The DNC Hack Is Watergate, but Worse

[SidDithers]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/07/the_dnc_hack_is_watergate_but_worse.html

The email dump isn’t a high-minded act of transparency. It’s a foreign power attempting to swing an election for its favored candidate.

By Franklin Foer

A foreign government has hacked a political party’s computers—and possibly an election. It has stolen documents and timed their release to explode with maximum damage. It is a strike against our civic infrastructure. And though nobody died—and there was no economic toll exacted—the Russians were aiming for a tender spot, a central node of our democracy.

It was hard to see the perniciousness of this attack at first, especially given how news media initially covered the story. The Russians, after all, didn’t knock out a power grid. And when the stolen information arrived, it was dressed in the ideology of WikiLeaks, which presents its exploits as possessing a kind of journalistic bravery the traditional media lacks.

But this document dump wasn’t a high-minded act of transparency. To state the obvious, only one political party has been exposed. (Selectively exposed: Many emails were culled from the abridged dump.) And it’s not really even the inner workings of the Democrats that have been revealed; the documents don’t suggest new layers of corruption or detail any new conspiracies. They’re something closer to the embarrassing emails that fly across every office in America—griping, the testing of stupid ideas, the banal musings that take place in private correspondence. The emails don’t get us much beyond a fact every sentient political observer could already see: Officials at the DNC, hired to work hand in glove with a seemingly inevitable nominee, were actively making life easier for Hillary Clinton. It didn’t take these leaks to understand that Debbie Wasserman Schultz is a hack and that the DNC should be far more neutral in presidential primaries.

"This is trespassing, it’s thievery, it’s a breathtaking transgression of privacy."

Sid

[tonyt53]

1. As the next few months progress there will be more of their antics on display.

[etherealtruth]

2. It looks that way

[leftstreet]

3. So it's been proven the Russians did this?

[emulatorloo]

4. "Why Experts Are Sure Russia Hacked the DNC Emails"

Evidence starting to pile up.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1014&pid=1531857

[SidDithers]

5. Yup. Here's the ThreatConnect info...

https://www.threatconnect.com/guccifer-2-all-roads-lead-russia/

Sid

[bananas]

18. Experts were sure Iraq had WMD, Colin Powell presented some of the evidence to the UN

The evidence was crap, but a lot of people fell for it.

[randome]

21. Yeah, this is exactly like Bush Jr. days.

The Obama administration is not trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]"The whole world is a circus if you know how to look at it."
Tony Randall, 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964)[/center][/font][hr]

[joshcryer]

25. The evidence here is not crap.

[etherealtruth]

6. I posted this earlier ... there is morenow, much more (this is a start)

it seems that this is the conclusion of all security analysts in and out .....
http://www.democraticunderground.com/12512301770#post30
.... of the government. the US is being very cautious in their accusations (understandably due to the sensitive nature and the foreign government involved) .... there doesn't seem to be any doubt in anyone's mind.


http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/why-experts-think-russia-hacked-dnc-emails-n616486
Why Experts Are Sure Russia Hacked the DNC Emails
its work hours aligned with a Russian time zone, cybersecurity company FireEye concluded in a report.
•LANGUAGE: The hackers also left an obvious digital fingerprint, one cybersecurity expert said, perhaps on purpose: a signature in Russia's Cyrillic alphabet.
•FORENSIC EVIDENCE: After a different batch of hacked Democratic emails was released last month, a wide spectrum of cyber-security experts concluded that it was the work of Russian intelligence agencies through previously known proxy groups known as COZY BEAR or APT 29, and FANCY BEAR or APT 28. "We've had lots of experience with both of these actors … and know them well," according to the DNC's own contract cybersecurity firm, Crowdstrike, which blogged that one of the two groups had already gained illegal access to the White House, State Department and even the military's Joint Chiefs of Staff.
•MOTIVE: Given their mutual and very public bromance, Putin would much prefer a Trump presidency to a Clinton one, and the timing suggests the leak was timed for maximum embarrassment to the Democrats and their presumptive nominee. Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said the campaign was told by cyber experts that Russian hackers stole and released the emails to help Trump. "I don't think it's coincidental that these emails were released on the eve of our convention here," said Mook, "and I think that's disturbing."
•HISTORY: U.S. intelligence officials, including Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, said they had previously seen evidence of foreign hackers spying on U.S. presidential candidates, including some state-sponsored ones, and that such cyber-intrusions would become even more commonplace.





The main reason, however, is that the email hack is exactly the kind of thing Russian hackers can do, are supposed to do, and are used for by Putin and his aides, retired four-star Adm. James Stavridis told NBC News.



http://www.npr.org/2016/06/14/482029912/russian-hackers-penetrate-democratic-national-committee-steal-trump-research
Russian hackers have been accessing the Democratic National Committee's computer network for the past year, and have stolen information including opposition research files on presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

According to CrowdStrike, the security firm the DNC called in to deal with the massive data breach, one group of hackers tied to the Russian government has been stealing information from the national party for about a year.

"They infiltrated the DNC's network last summer and were monitoring their communications, their email servers, and the like," company co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch told NPR.

A second group, also tied to Russia, accessed the DNC's network in April. "They went straight for the research department of the DNC and exfiltrated opposition materials on Mr. Trump," Alperovitch said.



http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/25/us/politics/donald-trump-russia-emails.html?_r=0

Proving the source of a cyberattack is notoriously difficult. But researchers have concluded that the national committee was breached by two Russian intelligence agencies, which were the same attackers behind previous Russian cyberoperations at the White House, the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff last year. And metadata from the released emails suggests that the documents passed through Russian computers. Though a hacker claimed responsibility for giving the emails to WikiLeaks, the same agencies are the prime suspects. Whether the thefts were ordered by Mr. Putin, or just carried out by apparatchiks who thought they might please him, is anyone’s guess.


http://www.npr.org/2016/07/25/487380897/examining-russias-role-in-leaked-democratic-party-emails

[bananas]

7. No, it hasn't been proven - not even close to proven.

So far it's just conspiracy theories and creative speculation.
https://theintercept.com/2016/07/26/russian-intelligence-hack-dnc-nsa-know-snowden-says/

[FSogol]

9. Is the Intercept pretending that Snowden still has contacts in the NSA?

[bananas]

13. Are you pretending that you still have contacts in the NSA?

Get real, or get a clue.

[geek tragedy]

12. Lol, Glenn Greenwald, lol nt

[bananas]

14. Lol, NSA, lol!

[Rex]

15. How ironic is that?

[giftedgirl77]

34. Lol

[FSogol]

8. K&R. n/t

[workinclasszero]

10. This is big sid

I hope it blows up in Trumps face!

[kentuck]

11. I doubt it was the Russians?

I think your Watergate analogy may be closer to the truth. But, I have a difficult time believing that Trump, Manafort, and Spicer did not know about it?

They will make Bush and Cheney look like petty thieves. They only stole Florida.

[Matrosov]

16. Yet the Russians didn't write those emails

The DNC did. There would've been nothing controversial to leak if nothing controversial had been written.

[randome]

17. If you think a handful of emails are 'proof' of anything, you're engaged in wishful thinking.

Just because a few DNC-ers were rightfully disdainful of Sanders does not mean they did a thing to subvert Sanders.

The 'controversy' you see is something that supports your pre-conceived notions.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]"The whole world is a circus if you know how to look at it."
Tony Randall, 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964)[/center][/font][hr]

[Rex]

20. The DNC admits to writing the emails and they could have been altered by Russia.

Both actions are not mutually exclusive. DWS didn't step down due to fake emails, but Russia still tried to use them to help Trump get elected. This is all about NATO and Russia wanting it to go away. If Trump gets elected, it just might or at least become weak.

[emulatorloo]

23. Nobody said Russians wrote the emails. This thread is about who hacked the server.

They are two different stories, both important.

There are lots of threads on the content of the emails. No one disputes content of email as far as I know.

This is a thread on who hacked the server.

What we want to know is whether it was the Russians hacked it, and more and more evidence suggests they did.

This is important because trump and Putin have ties, so it is possible Russian Intel leaked to help Trump campaign. If Putin is attempting to manipulate the US election, I want to know about it.

[Squinch]

28. Please produce a single email that shows evidence of biased influencing of the primaries.

In the 20,000 emails, there were two emails, exchanged by two low level assholes, that discussed Bernie's religion. They WERE awful, but they were exchanged AFTER Bernie lost.

I keep asking people, and so far NO ONE has come up with a single email other than those two.

How about you? Have you found the secret cache that is actually damaging?

[randome]

19. Putin and Trump, two bungling clowns who deserve one another.

[hr][font color="blue"][center]"The whole world is a circus if you know how to look at it."
Tony Randall, 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964)[/center][/font][hr]

[Scuba]

24. I really, really wish there had been no bias to be exposed.

But since there was, I'm glad it was exposed.

[Squinch]

27. Oy, Scuba.

You and I have had a long conversation in which you were not able to find any emails that showed any evidence of primary influencing, despite the fact that Fox News tells us they are the end of the world.

NOW we know that a foreign government, which is in the hands of a megalomaniac, was behind the hack. We know the hack was done to help his friend, the other megalomaniac, get elected President of OUR country. And you STILL support this thing?

I like you, man, but that is nuts.

[Scuba]

29. Snopes, Robert Reich, Nancy Pelosi, Ed Rendell.

And in the other corner, Squinch.

[Squinch]

31. And a screaming lack of evidence. You've seen them, Scuba. You know it's not there.

[Scuba]

32. None so blind as those who refuse to see.

[Squinch]

33. True. They are often made tools by their enemies. Which in this case is Trump and Putin.

[bravenak]

26. This is the real scandal. We need to investigate Trump's role in this crime.

And people who think it is a okay for people to hack into servers and steal info and distribute it and condoning criminal behaiviour. Any one who thinks this is okay should post their email address and password right now to prove their mettle. I bet they wont because if it happened to them ut would be a high crime. People who want to use this to attack Democrats are not DEMOCRATS. They are not on our side. We need to find out what happened and make sure it is known that this is criminal. Assange should be charged.

[Squinch]

30. As a nation we are completely ignoring this. This is an attack that could presage

a lot worse.

Influencing our elections, influencing our financial system, there is no end to where it can go.

THIS scares me.