Vault 7: The Russian Hacking story is over
No convincing evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election through the Wikileaks releases will ever exist. Nice try FBI, DHS, Obama and “17 intelligence agencies” but you’re lying.
No evidence, no story
Trump may have troubling or illegal ties to the Russian mafia or government. The Putin government may have met with the Trump campaign to plan to undermine the integrity of the 2016 election. We can’t yet know all of these questions.
We can know with almost complete certainty, however, that Craig Murray and Julian Asssange’s statements that Russia had no role in the DNC and Podesta leaks will almost certainly remain the best and final word on the subject of how the emails got to Wikileaks.
Any one of dozens of individuals no longer or never associated with the CIA could have left evidence to suggest Russia was hacking the DNC. The files created by the CIA are now out there, floating around, and have been for months or years. The Russians, the CIA, a friend of a guy who worked for the CIA in 2014… too many suspects, all have the same fingerprints.
The individual who passed these programs to Wikileaks to publish today did so, perhaps, in the hope that software companies and individuals would put fixes in place to protect privacy. Wikileaks and the leaker behind Vault 7 are providing a public service in revealing the extent to which our information is still being hacked by the government, even after Obama promised to stop it following the NSA Snowden releases.
We cannot know who hacked the DNC: no authentic “Russian” trail is possible. If the government wants to make the contrary claim, that we can know Russia did hack the DNC and Podesta, they’ll have a hard time proving it. Anything that looks Russian isn’t.
CIA Hacker is a fun job
We’re only a day into year zero, as Assange puts it. Vault 7 Wikileaks release includes CIA hackers having what seems like a great time. They keep in shape. They love their work, even if they complain a bit from time to time.
Who are they fighting and why? Never seems to come up. It’s just a fun job. They get to travel to Germany and play spook. This leak has already appeared in an article in Der Spiegel.
CIA is all in, for themselves
The CIA itself has a clear mission: to avoid any scrutiny of their budget and to have as much latitude to act as independently as possible. Do the president and congress have any control over these guys?
The idea that there is a real foreign enemy out there, the idea that the CIA represents the good guys fighting this foreign enemy seems utterly absurd at this point. The CIA has to prop up the enemies in order to justify their budget. Thus, the CIA is making Russia malware stronger and more scary. Imagine what would happen in the Russians were not that bad or not that effective: the CIA would have a hard time justifying their secret budget of some unknown billions of dollars.
Scary stuff from the CIA
Vault 7 is filled with strange and disturbing comments. Here we read, “Mendicant Engineer — reserved for the next tool delivered during a gov’t shutdown.” Nice to know they are ready for the shutdown. The rest of us? Not so much.
Fake-off mode is scary. “Suppress LEDs to improve look of Fake-Off mode… Turn on or leave WiFi turned on in Fake-Off mode… Parse unencrypted audio collection… During initial development, a rough approximation of bit rates for different audio quality settings were made. Quality 1 settings required 100 kB/minutes. Quality 5 settings required 250 kB/minutes. Quality 7 settings required 350 kB/min. Quality 5 seemed to provide very nice results and is usually used.”
Hello, Big Brother. Can you hear me?
Smoking gun of fake Russian claims
The CIA intentionally uses Russian malware and disguises their tracks to look like Russians. Here is the link to the article on how to hide your tracks and look like the Russians. In these instructions for hiding your origins, we read “DO NOT leave dates/times such as compile timestamps, linker timestamps, build times, access times, etc. that correlate to general US core working hours (i.e. 8am-6pm Eastern time).” More of those in that same link.
Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in their joint statement on Russian hacking, said, “. . . are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow — the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”
So, who are you going to believe, the DHS or your own eyes? There is no such thing as evidence “consistent with the methods” of the Russians because those same methods are consistent with the CIA.
In the FireEye report commissioned to prove Russian hacking, we read, “The second was that malware compile times from 2007 to 2014 corresponded to normal business hours in the UTC (+) 4 time zone, which includes major Russian cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg.” Right, just as the CIA instructed their hackers to do.
The FBI in their report “GRIZZLY STEPPE — Russian Malicious Cyber Activity” said, “The U.S. Government confirms that two different RIS actors participated in the intrusion into a U.S. political party. The first actor group, known as Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) 29, entered into the party’s systems in summer 2015, while the second, known as APT28, entered in spring 2016.” The systems were old Russia malware, as reported here.
Old, well-known Russian malware is just what the CIA would use. “The CIA’s Remote Devices Branch’s UMBRAGE group collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques ‘stolen’ from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation.”
We can now say that the “Russia did it” story is over in anything other than an “alternative fact” universe. There is not now nor will there ever be any evidence that Russia gave the Podesta and DNC leaks to Wikileaks. If Russia influenced the 2016 US election, they did it some other way, without Wikileaks, without revealing Podesta’s emails.
Driverless cars, smart TVs: big brother has infected tech
Can the CIA murder anyone at any time by turning their own car against them? Michael Hastings was investigating the CIA, then died in a car crash. And then there is this:
If they are listening to you through your TV can you dismiss the idea they killed Kennedy?
Have you seen this Kennedy quote? “I will splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the wind.” — John F. Kennedy
It’s been pretty prominent today and it is a real quote. The writers of this 1966 New York Times article got the quote from someone in the Kennedy administration. He was really murdered and the idea that the CIA did it is tin-foil hat stuff… like the CIA listening to you through your television, which they can do right now.
I didn’t think too much about the Kennedy assassination until that quote popped up. I am agnostic on whether or not the CIA killed Kennedy. They might have. It would not be the first democratically elected leader they killed. I dug out the original article with the “scatter to the wind quote,” from April 1966 from the front page of the New York Times. You should read the entire article. It’s amazing. No such intelligent, fair reporting is likely to appear in the New York Times today. Instead of a critical and fair consideration of all possibilities, otherwise known as journalism, the NYT today puts out propaganda like this.
This Vault 7 release confirms the seemingly obvious statement by John McAfee back in December: “if it looks like the Russians did it, then I can guarantee you it was not the Russians.”
70 billion dollars buys you a lot of code and newsprint
With 70 billion dollars in the budget, the CIA can give money to Amazon to buy the Washington Post and pay software developers to let them in.
