Further, an intelligence official told BuzzFeed News that no representative of the vast network of US intelligence services has conducted any form of original forensic analysis of those servers. Nevertheless, President Obama ordered the expulsion of almost three-dozen Russian diplomats, adding to his tarnished reputation as "deporter in chief."
Eric Walker, deputy communications director at the DNC, told BuzzFeed that the FBI, Justice Department, and US Attorney General’s offices asked the DNC to cooperate on a host of issues, but that the FBI, in particular, "never requested access to the DNC’s computer servers." Instead, the agency relied on CrowdStrike, a for-profit security business headquartered in California, as the basis of its allegations. "CrowdStrike is pretty good," the intelligence official remarked.
“There’s no reason to believe” that CrowdStrike’s determination was not "accurate," the official claimed. A philosopher worth his salt would be quick to point out to the intelligence official that he had committed a classic fallacy in informal logic. Just because CrowdStrike’s credibility has not been disproved, does not prove that Crowdstrike is credible. The fallacy is so old it even has a latin name, argumentum ad ignoratium, ‘the argument from ignorance.’
The 13-page issue brief proffered by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security at no point mentions that federal agencies conducted an independent investigation of compromised DNC servers. This level of oversight is difficult to believe. Instead, the ‘joint analysis report’ is packed with banal, boilerplate advice for IT professionals, such as "A commitment to good cybersecurity and best practices is critical to protecting networks and systems. Here are some questions you may want to ask your organization to help prevent and mitigate against attacks."
A recent analysis found that 43 percent of the suspicious IPs allegedly used by Russia were in fact simple Tor exit nodes, meaning that anyone using a Tor web browser, whether from the UK, Fiji, or mom’s basement in Ohio could be implicated as an elite Russian hacker.
Jeffrey Carr, a cybersecurity expert based in Seattle, Washington, recently wrote that the report "adds nothing" to lawmakers' call for bullet-proof evidence. "The problem is," Carr told Radio Sputnik’s Brian Becker on Thursday’s episode of Loud & Clear, "none" of the tools used in the hack "have ever been identified conclusively or even have one instance of technical evidence that links them to any Russian government agency,” only linking to "Russian speaking hackers," Carr noted, which "nobody is addressing," in the current debate. This position largely lines up with Kremlin spokesman Dimitri Peskov’s stance that accusations of Kremlin meddling in US elections are groundless.
Bill Binney, former NSA whistleblower and technical cryptanalyst and mathematician, recently contributed to a post in which writers concluded that the “DNC and HRC servers alleged to have been hacked were, in fact, not hacked.” The NSA would be able to trace such a hack, according to the analysis conducted by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. Instead, the authors "conclude that the emails were leaked by an insider," similar to revelations made by Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning.
Nevertheless, Obama’s administration seized a Russian summer house, or "dacha," on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, which media outlets claimed was spy compound. Former US ambassador to Russia, Michael Mcfaul, said that he used to send his children there to go water skiing. Other nefarious uses of the property include grilling nuclear-Russian shish kabobs.
