[Peace-discuss] Russia Gate Hoax - evidence # 1

[David Johnson]

RUSSIA GATE HOAX - Evidence # 1 

At the time I
<http://patricklawrence.us/new-report-raises-big-questions-last-years-dnc-ha
ck/> reported on the findings of VIPS and associated forensic scientists,
that the most fundamental evidence that the events of summer 2016
constituted a leak, not a hack, was the transfer rate-the speed at which
data was copied. The speed proven then was an average of 22.7 megabytes per
second. That speed matches what is standard when someone with physical
access uses an external storage device to copy data from a computer or
server and is much faster than a remote hack, reliant on communications
<https://www.dictionary.com/browse/topology?s=t> topology available at the
time, could achieve.

Binney experimented into the autumn. By mid-autumn he had tested several
routes-from East Coast locations to cities in eastern Europe, from New
Jersey to London. The fastest internet transfer speed achieved, during the
New Jersey-to-Britain test, was 12.0 megabytes of data per second. Since
this time it has emerged from G-2.0's metadata that the detected average
speed-the 22.7 megabytes per second-included peak speeds that ran as high as
49.1 megabytes per second, impossible over the internet. "You'd need a
dedicated, leased, 400-megabit line all the way to Russia to achieve that
result," Binney said in a recent interview. 

To my knowledge, no one with an understanding of the science involved,
including various former skeptics, any longer questions the validity of the
specific finding based on the observed transfer rate. That remains the
bedrock evidence of the case VIPS and others advance without qualification.
"No one-including the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA-has come out against this
finding," Binney said Monday. "Anyone who says the speed we demonstrated can
be achieved remotely, our position is 'Let's see it. We'll help any way we
can.' There hasn't been anyone yet."

 <https://consortiumnews.com/category/commentary/> Commentary,
<https://consortiumnews.com/category/intelligence-2/> Intelligence,
<https://consortiumnews.com/category/international/> International,
<https://consortiumnews.com/category/international/russia/> Russia,
<https://consortiumnews.com/category/russiagate/> Russiagate,
<https://consortiumnews.com/category/vips-memos/> VIPS Memos

'Too Big to Fail': Russia-gate One Year After VIPS Showed a Leak, Not a Hack

August 13, 2018 .
<https://consortiumnews.com/2018/08/13/too-big-to-fail-russia-gate-one-year-
after-vips-showed-a-leak-not-a-hack/#comments> 321 Comments 

Save

One year later, the VIPS memo contending that the DNC emails were leaked and
not hacked has yet to be successfully challenged. Meanwhile, the country
sinks deeper into the morass of the new McCarthyism, comments Patrick
Lawrence.

By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News

 
<https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Patrick-S-freeport-12
-2012-Color-No-3-1.jpg>
https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Patrick-S-freeport-12-
2012-Color-No-3-1-130x130.jpgA year has passed since highly credentialed
intelligence professionals produced the first hard evidence that allegations
of mail theft and other crimes attributed to Russia rested on purposeful
falsification and subterfuge. The initial reaction to these revelations-a
firestorm of frantic denial-augured ill, and the time since has fulfilled
one's worst expectations. One year later we live within an institutionalized
proscription of proven reality. Our discourse consists of a series of fence
posts and taboos. By any detached measure, this lands us in deep, serious
trouble. The sprawl of what we call "Russia-gate" now brings our republic
and its institutions to a moment of great peril-the gravest since the
McCarthy years and possibly since the Civil War. No, I do not consider this
hyperbole. 

Much has happened since Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
published its report on intrusions into the Democratic Party's mail servers
on Consortium News on July 24 last year. Parts of the intelligence
apparatus-by no means all or even most of it-have issued official
"assessments" of Russian culpability. Media have produced countless
multi-part "investigations," "special reports," and what-have-yous that
amount to an orgy of faulty syllogisms. Robert Mueller's special
investigation has issued two sets of indictments that, on scrutiny, prove as
wanting in evidence as the notoriously flimsy intelligence "assessment" of
January 6, 2017.

Indictments are not evidence and do not need to contain evidence. That is
supposed to come out at trial, which is very
<https://consortiumnews.com/2018/07/14/clinging-to-collusion-why-evidence-wi
ll-probably-never-be-produced-in-the-indictments-of-russian-agents/>
unlikely to ever happen. Nevertheless, the corporate media has treated the
indictments as convictions. 

Numerous sets of sanctions against Russia, individual Russians, and Russian
entities have been imposed on the basis of this great conjuring of
assumption and presumption. The latest came last week, when the Trump
administration announced measures in response to the alleged attempt to
murder Sergei and Yulia Skripal, a former double agent and his daughter, in
England last March. No evidence proving responsibility in the Skripal case
has yet been produced. This amounts to our new standard. It prompted a
reader with whom I am in regular contact to ask, "How far will we allow our
government to escalate against others without proof of anything?"

This is a very good question. 

 <https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Re.jpg>
https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Re-288x400.jpg

Cover of 2001 book that looks back on the earlier period of anti-Russia
hysteria.

There have been many attempts to discredit VIPS50 as the group's
<https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/24/intel-vets-challenge-russia-hack-evid
ence/,> document is called. There has been much amateurish journalism, false
reporting, misrepresentation, distortion, misquotation, and omission. We
have been treated to much shoddy science, attempts at character
assassination, a great deal of base name-calling, and much else. Russia is
routinely advanced as the greatest threat to democracy Americans now face.
Is there any denying that we live amid an induced hysteria now comparable to
the "Red under every bed" period of the 1950s? 

None of this has altered the basic case. VIPS and forensic scientists
working with it have continued their investigations. New facts, some of
which alter conclusions drawn last year, have come to light, and these are
to be addressed. But the basic evidence that Russia-gate is a false
narrative concocted by various constituents of national power stands,
difficult as this is to discern. Scrape back all that is ethically
unacceptable and unscrupulously conveyed into the public sphere and you find
that nothing has changed: No one "hacked" the Democratic party's mail in the
summer of 2016. It was leaked locally. From what one can make out, it was
done to expose the party leadership's corrupt efforts to sink Bernie
Sanders' insurgent campaign to win the Democratic nomination. 

But in another, very profound way, more has changed since VIPS50 was
published than one could have imagined a year ago. American discourse has
descended to a dangerous level of irrationality. The most ordinary standards
of evidentiary procedure are forgone. Many of our key institutions-the
foreign policy apparatus, the media, key intelligence and law-enforcement
agencies, the political leadership-are now extravagantly committed to a
narrative none appears able to control. The risk of self-inflicted damage
these institutions assume, should the truth of the Russia-gate events
emerge-as one day it surely will-is nearly incalculable. This is what
inspires my McCarthy and Civil War references. Russia-gate, in a phrase, has
become too big to fail. 

This column is an attack on no one. However it may be read, it is not
intended as another round of vituperative argument adding to the din and fog
we already suffer daily. No shred of ideology informs it. I write a
lament-this for all we have done to ourselves and our institutions this past
year, and to the prospect of an orderly world, and for all that must somehow
be done to repair the damage once enough of us indeed recognize what has
been done. 

New VIPS Findings

 <https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Binney.jpg>
https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Binney-300x300.jpg

Binney: Dares anyone to prove remote speeds.

The forensic scientists working with VIPS continued their research and
experiments after VIPS50 was published. So have key members of the VIPS
group, notably William Binney, the National Security Agency's former
technical director for global analysis and designer of programs the agency
still uses to monitor internet traffic. Such work continues as we speak,
indeed. This was always the intent: "Evidence to date" was the premise of
VIPS50. Over the past year there have been confirmations of the original
thesis and some surprises that alter secondary aspects of it. Let us look at
the most significant of these findings.

At the time I
<http://patricklawrence.us/new-report-raises-big-questions-last-years-dnc-ha
ck/> reported on the findings of VIPS and associated forensic scientists,
that the most fundamental evidence that the events of summer 2016
constituted a leak, not a hack, was the transfer rate-the speed at which
data was copied. The speed proven then was an average of 22.7 megabytes per
second. That speed matches what is standard when someone with physical
access uses an external storage device to copy data from a computer or
server and is much faster than a remote hack, reliant on communications
<https://www.dictionary.com/browse/topology?s=t> topology available at the
time, could achieve.

Binney experimented into the autumn. By mid-autumn he had tested several
routes-from East Coast locations to cities in eastern Europe, from New
Jersey to London. The fastest internet transfer speed achieved, during the
New Jersey-to-Britain test, was 12.0 megabytes of data per second. Since
this time it has emerged from G-2.0's metadata that the detected average
speed-the 22.7 megabytes per second-included peak speeds that ran as high as
49.1 megabytes per second, impossible over the internet. "You'd need a
dedicated, leased, 400-megabit line all the way to Russia to achieve that
result," Binney said in a recent interview. 

To my knowledge, no one with an understanding of the science involved,
including various former skeptics, any longer questions the validity of the
specific finding based on the observed transfer rate. That remains the
bedrock evidence of the case VIPS and others advance without qualification.
"No one-including the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA-has come out against this
finding," Binney said Monday. "Anyone who says the speed we demonstrated can
be achieved remotely, our position is 'Let's see it. We'll help any way we
can.' There hasn't been anyone yet."

There is also the question of where and when leaks were executed. Research
into this has turned out differently. 

Evidence last year, based on analysis of the available metadata, showed that
the copy operation date-stamped July 5, 2016, took place in the Eastern U.S.
time zone. But Forensicator, one of the chief forensic investigators working
on the mail-theft case anonymously, published evidence in May showing that
while there was activity in the Eastern zone at the time of that copy, there
was also a copy operation in the Pacific time zone, where clocks run three
hours earlier that EST. In an earlier publication he had also reported
activity in the Central time zone.
<https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/guccifer-640x393.png>
https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/guccifer-640x393-400x2
46.png 

Plainly, more was awaiting discovery as to the when and where of the copy
operations. The identity of Guccifer 2.0, who claimed to be a Romanian
hacker but which the latest Mueller indictment claims is a construct of the
GRU, Russian military intelligence, has never been proven. The question is
what G-2.0 did with or to the data in question. It turns out that both more,
and less, is known about G-2.0 than was thought to have been previously
demonstrated. This work has been completed only recently. It was done by
Binney in collaboration with Duncan Campbell, a British journalist who has
followed the Russia-gate question closely. 

Peak Speed Established

Binney visited Campbell in Brighton, England, early this past spring. They
examined all the metadata associated with the files G-2.0 has made public.
They looked at the number of files, the size of each, and the time stamps at
the end of each. It was at this time that Binney and Campbell established
the peak transfer rate at 49.1 megabytes per second. 

But they discovered something else of significance, too. At some point G-2.0
had merged two sets of data, one dated July 5, 2016, which had been known,
and another dated the following September 1, which had not been known. In
essence, Campbell reverse-engineered G-2.0's work: He took the sets of data
G-2.0 presented as two and combined them back into one. "G-2.0 used an
algorithm to make a downloaded file look like two files," Binney explained.
"Those two shuffled back together like a deck of cards."

G-2.0 then took another step. Running another algorithm, he changed all the
dates on all the files. With yet another algorithm, he changed the hours
stamped on each file. These are called "range changes" among the
professionals. The conclusion was then obvious: G-2.0 is a fabrication and a
fabricator. Forensicator had already
<https://theforensicator.wordpress.com/did-guccifer-2-plant-his-russian-fing
erprints/> proven that the G-2.0 entity had inserted Russian "fingerprints"
into the document known as the "Trump Opposition Report," which G-2.0 had
published on June 15, 2016. It is clear that no firm conclusions can be
drawn at this point as to when or where G-2.0 did what he did. 

"Now you need to prove everything you might think about him," Binney told
me. "We have no way of knowing anything about him or what he has done, apart
from manipulating the files. We detected activity in the Eastern time zone.
Now we have to ask again, 'Which time zone?' The West Coast copy operation
[discovered by Forensicator] has to be proven. All the data has been
manipulated. It's a fabrication." 

This throws various things into question. The conclusions initially drawn on
time and location in VIPS50 are now subject to these recent discoveries. "In
retrospect, giving 'equal importance' status to data pertaining to the
locale was mistaken," Ray McGovern, a prominent VIPS member, wrote in a
recent note. "The key finding on transfer speed always dwarfed it in
importance." 

The indictments against 12 Russian intelligence officers announced in
mid-July by Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney-general, also come into
question. They rest in considerable part on evidence derived from G-2.0 and
DCLeaks, another online persona. How credible are those indictments in view
of what is now known about G-2.0?

Binney told me: "Once we proved G-2.0 is a fabrication and a manipulator,
the timing and location questions couldn't be answered but really didn't
matter. I don't right now see a way of absolutely proving either time or
location. But this doesn't change anything. We know what we know: The
intrusion into the Democratic National Committee mail was a local
download-wherever 'local' is." That doesn't change. As to Rosenstein, he'll
have a lot to prove."

What Role does Evidence Play?

 <https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Rosen.jpg>
https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Rosen-347x400.jpg

Rosenstein at the Justice Department on July 13 announcing indictments
against 12 GRU agents. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Rosenstein's predicament-and there is no indication he understands it as
one-brings us to an essential problem: What is the place of evidence in
American public discourse? Of rational exchange? 

The questions are germane far beyond the Russia-gate phenomenon, but it is
there that answers are most urgent. What is implicit in the Rosenstein
indictments has been evident everywhere in our public sphere for a year or
more: Make a presumption supported by circumstantial evidence or none and
build other presumptions upon it until a false narrative is constructed. The
press has deployed this device for as long as I have been a practitioner:
"Might" or "could" or "possibly" becomes "perhaps," "probably" and "almost
certainly," and then moves on to unqualified fact in the course of, maybe,
several weeks. Now this is how our most basic institutions-not least
agencies of the Justice Department-routinely operate.

This is what I mean when I refer to ours as a republic in peril. 

There is the argument that certain things have been uncovered over the past
year, and these are enough to conclude that Russia plots to undermine our
democracy. I refer to the small number of Facebook advertisements attributed
to Russians, to strings of Twitter messages, to various phishing exercises
that occur thousands of times a day the world over. To be clear, I am no
more satisfied with the evidence of Russian involvement in these cases than
I am with the evidence in any other aspect of the Russia-gate case. But for
the sake of argument, let us say it is all true.

Does this line up with the Russophobic hysteria-not too strong a term-that
envelops us? Does this explain the astonishing investments our public
institutions, the press, and leading political parties have made in
advancing this hysteria as they did a variant of in the 1950s? 

As global politics go, some serious thought should be given to a reality we
have created all by ourselves: It is now likely that America has built a new
Cold War division with Russia that will prove permanent for the next 20 to
30 years. All this because of some Facebook ads and Twitter threads of
unproven origin? Am I the only one who sees a weird and worrisome gap
between what we are intent on believing-as against thinking or knowing-and
the consequences of these beliefs?

There was an orthodoxy abroad many centuries ago called Fideism. In the
simplest terms, it means the privileging of faith and belief over reason. It
was the enemy of individual conscience, among much else. Fideism has deep
roots, but it was well around in the 16th century, when Montaigne and others
had to navigate its many dangers. Closer to our time, William James landed a
variant on American shores with an 1896 address called "The Will to
Believe." Bertrand Russell countered this line of thinking a couple of
decades later with "Free Thought and Official Propaganda," a lecture whose
title I will let speak for itself. Twenty years ago, none other than Pope
John Paul II warned of a resurgence of Fideism. It is still around, in
short. 

Do we suffer from it? A variant of it, I would say, if not precisely in
name. There seems to be a givenness to it in the American character. I think
we are staring into a 21st century rendition of it. 

To doubt the hollowed-out myth of American innocence is a grave sin against
the faith. It is now unpatriotic to question the Russia-gate narrative
despite the absence of evidence to support it. Informal censorship of
differing perspectives is perfectly routine. It is now considered treasonous
to question the word of intelligence agencies and the officials who lead
them despite long records of deceit. Do we forget that it was only 15 years
ago that these same institutions and people deceived us into an invasion of
Iraq the consequences of which still persist? 

This was the question Craig Murray, the former British diplomat (who has
vital information on the DNC mail theft but who has never been interviewed
by American investigators) posed a few weeks ago. Eugene Robinson gave a
good-enough reply in a Washington Post opinion piece shortly afterward: "God
Bless the Deep State," the headline read.

How we got here deserves a work of social psychology, and I hope someone
takes up the task. Understanding our path into our self-created crisis seems
to me the first step to finding our way out of it. 

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the
International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author, and
lecturer. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the
American Century (Yale). Follow him @thefloutist. His web site is
<http://www.patricklawrence.us/> www.patricklawrence.us. Support his work
via  <http://www.patreon.com/thefloutist> www.patreon.com/thefloutist.

 

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