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Putin Now Argues Russia Could've Been Framed For Election Meddling By The CIA (nbcnews.com)
In a news magazine show premiering tonight, Megyn Kelly reports that Russian president Vladimir Putin "has denied Russian involvement in the hacking and interference with our U.S. presidential eletion for some time. That changed earlier this week, and the story appears to be evolving yet again." An anonymous reader shared two articles from NBC:
"Hackers can be anywhere. They can be in Russia, in Asia...even in America, Latin America," he said. "They can even be hackers, by the way, in the United States who very skillfully and professionally shifted the blame, as we say, onto Russia. Can you imagine something like that? In the midst of a political battle...?" The journalist asked the Russian president about what American intelligence agencies say is evidence that he became personally involved in a covert campaign to harm Hillary Clinton and benefit Donald Trump. "IP addresses can be invented -- a child can do that! Your underage daughter could do that. That is not proof," Putin replied...
Kelly told viewers that Putin -- the former director of Russia's domestic spy agency -- also suggested that the CIA could have been behind the hacking and noted that many people were convinced Russia was responsible for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy... Earlier, at a Friday forum moderated by Kelly, Putin likened the U.S. blaming his country for hacking the presidential election to "blaming the Jews"...
"Echoing remarks President Donald Trump made on the campaign trail, Putin also questioned the need for NATO."
Kelly told viewers that Putin -- the former director of Russia's domestic spy agency -- also suggested that the CIA could have been behind the hacking and noted that many people were convinced Russia was responsible for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy... Earlier, at a Friday forum moderated by Kelly, Putin likened the U.S. blaming his country for hacking the presidential election to "blaming the Jews"...
"Echoing remarks President Donald Trump made on the campaign trail, Putin also questioned the need for NATO."
Dec. 10, 2015
Lt. Gen Michael Flynn is part of a panel discussion in Moscow for the 10th anniversary of government-backed Russia Today, for which he receives payment (The Washington Post, Aug. 15, 2016). Officials notice an increase in communication between Flynn and the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, following the Russia Today event (CNN, May 19, 2017).
Late 2015
British intelligence agencies detect suspicious interactions between Russia and Trump aides that they pass on to American intelligence agencies (The Guardian, April 13, 2017).
March 19, 2016
Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta is sent an email that encourages him to change his email password, likely precipitating the hack of his account (CBS News, Oct. 28, 2016).
March 21
During an interview with The Post, Trump lists Carter Page as part of his foreign policy team. Page had been recommended by a son-in-law of President Richard Nixon, New York Republican Party Chairman Ed Cox (WP, March 21, 2016).
March 28
Political veteran Paul Manafort is hired to help the Trump campaign manage the delegate process for the Republican National Convention. He is recommended by Trump confidante Roger Stone (New York Times, March 28, 2016). Before joining the campaign, Manafort lobbied on behalf of Oleg Deripaska, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. That deal followed a memo from Manafort in which he offered a plan that could "greatly benefit the Putin Government." His relationship with Deripaska ended in 2009 (Associated Press, March 22, 2017). Manafort also worked on behalf of the Russia-friendly Party of Regions in Ukraine, helping guide the party's leader, Viktor Yanukovych, to the country's presidency. Yanukovych would later be ousted. (WP, Aug. 19, 2016)
April 27
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) may have met with Kislyak at a reception at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington before a foreign-policy speech given by Trump (CNN, May 31, 2017).
June
At a closed-door meeting of foreign policy experts and the prime minister of India, Page praises Putin effusively (WP, Aug. 5, 2016).
June 15
A hacker calling himself "Guccifer 2.0" releases the Democratic National Committee's research file on Donald Trump (Gawker, June 15, 2016). News reports already link the stolen data to Russian hackers (WP, June 14, 2016).
July
At some point this month, the FBI begins investigating possible links between the Russian government and Trump's campaign (Wired, March 20, 2017).
July 7
Page travels to Moscow to give a lecture (NYT, April 19, 2017). The Trump campaign approved the trip (USA Today, March 7, 2017). This trip was likely the catalyst for the FBI's request for a secret surveillance warrant to track PageÃs communications (WP, May 25, 2017).
July 11 or 12
Trump campaign staffers intervene with the committee developing the Republican Party's national security platform to remove language call arming Ukraine against Russian aggression. (July 18, 2016).
July 18
At an event hosted by the Heritage Foundation as part of the Republican National Convention, Sessions and Kislyak have a brief conversation (WP, March 2, 2017).
Flynn delivers a speech at the Republican convention, joining in the crowd's "Lock her up!" chant. "If I, a guy who knows this business, if I did a tenth of what she did," Flynn said, "I would be in jail today" (C-Span, July 18, 2016).
July 22
Wikileaks releases emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee (WP, July 22, 2017).
Jul. 27
During his last news conference of the campaign, Trump asks Russia to release emails hacked from Clinton's private server. He later says that he was joking (WP, July, 27, 2016).
Aug. 9
Flynn Intel Group, a consulting firm founded by Flynn, signs a contract with Inovo BV, a firm run by a Turkish businessman close to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for more than $500,000 (Daily Caller, Nov. 11, 2016).
Aug. 15
The New York Times reports on secret ledger
Both the US and Russia (and the former Soviet Union) as well as the UK have a LOOONG history of interfering in the internal politics of other countries by covert and illegal means. You reap what you sow - and that applies equally to everyone.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Given the low evidentiary standards used for blame attribution in these kinds of things, all that was needed to flag Russia is using a Russian based TOR exit node. IIRC, a large number of IPs associated with "Russian hackers" were just TOR exit nodes. The other evidence is activity times and Cyrillic characters and usernames. All stuff accessible to a moderately competent 4channer.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
The first comment is copied from a Washington Post news story that gives links to all the stories in the timeline, from all the news agencies.
You're not looking in (or being shown) the right places. As one example, I'll explain the Podesta "hack". Everything I say here comes from a particular thread on Twitter, which does a far better analysis than I will attempt here, or sources linked therein.
Yes, it was phishing. I wouldn't call the phish email "super-obvious", as it matches Google's style pretty much exactly. The key detail is that the phish link went to a bit.ly site, notably created via the bit.ly API, which requires creating an account. From information leaked from that account by researchers at the time, the same phishing campaign went to about 1800 people, individually targeted but using a common framework.
It's primarily from that mass of targets that we can determine motive, and from that we can attribute who had that motive. Almost two thirds of the targets were either military personnel or authors. Of the authors, about half were experts on Russia or the Ukraine. Of the military and government personnel, two thirds were U.S.-based, 14% were linked to NATO, and a few key Syrian rebel personnel were targeted as well.
Basically, the campaign that hit Podesta also targeted a lot of other folks, and the common thread is that Russia would want intelligence on them. There was no malware involved to be dissected, and no attempt to hide the origin of the campaign. In fact, the only way the analysis was possible was because the attackers had not set their bit.ly account private before they were discovered (though they did later). If the account were private, tracing a single victim's attack would have led only to a probably-hijacked server with a .tk domain.
(end citing the Twitter thread)
Similarly, other attacks can be attributed by the infrastructure they use. Some recent attacks on election committees, for example, used C&C servers that had previously been used in other attacks against Turkish and Ukranian governments, strongly indicating that the perpetrators of all the attacks were adversarial to Turkey and Ukraine.
In other attacks where malware and persistence are involved (like the DNC hack), expert analysis usually relies on identifying precisely which APT group is responsible for the attack. Each APT typically operates independently, using their own in-house-developed tools and preferred techniques. That's perfectly reasonable, because when the goal is stealth, an attacker will use the techniques they're most comfortable with to avoid costly mistakes. Once they are identified, though, that becomes a weakness, as the same pattern can be identified in other victim systems.
It is easy to spoof identifiers. Names, strings, and addresses can all be manipulated. What is more difficult to fake are behavior patterns. When a server starts seeing access requests for files starting every day at 2AM and ending at 10AM, it's a decent indicator that somebody with a seven-hour time zone difference is poking at your systems. Yes, that can be manipulated by having the attack teams work at odd hours, but it's just another bit of data. Then there's the localization of tools, exempted targets, and even the order in which tools are deployed.
Remember: These aren't amateurs. The attackers involved are professionals, clocking in and doing a job. There are the good ones, there are the sloppy ones, and there are the managers who make stupid decisions they have to deal with, just like in any other government office. They have their routines they follow to make it through the day, and it's through analysis of those routines that analysts learn about the attackers.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Ya, both sides are equivalent. Hilary running her own email server is the same as Trump colluding with a foreign adversary (getting Russian sanctions out of Rep platform, and we've probably not scratched the surface yet).
Hillary explicitly using unsecured communications channels for classified data, not turning over the server when the investigation started ("Did you wipe the server?" "with a cloth?" "No, with Bleachbit..."), cherry picking which e-mails get to be submitted as evidence...maybe not *quite* the same, but still thoroughly inexcusable..
Benghazi is the same as Iraq (the cause of 1+million human deaths).
Iraq, the war that Hillary voted in favor of and Trump spoke out against?
"Obamacare", ugly as it was, added millions to the number of insured and got rid of the donut hole
The 2,300 page bill that Nancy Pelosi said we needed to pass to find out what was in it? The bill that wasn't a tax until the question of whether or not it was Constitutional was raised, then it became a tax? That bill? Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that people got coverage, but has this turned into an ends-justifies-the-means situation?
and that's equivalent to Trump Care, which removes those advantages for the non-rich.
Support for TrumpCare was tough to find, even among Republicans.
Climate change is going to affect the poor way more than the rich,
This is true - the costs of addressing climate change are going to roll downhill until they end up manifesting as price increases for household goods, but let's not pretend that taxing companies into compliance is going to come out of the C-level exec's annual bonuses.
AND green jobs in some states already outnumber fossil fuel jobs,
Absolutely...and in other states, fossil fuels are still economic powerhouses (Pennsylvania and North Dakota, I'm looking at you), turning it into a numbers game.
but getting rid of jobs and sacrificing future prosperity, hey it's all equivalent, I don't know which side to support.
Amongst the reasons Trump won was because he promised that manufacturing and oil drilling and coal mining would end up becoming domestic tasks again. Now yes, to an extent he was just making campaign promises (i.e. he was full of it), but the definition of 'getting rid of jobs' sounds different if you're a career machinist. He tapped into the market for that sort of message.
To be clear, I'm not a Trump fan, and I didn't vote for him, but the false equivalences are of limited utility in this context.