertions.

“We don’t think the current version of the [CrowdStrike] report draws conclusions with regard to our data, other than quoting the clarification we provided to them,” IISS told VOA.

Dmitrova noted that the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community have also concluded that Russia was behind the hacks of the Democratic National Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the email account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager.

Note: The FBI and US Intelligence community has said that it relied on the Crowdstrike report without investigating and that they were also denied access to the DNC server that was allegedly hacked. In addition, there is reason to think that the incident was the result of an insider leak rather than a cyber hack.

The release of embarrassing Democratic emails during last year’s U.S. political campaign, and the subsequent finding by intelligence agencies that the hacks were meant to help then-candidate Donald Trump, have led to investigations by the FBI and intelligence committees in both the House and Senate.

Trump and White House officials have denied colluding with Russians.

See also

Fabius Maximus
Exposing the farcical claims about Russian hacking of the election

Editor

Rush to Judgment— The evidence that the Russians hacked the DNC is collapsing

To begin with, Crowdstrike initially gauged its certainty as to the identity of the hackers with “medium confidence.” However, a later development, announced in late December and touted by the Washington Post, boosted this to “high confidence.” The reason for this newfound near-certainty was their discovery that “Fancy Bear” had also infected an application used by the Ukrainian military to target separatist artillery in the Ukrainian civil war.…

The definitive “evidence” cited by Alperovitch is now effectively debunked: indeed, it was debunked by Carr late last year, but that was ignored in the media’s rush to “prove” the Russians hacked the DNC in order to further Trump’s presidential ambitions. The exposure by the Voice of America of Crowdstrike’s falsification of Ukrainian battlefield losses – the supposedly solid “proof” of attributing the hack to the GRU – is the final nail in Crowdstrike’s coffin. They didn’t bother to verify their analysis of IISS’s data with IISS – they simply took as gospel the allegations of a pro-Russian blogger. They didn’t contact the Ukrainian military, either: instead, their confirmation bias dictated that they shaped the “facts” to fit their predetermined conclusion.

Now why do you suppose that is? Why were they married so early – after a single day – to the conclusion that it was the Russians who were behind the hacking of the DNC?...

Crowdstrike founder Alperovitch is a Nonresident Senior Fellow of the Atlantic Council, and head honcho of its “Cyber Statecraft Initiative” – of which his role in promoting the “Putin did it” scenario is a Exhibit A. James Carden, writing in The Nation, makes the trenchant point that “The connection between Alperovitch and the Atlantic Council has gone largely unremarked upon, but it is relevant given that the Atlantic Council – which is funded in part by the US State Department, NATO, the governments of Latvia and Lithuania, the Ukrainian World Congress, and the Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk – has been among the loudest voices calling for a new Cold War with Russia.” Adam Johnson, writing on the FAIR blog, adds to our knowledge by noting that the Council’s budget is also supplemented by “a consortium of Western corporations (Qualcomm, Coca-Cola, The Blackstone Group), including weapons manufacturers (Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman) and oil companies (ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, BP).”

Johnson also notes that CrowdStrike currently has a $150,000 / year, no-bid contract with the FBI for “systems analysis.”...

AnitWar

Rush to Judgment— The evidence that the Russians hacked the DNC is collapsing
Justin Raimondo

Michael J. Sainato — Cybersecurity Firm That Attributed DNC Hacks to Russia May Have Fabricated Russia Hacking in Ukraine

The cyber security firm outsourced by the Democratic National Committee, CrowdStrike, reportedly misread data, falsely attributing a hacking in Ukraine to the Russians in December 2016.…

The report sheds further skepticism on CrowdStrike’s findings and objectivity in their conclusions, which several cyber security experts and former CIA and NSA officials have cast doubt on, especially given that several media outlets reported in early January 2017 that the DNC never allowed the FBI to examine their servers themselves, rather the FBI relied on forensic data gathered by CrowdStrike.

The investigation methods used to come to the conclusion that the Russian Government led the hacks of the DNC, Clinton Campaign Chair John Podesta, and the DCCC were further called into question by a recent BuzzFeed report by Jason Leopold, who has developed a notable reputation from leading several non-partisan Freedom of Information Act lawsuits for investigative journalism purposes. On March 15 that the Department of Homeland Security released just two heavily redacted pages of unclassified information in response to an FOIA request for definitive evidence of Russian election interference allegations. Leopold wrote, “what the agency turned over to us and Ryan Shapiro, a PhD candidate at MIT and a research affiliate at Harvard University, is truly bizarre: a two-page intelligence assessment of the incident, dated Aug. 22, 2016, that contains information DHS culled from the internet. It’s all unclassified — yet DHS covered nearly everything in wide swaths of black ink. Why? Not because it would threaten national security, but because it would reveal the methods DHS uses to gather intelligence, methods that may amount to little more than using Google.”

In lieu of substantive evidence provided to the public that the alleged hacks which led to Wikileaks releases of DNC and Clinton Campaign Manager John Podesta’s emails were orchestrated by the Russian Government, CrowdStrike’s bias has been cited as undependable in its own assessment, in addition to its skeptical methods and conclusions. The firm’s CTO and co-founder, Dmitri Alperovitch, is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a think tank with openly anti-Russian sentiments that is funded by Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk, who also happened to donate at least $10 million to the Clinton Foundation.

In 2013, the Atlantic Council awarded Hillary Clinton it’s Distinguished International Leadership Award. In 2014, the Atlantic Council hosted one of several events with former Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who took over after pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in early 2014...

Counterpunch
Cybersecurity Firm That Attributed DNC Hacks to Russia May Have Fabricated Russia Hacking in Ukraine
Michael J. Sainato

Moon of Alabama — Fool Me Once ... - Crowdstrike Claimed Two Cases Of "Russian Hacking" - One Has Been Proven Wrong

The cyber-security company Crowdstrike claimed that the "Russia" hacked the Democratic National Committee. It also claimed that "Russia" hacked artillery units of the Ukrainian army. The second claim has now be found to be completely baseless. That same is probably the case with its claims related to the DNC.

Much of this has already been posted here previously, but b pulls it together. Moreover, it is relevant now owing to the recent testimony of FBI chief James Comey that the agency never actually investigated the alleged DNC "hack" forensically and there is good reason to think that it was actually a leak rather than a hack.

There are some good comments, too.

Internet security is highly important, of course, but without oversight it can lead to government management of the national and global information systems.

In this case Congress seems to be bent on a witch hunt rather than a real investigation.

Moon of Alabama
Fool Me Once ... - Crowdstrike Claimed Two Cases Of "Russian Hacking" - One Has Been Proven Wrong

b

Johnson's Russia List — “How did the intelligence community know that the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee? CrowdStrike told them so. From the March 20 House Intelligence Committee hearing …”

The FBI and NSA admit that they never actually investigated the DNC hack. Excerpt from the hearing transcript.

Johnson's Russia List
“How did the intelligence community know that the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee? CrowdStrike told them so. From the March 20 House Intelligence Committee hearing …”

See also

NEWSLINK: “Notes From the House Select Intelligence Hearing on Russia; In one of the most anticipated congressional hearings in years, James Comey and Mike Rogers took turns saying nothing” – Rolling Stone/Matt Taibbi

NEWSLINK: “Key Democratic Officials Now Warning Base Not to Expect Evidence of Trump/Russia Collusion” – The Intercept/Glenn Greenwald

NEWSLINK: “The paranoid attempts to tie Trump to Russia are distracting US liberals from their real problems” – Quartz: James Carden

George Ellison — Why Crowdstrike's Russian Hacking Story Fell Apart--Say Hello to Fancy Bear

In the wake of the JAR-16-20296 dated December 29, 2016, about hacking and influencing the 2016 election, the need for real evidence is clear. The joint report adds nothing substantial to the October 7th report. It relies on proofs provided by the cyber-security firm Crowdstrike that is clearly not on par with intelligence findings or evidence. At the top of the report is an "as is" statement showing this.

The difference between [Co-Founder and CTO of CrowdStrike Inc.] Dmitri Alperovitch's claims, which are reflected in JAR-1620296, and this article is that enough evidence is provided to warrant an investigation of specific parties for the DNC hacks. The real story involves specific anti-American actors that need to be investigated for real crimes.

Later in this article, you'll meet and know a little more about the real "Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear." The bar for identification set by has never been able to get beyond words like probably, may be, could be, or should be in their attribution.

The article is lengthy because the facts need to be in one place. The bar Dimitri Alperovitch set for identifying the hackers involved is that low. Other than asking America to trust them, how many solid facts has Alperovitch provided to back his claim of Russian involvement?

The December 29th JAR adds a flowchart that shows how a basic phishing hack is performed. It doesn't add anything substantial beyond that. Noticeably, they use both their designation APT 28 and APT 29 as well as the CrowdStrike labels of Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear separately.

This is important because information from outside intelligence agencies has the value of rumor or unsubstantiated information at best according to policy. Usable intelligence needs to be free from partisan politics and verifiable. Intel agencies noted back in the early '90s that every private actor in the information game was radically political....

Reads like a detective story. Longish but gripping. It's an argument that there was likely a criminal conspiracy involved, but not by either the Trump faction or "the Russians."

If you are following this, it is a must-read. Lots of new information and documentation.

OpEdNews
Why Crowdstrike's Russian Hacking Story Fell Apart--Say Hello to Fancy Bear
George Ellison
Crossposted at Washington's Blog

George Ellison lives in Ukraine.

Mark Ames — The Anonymous Blacklist Promoted by the Washington Post Has Apparent Ties to Ukrainian Fascism and CIA Spying

Mark Ames lands another knockout punch, connecting the Trump hearts Putin meme, the "Russian hack," and the PropOrNot site with Ukrainian nationalists sewing disinformation in the US media.

AlterNer
The Anonymous Blacklist Promoted by the Washington Post Has Apparent Ties to Ukrainian Fascism and CIA Spying
Mark Ames, editor at Exiledonline

Yekaterina Sinelschikova — Russian server head: Hacks on U.S. weren’t even worthy of Bond movie

The hackers who broke into U.S. Democratic Party files wrote in broken English and were extremely amateurish, the owner of the Russian company King Servers, from whose servers the attacks originated, told RBTH, whilst denying any involvement in the scandal.

The investigation of the controversial hacking into state voting systems in two U.S. states have led American experts to Biysk, a small industrial town in the south of Siberia (2,300 miles east of Moscow). This is where 26-year-old Vladimir Fomenko, whose company King Servers rents out server space in the United States, the Netherlands and Russia, lives and works.

In June this year, according to the FBI, Russian hackers staged "significant" cyber-attacks from servers rented from King Servers, penetrating the voter registration systems in Arizona and Illinois.

They had earlier broken into the computers of the Democratic National Committee, exposing emails and correspondence whose publication seriously compromised the position of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, as well as Democratic research on Republican candidate Donald Trump.

After the FBI revealed that Russians were highly likely to be behind the attacks, the U.S. media was quick to report the “Russian trace.” And while the Kremlin denied any involvement in the incident, the company from Biysk wondered why no one had contacted it, since everything written in the Western press was connected with it.

The American cybersecurity company ThreatConnect even described Fomenko as the manager of an "information nexus" used by hackers who targeted Germany, Turkey and Ukraine, among other countries, according to an article by The New York Times.

"I really did not cooperate and am not cooperating with Russian or any other special services," Fomenko said in an interview with RBTH. "We were not contacted even by the FBI to obtain data that would allow the criminals to be caught."…

"If we consider the situation from the other side, it is unclear why the FBI and related experts are talking only about our company," said Fomenko.

"After all, the U.S. intelligence report says that the hacking was staged from eight IP addresses, six of them belonging to our company (the criminals used our equipment), and two other companies being not connected with us in any way. One of them is located in the Netherlands, I don’t know about the other. But it's all just about us. What is this? Prejudice?"…

As for the "Russian trace," it turns out to be have been all too obvious, said Fomenko. The hackers left several messages for King Servers' support service written in broken English, though he claimed this “would be very strange for the Russian special services, when applying for assistance to a Russian company.”

Additionally, the e-mail addresses used for registration contain the following name, literally – "Robin Good" (with G, rather than H – typical of Russian transliteration). 

"I don’t think that the security services work so unprofessionally," said Fomenko. "Of course, I can only judge from movies, but even the James Bond movies show Russians as more inventive."

Russia Beyond the Headlines
Russian server head: Hacks on U.S. weren’t even worthy of Bond movie
Yekaterina Sinelschikova

RT — Russian server co. head on DNC hack: ‘No idea’ why FBI still has not contacted us

Blaming Russia because servers are from here is “absurd,” Vladimir Fomenko, owner of the Russian server company implicated in the DNC hack, told RT adding that they are ready to help any special service in investigating the attack.

Fomenko’s web hosting service, King Servers, was identified by American cybersecurity company ThreatConnect as the platform for the attack on emails of the Democratic National Committee. Six out of the eight IP addresses used by the hackers were hosted on King Servers, ThreatConnect claimed in September.

But the 26-year-old from Biysk, in western Siberia, is far from being scared or unwilling to cooperate. In fact, he recently told the New York Times that “If the FBI asks, we are ready to supply the IP addresses, the logs.” However, he says, “Nobody is asking… It’s like nobody wants to sort this out.”

Fomenko tells RT he was as surprised to learn from US media that his company was somehow implicated. He also believes that the only connection to Russia the Americans really have is the servers being from there.

“Thinking that the criminals must likewise also be from Russia is just absurd,” he says. “No one blames Mark Zuckerberg when criminals use Facebook for their own ends? … As soon as we learnt our servers were involved, we disconnected the perpetrators from our equipment. And conducted our own investigation. We have learnt certain things and are ready to share it with special services at their first call.”

Asked why the FBI still has not taken advantage of this opportunity, Fomenko said he had “no idea; you’d better ask them.”…

The King Servers boss says there was absolutely no way the company could have known it was being used for malicious activity, as it can only catch wrongdoing after the fact.

“We are ready to take on a pro-active role in investigating this crime. This is in our own best interest when the company’s reputation is at stake.”

RT

Russian server co. head on DNC hack: ‘No idea’ why FBI still has not contacted us

Zero Hedge — New DNC Chair Says Outrage Over Clinton's Pay-To-Play Is Attempt To "Criminalize Normal Behavior"

Just to clarify Brazile's position, trading "access" to the Secretary of State in return for donations from questionable international characters and misappropriating DNC funds is in no way criminal but revealing such information to the public is. So as long as we're kept in the dark there is no crime. Got it. Thanks.

Good along with the only people to have been prosecuted and sentenced for crimes revealed by whistleblowers have been the whistleblowers. Great government the US has.

Zero Hedge
New DNC Chair Says Outrage Over Clinton's Pay-To-Play Is Attempt To "Criminalize Normal Behavior"
Tyler Durden

James Bamford — Commentary: The world's best cyber army doesn’t belong to Russia

The United States is, by far, the world’s most aggressive nation when it comes to cyberspying and cyberwarfare. The National Security Agency has been eavesdropping on foreign cities, politicians, elections and entire countries since it first turned on its receivers in 1952. Just as other countries, including Russia, attempt to do to the United States. What is new is a country leaking the intercepts back to the public of the target nation through a middleperson.

There is a strange irony in this. Russia, if it is actually involved in the hacking of the computers of the Democratic National Committee, could be attempting to influence a U.S. election by leaking to the American public the falsehoods of its leaders. This is a tactic Washington used against the Soviet Union and other countries during the Cold War. In the 1950s, for example, President Harry S Truman created the Campaign of Truth to reveal to the Russian people the “Big Lies” of their government. Washington had often discovered these lies through eavesdropping and other espionage.

Today, the United States has morphed from a Cold War, and in some cases a hot war, into a cyberwar, with computer coding replacing bullets and bombs. Yet the American public manages to be “shocked, shocked” that a foreign country would attempt to conduct cyberespionage on the United States….

Espionage, of which hacking is a tool, is one aspect of cyber warfare. The second is introducing malware to disrupt information and control systems.

The first known use of cyber warfare aggressively against a perceived adversary was Stuxnet worm into Iranian computers apparently to take down their nuclear program without bombing. Experts believe that only a state-sponsored group would have been able to do this and the main suspects are the US (CIA) and Israel (Mossad), perhaps acting jointly.

Reuters
Commentary: The world's best cyber army doesn’t belong to Russia
James Bamford

Reuters — Clinton says Russia behind DNC hacking, draws line to Trump and NSA head James Clapper says to stop hyperventilating

"We know that Russian intelligence services hacked into the DNC and we know that they arranged for a lot of those emails to be released and we know that Donald Trump has shown a very troubling willingness to back up Putin, to support Putin," Clinton said in an interview with "Fox News Sunday."

Reuters
Clinton says Russia behind DNC hacking, draws line to Trump
Doina Chiacu and Roberta Rampton

The Director of National Intelligence says Washington is still unsure of who might be behind the latest WikiLeaks release of hacked Democratic National Committee emails, while urging that an end be put to the “reactionary mode” blaming it all on Russia.

“We don’t know enough to ascribe motivation regardless of who it might have been,” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said speaking at Aspen’s Security Forum in Colorado, when asked if the media was getting ahead of themselves in fingering the perpetrator of the hack.…

Speaking on Thursday, Clapper said that Americans need to stop blaming Russia for the hack, telling the crowd that the US has been running in “reactionary mode” when it comes to the numerous cyber-attacks the nation is continuously facing.

“I’m somewhat taken aback by the hyperventilation on this,” Clapper said.…

RT
US intel head calls for end to ‘hyperventilation’ over Russia’s alleged role in DNC hack

Spy chief James Clapper said Thursday that U.S. intelligence services are facing a "version of war" with Russia — but it's too soon to blame the old Cold War rival for hacking the Democratic National Committee's emails.

He said it's also too early to say whether the people who leaked those emails are trying to throw the presidential election to Donald Trump, as Hillary Clinton's campaign has charged.

"I don't think we're quite ready yet to make a call on attribution," Clapper said at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado. "There are just a few usual suspects out there." Additionally, he said, "We don't know enough to ascribe motivation regardless of who it might have been."

The reasons for the administration's reluctance to assign blame are a combination of two factors, Clapper said: uncertainty about whether the Russians are the culprits, and the lack of a decision yet on whether the U.S. should "name and shame" them if indeed they committed the cyberattack.

Politico

Spy chief James Clapper said Thursday that U.S. intelligence services are facing a "version of war" with Russia — but it's too soon to blame the old Cold War rival for hacking the Democratic National Committee's emails.

He said it's also too early to say whether the people who leaked those emails are trying to throw the presidential election to Donald Trump, as Hillary Clinton's campaign has charged.

"I don't think we're quite ready yet to make a call on attribution," Clapper said at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado. "There are just a few usual suspects out there." Additionally, he said, "We don't know enough to ascribe motivation regardless of who it might have been."

The reasons for the administration's reluctance to assign blame are a combination of two factors, Clapper said: uncertainty about whether the Russians are the culprits, and the lack of a decision yet on whether the U.S. should "name and shame" them if indeed they committed the cyberattack.

No one should be "hyperventilating" about the hack, though, he said. "I'm shocked somebody did some hacking," he said, sarcastically taking the voice of someone who was surprised. "That's never happened before."

Top spy: Despite intelligence 'war' with Russians, it's too soon to blame them for DNC hack

Tim Starks and Eric Geller

Is HRC lying? — I mean exaggerating? If James Clapper doesn't know, HRC doesn't "know" either.

UPDATE

Russia Insider
Urgent: Trump's 'Putin Connection' Outed - Part I

Urgent: Trump's 'Putin Connection' Outed -- Part II (The Original Media Story was False)

William Dunkerley