Anonymous CIA officials claim that Russia hacked the U.S. election by accessing emails from top Democratic officials and then leaking them to Wikileaks.
But the Washington Post notes:
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) voiced doubts about the veracity of the intelligence, according to officials present.
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A senior U.S. official said there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency’s assessment, in part because some questions remain unanswered.
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For example, intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin “directing” the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks ….
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Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has said in a television interview that the “Russian government is not the source.” [The former intelligence analyst, British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, and chancellor of the University of Dundee (Craig Murray) – who is close friends with Wikileaks’ Assange – said he knows with 100% certainty that the Russians aren’t behind the leaks.]
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“I’ll be the first one to come out and point at Russia if there’s clear evidence, but there is no clear evidence — even now,” said Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a member of the Trump transition team. “There’s a lot of innuendo, lots of circumstantial evidence, that’s it.”
Indeed, some cybersecurity consultants claim that it’s impossible to ever know for sure who is behind hacks of this nature.
But that’s wrong …
In reality, it would be child’s play to determine whether or not the Russians really hacked the Dem emails and shared them with Wikileaks.
Specifically, Edward Snowden says the NSA could easily determine who hacked the Democratic National Committee’s emails:
Evidence that could publicly attribute responsibility for the DNC hack certainly exists at #NSA, but DNI traditionally objects to sharing.
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) July 25, 2016
But don’t trust Snowden …
The NSA executive who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information, who served as the senior technical director within the agency, who managed six thousand NSA employees, the 36-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency and the NSA’s best-ever analyst and code-breaker, who mapped out the Soviet command-and-control structure before anyone else knew how, and so predicted Soviet invasions before they happened (“in the 1970s, he decrypted the Soviet Union’s command system, which provided the US and its allies with real-time surveillance of all Soviet troop movements and Russian atomic weapons”) – confirmed to Washington’s Blog that the NSA would definitely know who the hacker was.
Binney told Washington’s Blog in July:
Snowden is right and the MSM is clueless.
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Do they have evidence that the Russians downloaded and later forwarded those emails to wikileaks? Seems to me that they need to answer those questions to be sure that their assertion is correct.
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You can tell from the network log who is going into a site. I used that on networks that I had. I looked to see who came into my LAN, where they went, how long they stayed and what they did while in my network.
Further, if you needed to, you could trace back approaches through other servers etc. Trace Route and Trace Watch are good examples of monitoring software that help do these things. Others of course exist … probably the best are in NSA/GCHQ and the other Five Eyes countries. But, these countries have no monopoly on smart people that could do similar detection software.
