DNC Server: Most Critical Evidence To Proving "Russian Hacking" Is Being Withheld From Mueller, Why?

If there were any actual crimes committed during the 2016 presidential election, then the origin of those crimes can be traced back to a single piece of hardware sitting at the DNC which housed the emails that were stolen and subsequently shared with WikiLeaks.  Ironically, despite the fact that they"re apparently sitting on perhaps the most critical evidence available to prove that Russia "hacked the election," an allegation that has been hammered 24/7 on CNN for the better part of a year now despite a lack of actual tangible evidence to support the allegation, the DNC has completely refused to cooperate with the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and/or Robert Mueller"s independent investigation.  Which begs one very simple question, why?

As the Washington Times points out, a cybersecurity firm called CrowdStrike, is the only organization that has been allowed by the DNC to inspect their email server...an inspection which quickly resulted in the very "convenient" conclusion that Russia was the culprit of the hack...even though minimal details supporting that conclusion were ever revealed to authorities.

It is perhaps the key piece of forensic evidence in Russia’s suspected efforts to sway the November presidential election, but federal investigators have yet to get their hands on the hacked computer server that handled email from the Democratic National Committee.

Indeed, the only cybersecurity specialists who have taken a look at the server are from CrowdStrike, the Irvine, California-based private cybersecurity company that the DNC hired to investigate the hack — but which has come under fire itself for its work.

Some critics say CrowdStrike’s evidence for blaming Russia for the hack is thin. Members of Congress say they still believe Russia was responsible but wonder why the DNC has never allowed federal investigators to get a look at the key piece of evidence: the server. Either way, a key “witness” in the political scandal consuming the Trump administration remains beyond the reach of investigators.

“I want to find out from the company [that] did the forensics what their full findings were,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who is leading the Judiciary Committee’s inquiry, told The Washington Times.

As you may recall, CrowdStrike is the very same "cybersecurity" firm that attributed the Sony hack to North Korea...

In 2014, it investigated the Sony Pictures leak, the disclosure of a trove of sensitive and embarrassing internal emails and executive salary data apparently orchestrated by hackers sympathetic to North Korea, and who objected to Sony’s comic depiction of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

Unfortunately, that "hack" was subsequently revealed to have been perpetrated by a Sony insider.

But, Crowdstrike"s hacking attribution analyses have been questioned before, as have their ties to Ukranian funders and the Clinton Foundation.

Mr. Alperovitch is also a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank focused on international issues that is partially funded by Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk, who reportedly has donated at least $10 million to the Clinton Foundation.

Late last year, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a respected British think tank, disputed CrowdStrike’s analysis of a Russian hack during Ukraine’s war with Russian-backed separatists. CrowdStrike later revised and retracted portions of its analysis.

Meanwhile, the ultimate publisher of the DNC emails, WikiLeaks, has very publicly confirmed on numerous occasions that their source was, in fact, not a state actor.

HANNITY: Can you say to the American people, unequivocally, that you did not get this information about the DNC, John Podesta"s emails, can you tell the American people 1,000 percent that you did not get it from Russia or anybody associated with Russia?

ASSANGE: Yes. We can say, we have said, repeatedly that over the last two months that our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party... Obama is trying to say that President-elect Trump is not a legitimate President.

Not surprisingly, all of the above has raised some very valid concerns on both sides of the aisle.

Both Republicans and Democrats say the DNC’s reaction to the hacking is troubling.

Jeh Johnson, who served as homeland security secretary under President Obama, told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence last month that his department offered to assist the DNC during the campaign to determine what was happening, but Mr. Johnson said he was rebuffed.

“The DNC,” Mr. Johnson said at the time, “did not feel it needed DHS’ assistance at that time. I was anxious to know whether or not our folks were in there, and the response I got was the FBI had spoken to them, they don’t want our help, they have CrowdStrike.”

In January, Mr. Comey told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the FBI issued “multiple requests at different levels” to assist the DNC with a cyberforensic analysis. Those requests were also denied.

All of which brings us back to our original question: If the DNC is in possession of actual tangible evidence that could prove once and for all that Russians hacked their servers and attempted to undermine the campaign of Hillary Clinton, why not share that evidence with investigators and enjoy the blissful vindication that its public release would provide?

Might it have something to do with this "purely coincidental" meeting on a tarmac in Phoenix and/or Loretta Lynch"s "assurances" that the FBI"s investigation (or, "matter" if you prefer) of Hillary Clinton "wouldn"t go too far"?

Believing The Russian "Hacking" Claim

Authored by David Swanson via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Government lies are common when seducing a population to support a war, but the Russian “hacking” claims are unusual in that U.S. officials supply no evidence while the “fact” is just assumed,

When the U.S. public was told that Spain had blown up the Maine, or Vietnam had returned fire, or Iraq had stockpiled weapons, or Libya was planning a massacre, the claims were straightforward and disprovable.

CIA Director John Brennan addresses officials at the Agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. (Photo credit: CIA)

Before people began referring to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, somebody had to lie that it had happened, and there had to be an understanding of what had supposedly happened. No investigation into whether anything had happened could have taken as its starting point the certainty that a Vietnamese attack or attacks had happened. And no investigation into whether a Vietnamese attack had happened could have focused its efforts on unrelated matters, such as whether anyone in Vietnam had ever done business with any relatives or colleagues of Robert McNamara.

All of this is otherwise with the idea that the Russian government determined the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. U.S. corporate media reports often claim that Russia did decide the election or tried to do that or wanted to try to do that. But they also often admit to not knowing whether any such thing is the case.

There is no established account, with or without evidence to support it, of exactly what Russia supposedly did. And yet there are countless articles casually referring, as if to established fact to the...

“Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election” (Yahoo).

“Russian attempts to disrupt the election” (New York Times).

“Russian… interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election” (ABC).

“Russian influence over the 2016 presidential election” (The Intercept).

“a multi-pronged investigation to uncover the full extent of Russia’s election-meddling” (Time).

“Russian interference in the US election” (CNN).

“Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election” (American Constitution Society).

“Russian hacking in US Election” (Business Standard).”

“Obama Strikes Back at Russia for Election Hacking” we’re told by the New York Times, but what is “election hacking”? Its definition seems to vary widely. And what evidence is there of Russia having done it?

The “Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections” even exists as a factual event in Wikipedia, not as an allegation or a theory. But the factual nature of it is not so much asserted as brushed aside.

Former CIA Director John Brennan, in the same Congressional testimony in which he took the principled stand “I don’t do evidence,” testified that “the fact that the Russians tried to influence resources and authority and power, and the fact that the Russians tried to influence that election so that the will of the American people was not going to be realized by that election, I find outrageous and something that we need to, with every last ounce of devotion to this country, resist and try to act to prevent further instances of that.” He provided no evidence.

Activists have even planned “demonstrations to call for urgent investigations into Russian interference in the US election.” They declare that “every day we learn more about the role Russian state-led hacking and information warfare played in the 2016 election.” (March for Truth.)

Belief that Russia helped put Trump in the White House is steadily rising in the U.S. public. Anything commonly referred to as fact will gain credibility. People will assume that at some point someone actually established that it was a fact.

Keeping the story in the news without evidence are articles about polling, about the opinions of celebrities, and about all kinds of tangentially related scandals, their investigations, and obstruction thereof. Most of the substance of most of the articles that lead off with reference to the “Russian influence on the election” is about White House officials having some sort of connections to the Russian government, or Russian businesses, or just Russians. It’s as if an investigation of Iraqi WMD claims focused on Blackwater murders or whether Scooter Libby had taken lessons in Arabic, or whether the photo of Saddam Hussein and Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands was taken by an Iraqi.

A general trend away from empirical evidence has been extensively noted and discussed. There is no more public evidence that Seth Rich (a Democratic National Committee staffer who was murdered last year) leaked Democratic emails than there is that the Russian government stole them. Yet both claims have passionate believers.

Still, the claims about Russia are unique in their wide proliferation, broad acceptance, and status as something to be constantly referred to as though already established, constantly augmented by other Russia-related stories that add nothing to the central claim. This phenomenon, in my view, is as dangerous as any lies and fabrications coming out of the racist right.

What Is CrowdStrike? Firm Hired By DNC Has Ties To Hillary Clinton, A Ukrainian Billionaire, And Google

Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

As usual, the rabbit hole gets much deeper the more you look.

In yesterday’s post, Credibility of Cyber Firm that Claimed Russia Hacked the DNC Comes Under Serious Question, I examined how CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC to look into its hacking breach, had been exposed as being completely wrong about a separate attack it claimed originated from the same group it claimed broke into DNC systems, and supposedly works for Russia’s military intelligence unit, GRU. Here’s some of what we learned:

An influential British think tank and Ukraine’s military are disputing a report that the U.S. cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has used to buttress its claims of Russian hacking in the presidential election.

The CrowdStrike report, released in December, asserted that Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery app, resulting in heavy losses of howitzers in Ukraine’s war with Russian-backed separatists.

But the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) told VOA that CrowdStrike erroneously used IISS data as proof of the intrusion. IISS disavowed any connection to the CrowdStrike report. Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense also has claimed combat losses and hacking never happened.

The challenges to CrowdStrike’s credibility are significant because the firm was the first to link last year’s hacks of Democratic Party computers to Russian actors, and because CrowdStrike co-founder Dimiti Alperovitch has trumpeted its Ukraine report as more evidence of Russian election tampering.

Yaroslav Sherstyuk, maker of the Ukrainian military app in question, called the company’s report “delusional” in a Facebook post. CrowdStrike never contacted him before or after its report was published, he told VOA.

VOA first contacted IISS in February to verify the alleged artillery losses. Officials there initially were unaware of the CrowdStrike assertions. After investigating, they determined that CrowdStrike misinterpreted their data and hadn’t reached out beforehand for comment or clarification.

CrowdStrike declined to answer VOA’s written questions about the Ukraine report, and Alperovitch canceled a March 15 interview on the topic. In a December statement to VOA’s Ukrainian Service, spokeswoman Ilina Dimitrova defended the company’s conclusions.

Seems like pretty extraordinary incompetence. Either that, or something else was potentially at play; namely, a desire to push the narrative that Russia hacked the DNC, irrespective of the facts.

The whole things gets even more disturbing the more you look.

For example, Counterpunch put out a very important article earlier today on the topic, adding several crucial nuggets of information.

First there’s this:

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.”

That’s weird enough, but it gets far stranger. For example:

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, who now lives in exile in Russia.

Recall that the FBI was denied access to the DNC servers by the DNC itself, and simply agreed to rely on the results provided by CrowdStrike, which as you can see has ties to all sorts of anti-Russia organizations and individuals. I find it absolutely remarkable that James Comey head of the FBI outsourced his job to CrowdStrike.

There remains zero evidence that Russia hacked the DNC. I repeat, there remains zero evidence that Russia hacked the DNC.

As cybersecurity expert Jeffrey Carr noted:

Jeffrey Carr called the FBI/Department of Homeland Security Report, the only alleged evidence released by intelligence officials, released in late December 2016 a “fatally flawed effort” that provided no evidence to substantiate the claims that the Russian government conducted the hacks, though that’s what it was purported to do.

Absolutely remarkable, but there’s more. As TechCrunch reported back in 2015:

If you need proof that security is a red hot market these days, how about this morning’s announcement that cybersecurity company CrowdStrike landed a $100 million Series C investment round?

The round was led by Google Capital with Rackspace, which happens to be one of the company’s customers also investing. Existing investors Accel and Warburg Pincus also participated. Today’s investment brings the total to-date to $156 million.

Why do I find it interesting that Google was a major investor in CrowdStrike? Well for one, we know that Chairman of Alphabet, Inc. (Google’s parent company), Eric Schmidt, was actively working to help the Hillary campaign. As I highlighted in the 2015 post,Meet “Groundwork” – Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s Stealth Startup Working to Make Hillary Clinton President:

An under-the-radar startup funded by billionaire Eric Schmidt has become a major technology vendor for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, underscoring the bonds between Silicon Valley and Democratic politics.

The Groundwork, according to Democratic campaign operatives and technologists, is part of efforts by Schmidt—the executive chairman of Google parent-company Alphabet—to ensure that Clinton has the engineering talent needed to win the election. And it is one of a series of quiet investments by Schmidt that recognize how modern political campaigns are run, with data analytics and digital outreach as vital ingredients that allow candidates to find, court, and turn out critical voter blocs.

There is also another gap in play: The shrinking distance between Google and the Democratic Party. Former Google executive Stephanie Hannon is the Clinton campaign’s chief technology officer, and a host of ex-Googlers are currently employed as high-ranking technical staff at the Obama White House. Schmidt, for his part, is one of the most powerful donors in the Democratic Party—and his influence does not stem only from his wealth, estimated by Forbes at more than $10 billion.

According to campaign finance disclosures, Clinton’s campaign is the Groundwork’s only political client. Its employees are mostly back-end software developers with experience at blue-chip tech firms like Netflix, Dreamhost, and Google.

Since Democrats seem so obsessed with the saying these days, “where there’s smoke there’s fire,” and there’s plenty of smoke here.

A CIA Cyber False Flag

Authored by Federico Pieraccini via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

New revelations from Wikileaks’ "Vault 7" leak shed a disturbing light on the safeguarding of privacy. Something already known and largely suspected has now become documented by Wikileaks. It seems evident that the CIA is now a state within a state, an entity out of control that has even arrived at the point of creating its own hacking network in order to avoid the scrutiny of the NSA and other agencies.

Reading the revelations contained in the documents released by WikiLeaks and adding them to those already presented in recent years by Snowden, it now seems evident that the technological aspect regarding espionage is a specialty in which the CIA, as far as we know, excels. Hardware and software vendors that are complicit -- most of which are American, British or Israeli -- give the CIA the opportunity to achieve informational full-spectrum dominance, relegating privacy to extinction. Such a convergence of power, money and technology entails major conflicts of interest, as can be seen in the case of Amazon AWS (Amazon"s Cloud Service), cloud provider for the CIA, whose owner, Jeff Bezos, is also the owner of The Washington Post. It is a clear overlap of private interests that conflicts with the theoretical need to declare uncomfortable truths without the need to consider orders numbering in the millions of dollars from clients like the CIA.

While it is just one example, there are thousands more out there. The perverse interplay between media, spy agencies and politicians has compromised the very meaning of the much vaunted democracy of the land of the Stars and Stripes. The constant scandals that are beamed onto our screens now serve the sole purpose of advancing the deep interest of the Washington establishment. In geopolitical terms, it is now more than obvious that the deep state has committed all available means toward sabotaging any dialogue and détente between the United States and Russia. In terms of news, the Wikileaks revelations shed light on the methods used by US intelligence agencies like the CIA to place blame on the Kremlin, or networks associated with it, for the hacking that occurred during the American elections.

Perhaps this is too generous a depiction of matters, given that the general public has yet to see any evidence of the hacking of the DNC servers. In addition to this, we know that the origin of Podesta’s email revelations stem from the loss of a smartphone and the low data-security measures employed by the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. In general, when the 16 US spy agencies blamed Russia for the hacking of the elections, they were never specific in terms of forensic evidence. Simply put, the media, spies and politicians created false accusations based on the fact that Moscow, together with RT and other media (not directly linked to the Kremlin), finally enjoy a major presence in the mainstream media. The biggest problem for the Washington establishment lies in the revelation of news that is counterproductive to the interests of the deep state. RT, Sputnik, this site and many others have diligently covered and reported to the general public every development concerning the Podesta revelations or the hacking of the DNC.

Now what is revealed through Wikileaks’ publications in Vault 7 is the ability of a subsection of the CIA, known as Umbrage, to use malware, viruses, trojans and other cyber tools for their own geopolitical purposes. The CIA’s Umbrage collects, analyzes and then employs software created variously from foreign security agencies, cyber mafia, private companies, and hackers in general. These revelations become particularly relevant when we consider the consequences of these actions. The main example can be seen in the hacking of the DNC. For now, what we know is that the hacking - if it ever occurred - is of Russian origin. This does not mean at all that the Kremlin directed it. It could actually be very much the opposite, its responsibility falling into the category of a cyber false-flag. One thing is for sure: all 16 US intelligence agencies are of the view that “the Russians did it”. That said, the methods used to hack vulnerabilities cannot be revealed, so as to limit the spread of easily reusable exploits on systems, such as the one that hosted the DNC server. It is a great excuse for avoiding the revelation of any evidence at all.

So, with little information available, independent citizens are left with very little information on which to reliably form an opinion on what happened. There is no evidence, and no evidence will be provided to the media. For politicians and so-called mainstream journalists, this is an acceptable state of affairs. What we are left with instead is blind faith in the 16 spy agencies. The problem for them is that what WikiLeaks revealed with Vault 7 exposes a scenario that looks more likely than not: a cyber false-flag carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency using engineered malware and viruses made in Russia and hypothetically linking them back to hacking networks in Russia. In all likelihood, it looks like the Democrats’ server was hacked by the CIA with the clear objective of leaving Russian fingerprints and obvious traces to be picked up by other US agencies.

In this way, it becomes easier to explain the unique views of all 16 spy agencies. Thus, it is far more likely that the CIA intentionally left fake Russian fingerprints all over the DNC server, thereby misleading other intelligence agencies in promoting the narrative that Russia hacked the DNC server. Of course the objective was to create a false narrative that could immediately be picked up by the media, creating even more hysteria surrounding any rapprochement with Russia.

Diversification of computer systems.

The revelations contained in the Wikileaks vault 7 (less than 1 % of the total data in Wikileaks’ possession has been released to date) have caused a stir, especially by exposing the astonishing complicity between hardware and software manufacturers, often intentionally creating backdoors in their products to allow access by the CIA and NSA. In today’s digital environment, all essential services rely on computer technology and connectivity. These revelations are yet more reason why countries targeted by Washington, like China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, should get rid of European and American products and invest in reducing technological dependence on American products in particular.

The People"s Republic has already started down this track, with the replacement of many network devices with local vendors like Huawei in order to avoid the type of interference revealed by Snowden. Russia has been doing the same in terms of software, even laying the groundwork to launch of its own operating system, abandoning American and European systems. In North Korea, this idea was already put into practice years ago and is an excellent tool for deterrence for external interference. In more than one computer security conference, US experts have praised the capabilities of the DPRK to isolate its Internet network from the rest of the world, allowing them to have strong safety mechanisms. Often, the only access route to the DPRK systems are through the People"s Republic of China, not the easiest way for the CIA or NSA to infiltrate a protected computer network.

An important aspect of the world in which we live today involves information security, something all nations have to deal with. At the moment, we still live in a world in which the realization of the danger and effect of hacking attacks are not apparent to many. On the other hand, militarily speaking, the diversification and rationalization of critical equipment in terms of networks and operability (smartphones, laptops, etc) has already produced strong growth in non-American and European manufacturers, with the aim of making their systems more secure.

This strengthening of technology also produces deleterious consequences, such as the need for intelligence agencies to be able to prevent the spread of data encryption so as to always enjoy access to any desired information. The birth of the Tor protocol, the deployment of Bitcoin, and apps that are more and more encrypted (although the WikiLeaks documents have shown that the collection of information takes place on the device before the information is encrypted) are all responses to an exponential increase in the invasion of privacy by federal or American government entities.

We live in a world that has an enormous dependence on the Internet and computer technology. The CIA over the years has focused on the ability to make sure vulnerable systems are exploited as well as seeking out major security flaws in consumer products without disclosing this to vendors, thereby taking advantage of these security gaps and leaving all consumers with a potential lack of security. Slowly, thanks to the work and courage of people like Snowden and Assange, the world is beginning to understand how important it is to keep personal data under control and prevent access to it by third parties, especially if they are state actors. In the case of national security, the issue is expanded exponentially by the need to protect key and vital infrastructure, considering how many critical services operate via the Internet and rely on computing devices.

The wars of the future will have a strong technological basis, and it is no coincidence that many armed forces, primarily the Russian and Chinese, have opted in recent years to training troops, and conducting operations, not completely relying on connectivity. No one can deny that in the event of a large-scale conflict, connectivity is far from guaranteed. One of the major goals of competing nations is to penetrate the military security systems of rival nations and be able to disarm the internal networks that operates major systems of defense and attack.

The Wikileaks revelations are yet another confirmation of how important it is to break the technological unipolar moment, if it may be dubbed this way, especially for nations targeted by the United States. Currently Washington dictates the technological capacities of the private and government sectors of Europe and America, steering their development, timing and methods to suit its own interests. It represents a clear disadvantage that the PRC and its allies will inevitably have to redress in the near future in order to achieve full security for its vital infrastructure.

CIA Bases Congressional Russian Hacking Report on Possibilities, Not Truth

Via The Daily Bell

Intel report warns Moscow will try to influence elections in countries allied to US. The declassified version of the report warned that other countries were also vulnerable to attack. - Independent

Intelligence in the US is becoming even more emphatic about the Russian threat to elections, claiming that Russians will start to disrupt the elections of other countries like they are disrupting American ones.

The trouble with this is that intel agencies, specifically the CIA, have not yet proven that Russia has done what the CIA claims it has done.

On Friday, it claimed that Russia had attacked the US with specific hacks. But at least one top official knowledegable about hacking pointed out that using such eminently traceable hacks was unlike the Russians. The entire report was false, he claimed. The Russians wouldn"t have use such easily detected means to accomplish a hacking. If they"d actually done it, they be subtle not obvious.

But a highly classified report, given to president Barack Obama, and sections of which were made public on Friday, reveals that the CIA, the FBI and the NSA all concurred that Russia used cyber warfare and state-funded social media “trolls” to spread negative information about Hillary Clinton and to help Mr Trump win the election.

Russia reportedly gained access to the Democratic National Committee servers from May 2015 to June the following year and passed on Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s and Ms Clinton’s emails to WikiLeaks. In return, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was given a platform on state-run media outlet RT to criticise the US.

The CIA called the attacks "multifaceted". Mr. Putin has denied anything to do with the attacks. The report has also been dismissed by Trump, but he has said cybersecurity should be strengthened nonetheless.

The reality is that the CIA probably needs something to do with its time and fighting against Russians seems like a good way of bolstering the CIA"s importance.

The CIA like much else, is at least partially controlled out of London"s City, by the bankers there. These are the same central bankers that have installed monopoly cental banks around the world. The CIA, from what we can tell, at the top, has people who work directly with these London financiers.

The CIA"s proof regarding Russian hacking is considerably mitigated by the CIA"s lack of ability to say forthrightly that the Russians did the things they say they did. If the Russians did it, the CIA should say so clearly and simply. It will not.

Now with the same lack of evidence, the CIA is warning about overseas targeting of US allies. There is no more certainty regarding these arguments than CIA suppositions that the US itself has been targeted.

Conclusion: None of this is backed up by conclusions, only by theories that may well have a political component to them. The CIA is making work for itself and upping the level of fear-based rhetoric without any proof what they are saying is true.

Other articles:

Supposed Russian Hack Further Illustrates the Divide Between CIA and Trump

Trump Slams Russian Hack As "Political Witch Hunt"

Just hours before president-elect Trump receives the full intelligence briefing over the Russian hacking allegations, Nancy Pelosi is convinced - stating that the report is "stunning" and "of course" Russia disrupted the election, there is "no question."

“It’s stunning in its conclusions and you’ll see some of it” though “I wish you could see the entire report”

“When you see this report you will see how intelligence has identified what we have seen” and “there is no question that the Russians disrupted and then they released information” on partisan basis

“The American people have a right to know what a foreign power did to disrupt the outcome”

However, after raising questions once again this morning about the legitimacy of the findings, Trump spoke out in a New York Times interview, raging that the storm surrounding Russian hacking during the presidential campaign is a political witch hunt being carried out by his adversaries, who he said were embarrassed by their loss to him in the election last year.

Mr. Trump spoke to The New York Times by telephone three hours before he was set to be briefed by the nation’s top intelligence and law enforcement officials about Russian hacking of American political institutions.

In the conversation, he repeatedly criticized the intense focus on the alleged cyber intrusions by Russia.

“China, relatively recently, hacked 20 million government names,” he said, referring to the breach of computers at the Office of Personnel Management in late 2014 and early 2015. “How come nobody even talks about that? This is a political witch hunt.”

“The D.N.C. wouldn’t let them see the servers,” Mr. Trump said. “How can you be sure about hacking when you can’t even get to the servers?” The D.N.C. has previously said the law enforcement agency had not asked to examine the computers.

NYT adds that Mr. Trump said he is looking forward to his meeting Friday afternoon about the hacking by James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence; F.B.I. Director James B. Comey and other intelligence officials.

He said that Mr. Clapper “wrote me a beautiful letter a few weeks ago wishing me the best.”

But he said that “a lot of mistakes were made” by the intelligence community in the past, noting in particular the attacks on the World Trade Center and saying that “weapons of mass destruction was one of the great mistakes of all time.”

Trump concluded with a jab at Obama"s current cybersecurity operation in America:

“With all that being said, I don’t want countries to be hacking our country... They’ve hacked the White House. They’ve hacked Congress. We’re like the hacking capital of the world.”

We look forward to seeing the unclassified report released later today.. and Trump"s initial reaction to his briefing.

DNC Refused FBI Access to Its Servers … Instead Gave Access to a DNC Consultant Tied to Organization Promoting Russia Conflict

CNN reports:

The Democratic National Committee "rebuffed" a request from the FBI to examine its computer services after it was allegedly hacked by Russia during the 2016 election, a senior law enforcement official told CNN Thursday.

"The FBI repeatedly stressed to DNC officials the necessity of obtaining direct access to servers and data, only to be rebuffed until well after the initial compromise had been mitigated," a senior law enforcement official told CNN. "This left the FBI no choice but to rely upon a third party for information.

***

The FBI instead relied on the assessment from a third-party security company called CrowdStrike.

As first reported by George Eliason, CrowdStrike"s Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder Dimitri Alperovitch - who wrote the CrowdStrike reports allegedly linking Russia to the Democratic party emails published by Wikileaks - is a fellow at the Atlantic Council ... an organization associated with Ukraine, and whose main policy goal seems to stir up a confrontation with Russia.^[1]

The Nation writes:

In late December, Crowdstrike released a largely debunked report claiming that the same Russian malware that was used to hack the DNC has been used by Russian intelligence to target Ukrainian artillery positions. Crowdstrike’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Dmitri Alperovitch, told PBS, “Ukraine’s artillery men were targeted by the same hackers…that targeted DNC, but this time they were targeting cellphones [belonging to the Ukrainian artillery men] to try to understand their location so that the Russian artillery forces can actually target them in the open battle.”

Dmitri Alperovitch is also a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

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. As I pointed out in the pages of The Nation in November, the Atlantic Council has spent the past several years producing some of the most virulent specimens of the new Cold War propaganda.

It would seem then that a healthy amount of skepticism toward a government report that relied, in part, on the findings of private-sector cyber security companies like Crowdstrike might be in order.

The Atlantic Council is also funded by the U.S. military and the largest defense contractors, including:

• United States Army


• United States Navy


• United States Air Force


• United States Marines


• Lockheed Martin


• Raytheon


• Northrop Grumman


• Boeing

[1]  Here"s an example of the Atlantic Council"s bellicose rhetoric from July 2016:

Poland should announce that it reserves the right to deploy offensive cyber operations (and not necessarily in response just to cyber attacks).  The authorities could also suggest potential targets, which could include the Moscow metro, the St. Petersburg power network, and Russian state-run media outlets such as RT.