December 18, 2016

"Strict laws prohibit government officials from disclosing secrets, yet leaking has been a constant feature of American political life."

"Since the passage of the Espionage Act, in 1917, the federal government has prosecuted only about a dozen cases concerning media leaks of state secrets. That’s an astonishingly small number. [David] Pozen, a Columbia law professor, cites one estimate that, between 1949 and 1969, 2.3 per cent of the front-page stories in the Times and the Washington Post were based on government leaks. Another study looked at just the first six months of 1986 and found that a hundred and forty-seven stories in the country’s eight major newspapers were based on leaks. The entire career of Bob Woodward, perhaps the best-selling political writer of his generation, is based on leaks. And yet, with a few symbolic exceptions, nothing is done.... Pozen easily dispenses with the idea that Administrations don’t prosecute leakers because they can’t find them. They can: information—particularly sensitive information—has a pedigree.... Pozen argues that governments look the other way when it comes to leaks because it is in their interest to do so.... 'For a strategy of planting to work, it is critical that relevant audiences not immediately assume that every unattributed disclosure they encounter reflects a concerted White House effort to manipulate the information environment. The practice of planting requires some amount of constructive ambiguity as to its prevalence and operation..... Plants need to be watered with leaks'...."

Writes Malcolm Gladwell in "Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, and the Modern Whistle-Blower/From their backgrounds to their motivations, the two men have some striking differences." There are leaks, left unprosecuted because they camouflage plants from our government. But then what of hacks? Hacks are something else altogether — and that's the big difference between Ellsberg and Snowden. Ellsberg was a leaker. Snowden is a hacker.
Leakers... are interested in using and exploiting secrecy: they believe that secrecy, by its preservation and strategic violation, serves an essential purpose. The hacker, on the other hand, is a skeptic of secrecy. The anthropologist Gabriella Coleman has described hacking as the “aesthetic disposition” of craftiness and guile. “When lecturing to my class one security researcher described the mentality: ‘You have to, like, have an innate understanding that [a security measure is] arbitrary, it’s an arbitrary mechanism that does something that’s unnatural and therefore can be circumvented in all likelihood,’ ” she writes.
I was thinking about Gladwell's article when I was watching "This Week" this morning. Martha Raddatz was interviewing Donna Brazile:
RADDATZ: Well, do you bear any responsibility, does the Democratic National Committee bear any responsibility because they weren't prepared for something like this, or even have a chain of command going from, as you say, the Geek Squad up to more senior leadership.

BRAZILE: There's no question. I took full responsibility, Martha. I went to the Democratic convention. I spent the entire month of July, August apologizing because of the leaked, stolen emails....
As I watched that live, I thought Brazile said "leaked" then caught herself and substituted the word "stolen." I think she did not mean to say "leaked." That made me suspicious! Did the truth slip out?

Here, I've clipped out the precise point. Check my suspicion:



I hear resonance with what Julian Assange said the other day: "Our source is not the Russian government... We’re unhappy that we felt that we needed to even say that it wasn’t a state party... We have ... a strong interest in protecting our sources, and so we never say anything about them, never ruling anyone in or anyone out.... [W]e’ve had to come out and say 'no, it’s not a state party. Stop trying to distract in that way and pay attention to the content of the publication.'"

50 comments:

mccullough said...

When a leak hurts the Dems, it's a matter of national security.

The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...

Sad that Assange is more credible than the CIA but that is the world that the Leftist wingers have wrought.

Anonymous said...

So many leakers.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/18/leak-rex-tillerson-director-bahamas-based-us-russian-oil-company

Rex Tillerson, the businessman nominated by Donald Trump to be the next US secretary of state, is the long-time director of a US-Russian oil firm based in the tax haven of the Bahamas, leaked documents show.

Tillerson – the chief executive of ExxonMobil – has been a director of the oil company’s Russian subsidiary, Exxon Neftegas, since 1998. His name – RW Tillerson – appears next to other officers who are based at Houston, Texas; Moscow; and Sakhalin, in Russia’s far east.

The leaked 2001 document comes from the corporate registry in the Bahamas. It was one of 1.3m files given to the Germany newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung by an anonymous source. The registry is public but details of individual directors are typically incomplete or missing entirely. "

Hyphenated American said...

To quote Hillary Clinton, at this point what difference does it make? What does it matter if the corruption inside DNC, it's rigging of the primary elections, corruption and lies were revealed by a leak or a hack? Don't the American people have a right to know that Donna Brazille, the current head of the DNC illegally passed the debate questions to Hillary Clinton? Don't the American people have a right to know that hillary's daughter used the money donated for starving children in the 3rd world countries to pay for her wedding? Don't the American people have a right to know about Hillary's "private" and "public" positions on immigration and open borders? At this point, what difference does it make how the American people found out the truth?

Big Mike said...

Stop trying to distract in that way and pay attention to the content of the publication.

Good advice that won't be taken because -- Russian squirrel!

DavidD said...

Maybe she meant that they were stolen and then leaked, not that they were leaked, er, stolen....

Michael K said...

Brazile is a hack. Assange is probably more reliable than either her or Obama.

Ellsworth leaked the Pentagon Papers but that was only an embarrassment. Nothing was really secret.

The most serious leak in our history, I think, was the Chicago Tribune publishing that we had broken the Japanese code

Roosevelt was furious but decided not to try to prosecute the publisher and editor because he feared it would make the lapse more public. The Japanese never figured it out.

The tribune also leaked the Roosevelt war plan, Rainbow 5, which was less serious for national security but an embarrassment when isolationism was still strong. There is a theory that the plan was leaked by a US general named Wedemeyer.

We know that Senator Wheeler gave these plans to the Trib, but what is not know is where he got them from.

Wedemeyer was under suspicion and may have been the leaker.

Several Army staff officers said they strongly suspected Wedemeyer of being the leaker. An anonymous letter, obviously written by an insider and addressed to the Secretary of War, accused him and General Embick. Wedemeyer’s prospects grew even bleaker when the FBI discovered he had recently deposited several thousand dollars in the Riggs National Bank in Washington. He explained it was an inheritance and went on manfully to admit to the FBI that he knew Gen. Robert E. Wood, Charles A. Lindbergh, and other leaders of America First and agreed with some of their views. He often attended America First meetings, although never in uniform.

Anyway, the supposed Russian "hacks" were nothing of significance compared to the leak after Midway.

mockturtle said...

She knows very well they were 'leaked', not 'stolen'. Freudian slip for sure.

320Busdriver said...

Obama set the tone that allowed his most important cabinet member, Hillary at State, to use an unsecured private server to conduct all her government business on. This included the transmission of classified material.

The dems need more of that kind of leadership. Ordinary Americans understand how that is unacceptable and will render the proper verdict in the voting booth.

Anonymous said...

"Don't the American people have a right to know that hillary's daughter used the money donated for starving children in the 3rd world countries to pay for her wedding?"

More fake news, sheesh what is it with you people?

Anonymous said...

Now you people believe that the emails were "leaked"... by who? You folks live in fantasy land.

Anonymous said...

"Maybe she meant that they were stolen and then leaked, not that they were leaked, er, stolen...."

Oh thank goodness, someone with common sense.

Michael said...

Now you people believe that the emails were "leaked"... by who? You folks live in fantasy land.

LOL. Why Donna said so just this morning.

Bill, Republic of Texas said...

Why is Brazile still at the DNC? She did far more to help Hillary over Sanders than Wasser-name. Then she lied about it.

Now she's trying to hint the emails were tampered with. She now says they were misinformation. What a disgusting piece if trash.

It looks like Ellison will be a big improvement.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

Of the various principals, we know for sure Assange is lying because it is in his interest to conceal sources. He would never tell the truth on this topic.

Pookie Number 2 said...

More fake news, sheesh what is it with you people?

I actually have the same question, but about the many brain-dead people that mindlessly parrot whatever whiny catchphrase the Clintonians are using as their most recent excuse. How are you not too ashamed to make yourself into nothing more than trained seals?

Michael said...

Bill, Repjublic of Texas


She and others have implied for a while that the Russians not only hacked the emails but then went to tbe trouble of editing their content. LOL

Hyphenated American said...

"Don't the American people have a right to know that hillary's daughter used the money donated for starving children in the 3rd world countries to pay for her wedding?"

More fake news, sheesh what is it with you people?"


Fact check: no, it's not "fake news". The leaked emails confirmed this information:

Chelsea Clinton used her family foundation’s cash to pay for her wedding, living expenses and taxes on gifts of cash from her parents, according to a bombshell email made public Sunday.

Doug Band, formerly a top aide to President Bill Clinton, griped about the former first daughter’s spending in a Jan. 4, 2012, email released by WikiLeaks.

“The investigation into her getting paid for campaigning, using foundation resources for her wedding and life for a decade, taxes on money from her parents…,” Band wrote to John Podesta, now Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman.

“I hope that you will speak to her and end this. Once we go down this road…”
Band’s message is contained in a chain of emails that were hacked from Podesta’s Gmail account. WikiLeaks has released more than 50,000 of the stolen emails over the past 32 days.


http://nypost.com/2016/11/06/chelsea-clinton-used-foundation-to-help-pay-for-wedding-emails/

The Hillary team refused to confirm or deny the validity of this information.

Anonymous said...

Occam's Razor: She said leaked stolen emails because they were both. They were stolen by the Russian hackers and then released--- leaked--- to the media. So she didn't say anything "revealing."

Quaestor said...

Of the various principals, we know for sure Assange is lying because it is in his interest to conceal sources. He would never tell the truth on this topic.

Typically absurd (RealIy, ARM is that the best you can do? Pathetic.)

Of the various principals, we know for sure Brazile is lying because it is in her interest to conceal her clumsy handling of embarrassing Clinton secrets. She would never tell the truth on this topic.

See how that works?

Quaestor said...

How are you not too ashamed to make yourself into nothing more than trained seals?

Who knows? Maybe a trained seal is a step up in the world for the likes of Abie Someone.

Anonymous said...

http://www.inquisitr.com/3685982/chelsea-clinton-wikileaks-wedding-wikileaks-clinton-foundation-money-doug-band-wikileaks-email-chelsea-clinton-and-marc-mezvinsky/

"Doug Band has been Bill Clinton’s personal assistant since the 1990s. According to Fox News, Band wrote an email to John Podesta and two other Clinton aides after receiving word that Chelsea told “one of the [President] Bush 43 kids” and others about “an internal investigation of money within the Foundation.”"

Band had some disagreements with Chelsea, it appears he may have been mashing sour grapes.

Anonymous said...

"Occam's Razor: She said leaked stolen emails because they were both. They were stolen by the Russian hackers and then released--- leaked--- to the media. So she didn't say anything "revealing.""

Yeah! There is hope for humanity,another commenter with common sense.

walter said...

Blogger Michael K said...Brazile is a hack.
--
A hack who knows a thing or two about leaking..and has good reason to distract from the content. She is hacking this in a sense.
And the media enabling that makes them complicit.

Quayle said...

Unknown's handle should be Unknowing.

"Tillerson – the chief executive of ExxonMobil – has been a director of the oil company’s Russian subsidiary,...'

Oh, the horrors! An officer of a parent company is on the board of a subsidiary. Can you imagine the flim-flammery?

"More fake news, sheesh what is it with you people?"

Democrats always accuse others of their own dreamed-up dirty tricks. They create the ploy and genre of tricks, then when they get caught or lambasted, they accuse the conservatives of using the ploy or genre of tricks the Dems first dreamed up and created. For example, remember the fake news of that poor YouTube filmmaker being the cause of the attacks on our embassy? Fake news before anyone every debated fake news.

"Now you people believe that the emails were "leaked"... by who? You folks live in fantasy land."

How about a disgruntled Bernie supporter? How about Obama (No love lost between the Clintons and the Obamas, we've heard.) You know, Unknown, I am satisfied that there actually are progressives who resent that an out-of-touch, septuagenarian, money grubbing, bank-loving, establishment millionaire may have rigged her way into the nomination.

But in the whirl of post-election confusion, we've kind of lost track of what Unknown believes or knows, so let's ask:

Unknown, do you believe that the additional flexibility which Obama said he could give the Russians after the mid-term election was flexibility to hack into the DNC, or the flexibility to abet the slaughter of Syrian civilians and the bombing back into the stone age in Aleppo?

Or was it the flexibility to hack into our systems? 'Cause for a while, it looked like Hillary and Obama were loving Russian, what with all the resetting and flexibility giving and such. Now you're saying they're evil? What's with that?

Hyphenated American said...

"Band had some disagreements with Chelsea, it appears he may have been mashing sour grapes."

True. He had no issues with Chelsea misusing the money donated to feed starving children - he was upset that he was dissing him. But that in no way means that his matter of act statement in a private email was factually incorrect. He was simply saying that there was plenty of criminal things that chelsea had done, that should make her a little bit more careful when looking into the misdeeds of other Clinton people in the foundation.

This is how the criminals talk to each other. As you see, this is not "Fake news", there is clear evidence that Chelsey misused the money.

Agreed?

You are also free to share the response by Chelsea and the clinton family on this revelation. Have they denied it?

Big Mike said...

I was very upset when Brazile complained about the hackers spreading misinformation. No, they spread real information. Misinformation is what MSNBC and CNN put out there.

n.n said...

The latest deluge came as Deep Plunger overflowed Clinton's WaterCloset. The Washington Post and other JournoLists have been assigned janitorial work to cover-up and defend progressives and liberals' Pro-Choice (i.e. selective) philosophy.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

Quaestor said...
Of the various principals, we know for sure Brazile is lying because it is in her interest to conceal her clumsy handling of embarrassing Clinton secrets.


At a technical level Brazile didn't mishandle any data. She acted consistently with her perception of Clinton's interests.

traditionalguy said...

June 7, 1942 the Chicago Tribune ran a cover story on the victory at Midway,on June 4, 1942 announcing in the headline that the USN won because it had broken the Japanese Naval Code. FDR decided to arrest and hang the conservative FDR hating isolationist publisher. But acting cagey and cautious, like a Putin, he let it go in order to give it no more publicity.

But if ever a newspaper owner deserved to die, Robert McCormick did.

Lewis Wetzel said...

One of the differences between Left media outlets and pundits and those on the right: those on the Left will confidently assert that the CIA has determined that the Russians interfered with the election with the purpose of elevating Trump over Hillary. Even supposedly "unbiased" media outlets on the Left -- NPR, the NY Times -- will state without qualification. Media outlets and pundits on the right, even those that are anti-Trump, will qualify the heck out of what they say about the alleged Russian interference. It is based on an anonymous source at the CIA, the CIA is guessing at motivation and a bunch of other things (that the Russians were behind the Podesta hack, for example).
I just listened to an NPR report that hopelessly mashed up the Russian Federation and the old USSR. The reporter said, for example, that Russians who had immigrated to the US in the Soviet years "knew what it was like to live under the rule of a strong man."
NPR is really, really bad. Here is an example:

CORNISH: So what exactly are these new allegations, and more importantly, who's making them?

KELLY: They are all over the map, Audie. They range from a report by Slate of a mysterious communications between a Trump computer server and a Russian bank. There's also an NBC report out that the FBI is making inquiries into Paul Manafort's business connections. Paul Manafort we remember was one of Trump's former campaign managers.

There's also a report by Mother Jones out that quotes an anonymous former intelligence official who alleges that Russia has been trying to cultivate Trump as an asset, that they've been doing this for years and feeding him intelligence for years - so again, all over the map.

CORNISH: And the Trump campaign has denied all of these reports.

http://www.npr.org/2016/11/01/500263956/reports-raise-new-speculation-about-trumps-alleged-ties-to-russia

That's right, they are covering a Mother Jones report of an anonymous "former intelligence official." Note that at no time does NPR mention that Slate and Mother Jones are hard-left publications. The people at Slate and Mother Jones would claim that a vote for John Kasich was a vote for Hitler.

Lewis Wetzel said...

This is a fine example of the ungovernable compulsion of liberals to label their opinion as a fact:

Blogger AReasonableMan said...
Of the various principals, we know for sure Assange is lying because it is in his interest to conceal sources. He would never tell the truth on this topic.

Ann Althouse said...

"Occam's Razor: She said leaked stolen emails because they were both. They were stolen by the Russian hackers and then released--- leaked--- to the media. So she didn't say anything "revealing.""

Did you watch the video?

She said "leaked" then halted and said "stolen" as if it were a substitution, then reacted to what she'd said in a way that seemed to indicate awareness of a screwup.

Consider too that the chronological order -- if she meant both -- would be stolen, leaked. One more reason to think she did not mean to say leaked.

Steven said...

So, we are told by the media that we know that Putin was behind the release of the hacked email because a highly-placed intelligence source in the Kremlin told us that.

Okay. So, what treasonous asshole authorized revealing that we had a highly-placed asset in the Kremlin who knew about the decision to release the email, thus giving the Kremlin information that would help them hunt that asset down? Who decided that attacking Trump was worth compromising both national security and the life of a US intelligence asset?

Either the claims about Russian interference in the election are deliberate lies intended to undermine the legitimacy of the next President of the United States . . . or they're a deliberate betrayal of the national security of the United States and a vulnerable US intelligence source.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

Lewis Wetzel said...
This is a fine example of the ungovernable compulsion of liberals to label their opinion as a fact:


This is a fine example of the ungovernable compulsion of nitwits to make unfounded assumptions.

rhhardin said...

"Wikileaks" primes her to say leaked.

Michael K said...

we know for sure Assange is lying because it is in his interest to conceal sources.

ARM, this is bad even for you. Try to shape up.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

Michael K said...
ARM, this is bad even for you.


It is sad when even the completely fucking self-evident becomes a matter for partisan debate. Sad.

You partisans need to shape up.

William said...

Snowden gave hacked info to Wikileaks and through wiki to several major newspapers. Some of this information was harmful to our security interests and acutely embarrassing to America. The overall tone of the media coverage of Snowden and Wikileaks was favorable, and no effort was made to suppress the information.. This current batch of leaks is harmful and embarassing more to the DNC than to America or American interests. It is useful and edifying to note the different reactions on the part of the media this time around. It truly seems that their loyalties are more towards the DNC than to America.........I understand Gladwell's differentiation between a hacker and a leaker, but I'm sure there are other categories. How would you characterize Mark Felt, for example? I'm reasonably certain that there will be lots and lots of people in government who will rush to reveal any embarrassing or adverse information they have on the Trump administration as soon as such information becomes available.

kentuckyliz said...

I am surprised that you did not highlight the careful choice of words about Martha Rat-tits not "providing" the questions to Brazile, nor CNN "providing" them. Still leaves the door open to "take."

Yancey Ward said...

Yes, it was a bad slip, and she clearly noticed her own error as the follow on to the video showed.

Here is my interpretation- word has gone down the ranks in the DNC to only discuss these as stolen/hacked e-mails because the words imply an outside party is perpetrator. I have thought from the beginning that the most likely source of the DNC material was someone who worked there and supported Bernie Sanders simply because the only really damning information in them was how nearly every process was designed to minimize his chances to win the nomination. The Podesta material could have come from anywhere considering how his e-mail account was penetrated.

My operative assumption about Russian intelligence agencies is this- they penetrate any foreign electronic system they can, as does the US government. I just assume they hacked the DNC, the RNC, and Clinton's home-brew server, and I feel pretty confident they have penetrated much of the less well defended systems in the .gov domain. I also assume they the browsing histories of thousands of government and corporate officials. If the Russian government really was the source of the Wikileaks and wanted Trump to win the election, surely they could have found material more personally damaging than what was in the DNC and Podesta leaks by simply releasing the browsing histories of pretty much any male at the DNC, and probably a good number of the females, too. I assume the leaks are the authentic e-mails because who would fabricate that sort of stuff when one could sure fabricate something juicier?

Milwaukie guy said...

Way late to the party. Actually working on a Sunday. Posting this from another thread.

Wasted my morning on six straight hours of cable news. An old habit.

Saw CNN when Crowdstrike was introduced on somebody's show a couple of days ago. Read an article on them.

While I was wasting time this morning I decided to play journalist, to see what I could quickly find. Looked Crowdstrike up on Wickipedia [on the internet so it's true] along with Guccifer and G 2.0.

In the "executive summary," it said they have contracts in 170 countries and two notable clients are the SONY hack and the DNC hack. So far so good.

I went to the Crowdstrike blog to follow up on what they said on TV about the two hackers groups, Fuzzy Bear and Cozy Bear, which are Russia based, etc., etc. Sounds reasonable to me.

As far as Putin's motive, strategically it could never be Trump, because regardless of his foreign policy, domestically it's "Drill, baby, drill."

That is very deadly to non-diversified oil producers, including all our friends in Russia, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and some mopes like Nigeria and all the rest.

Vive la fracking!

OTOH, Hillary and the Sierra Club would have shut down another million barrels and been eminently blackmailable, because they both take money from Russia.

You can look it up. Like they used to say in the old days of guys like Mike Royko: "If your mother says she loves you, check it out."

Sammy Finkelman said...

It was leaked to Wikileaks. But the people who leaked the emails, who had had them for some time, didn't have any kind of authotized or semi-authorized access to the e-maild and stole it in the first place.

We also have that Wikileaks maybe claimed it was an ordinary leak from an insider, a la Snowden - the name Wikileaks itself, after all, implies that. And that it as an insider who divulged the DNC files seems to be the position of the Russian government. As for John Podesta, I don't think theer's any claim that it was anything but a hack.

Sammy Finkelman said...

Yancey Ward said... 12/19/16, 2:15 AM

Yes, it was a bad slip, and she clearly noticed her own error as the follow on to the video showed.

Not a bad slip, as in fact it was a leak. That doesn't mean it wasn't stolen in the first place. It was somewhat old by he time it was released, and they assume the Russians had it for a while before deciding to leak it.

I have thought from the beginning that the most likely source of the DNC material was someone who worked there and supported Bernie Sanders simply because the only really damning information in them was how nearly every process was designed to minimize his chances to win the nomination. The Podesta material could have come from anywhere considering how his e-mail account was penetrated.

My feeling: They didn't have anything better, and they thought maybe it was worth something. They released lots of stuff. I think it was American media who noticed what was good about it. Wikileaks didn't point it out. It never does, really. And the ex-KGB Russians are not all that attuned to American politics.

My operative assumption about Russian intelligence agencies is this- they penetrate any foreign electronic system they can, as does the US government. I just assume they hacked the DNC, the RNC, and Clinton's home-brew server,

If they hacked Clinton's e-mail server why didn't they releae anything from it? Wikileaks kept hinting they would. But nothing. Because they had nothing. The truth is Hillary's server was probably actually the most secure Internet accessible e-mail system in the history of e-mail. For starters: no backdoor password re-set. And no easy to guess password. Phishing wouldn't work. Operating system not publicly known. Any intrusion would be noticeable because of the strain on the system. Hillary's Communication was done solely through secure, encrypted Blackberry. Server physically protected by the Secret Service.

And it was secure also from supoenas, both by Congressional committees and from prosecutors; Freedom of Information Requests; inquiries by Inspector Genersl - in fact the state department didn't even have an Inspector General during all the time Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, which was the longest any U.S. federal government agency had gone without an Inspector general since they started having Inspector Generals, in the last two years of the Carter administration; and any commissoon of inquiry, like the 9/11 comission, that might be set up by the president.
and I feel pretty confident they have penetrated much of the less well defended systems in the .gov domain.

The Chinese did more penetration of computer systems. They are said to be bolder, but, as a result, get detected more often. They broe into both the obama and mcCAin campaigns in 2008 but didn't leak anything.

I also assume they the browsing histories of thousands of government and corporate officials. If the Russian government really was the source of the Wikileaks and wanted Trump to win the election, surely they could have found material more personally damaging than what was in the DNC

I don't think they had any idea what's damaging and what is not. And how would the browsing history of anyone damage the party

Guccifer 2.0 was taking requests from journalists and bloggers. That's how much they knew what to leak.

I assume the leaks are the authentic e-mails because who would fabricate that sort of stuff when one could sure fabricate something juicier?

That's right. They did fabricate emails and documents in oher countries. A notable case recently: A Lithuanian plan to annex Kaliningrad. Which looked suspiciously like the plan Russia had actually carried out in Crimea they say.

MayBee said...

Everyone here remembers that John Brennan got his job with Obama *after* someone at his firm was caught getting into the State Department/Passport files of Obama, McCain, and Clinton right?

The breach of Obama's file in particular was breaking news at the time. But it turned out to be ok, I guess.

CWJ said...

Yancey Ward's comment comes closest to my oen sense of the matter.

None of Sammy F's objections are convincing. Some make sense only as arguing backward from conclusions already drawn. eg: Hillary's system wasn't hacked.

Anonymous said...

My guess is that the Russians indeed hacked the DNC and Clinton campaign computers, but that the e-mails were leaked by a DNC/Clinton campaign worker disgruntled at the treatment of Bernie and corporate cronyism of the Clinton foundation. These are not mutually exclusive.

Yancey Ward said...

From Finkelman:

"My feeling: They didn't have anything better, and they thought maybe it was worth something."

And:

"If they hacked Clinton's e-mail server why didn't they release anything from it?"

The Russian intelligence agencies are all almost 100% certain to have more damaging material than what has been publicly released. The very fact of the vanilla sort of details in what Wikileaks did release tells me that this was not sourced from any technically proficient hacking operation. This pretty rules out any state intelligence agencies in the world- especially the Russian ones.

I believe the Russian government did hack Clinton's server, and the simple explanation for why none of it was released is that they weren't the source of the Wikileaks material in the first place. Such information is far more valuable unreleased for multiple reasons.

NO GOOGLES said...

Assange said that the DNC leaks were not a state source and he said that because his source was likely already dead.

98% chance that Seth Rich, the DNC staffer that died about 11 days before the DNC leak was made public, was the source. Rich was appalled about the DNC's treatment of Bernie Sanders.

Assange gave some general information about his source because Rich was already dead.

Bilwick said...

Donna Brazile? That respected journalist? Is that the same one?