I. Introduction
I've rearranged the text this pair of posts replies to, to put these
posts into six parts: this introduction; the quote from Donald Trump
already discussed; Russian hacking relevant to 2016 US elections
(this post). And the meaning of "felon"; Russian free speech in the
2016 US elections and possible identity theft in relation to that;
and epistemology relevant to Usenet and to the kinds of demands my
interlocutor here is making of me (the other post).
I'm citing (but not quoting) three documents:
<Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016
Presidential Election>, specifically <Volume I of II>, by Special
Counsel Robert S. Mueller, III. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department
of Justice, March 2019.
Available at
<https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf>
Briefly: "Mueller". This is the famously redacted report.
And two indictments. I don't think I have the information necessary
to cite these the way many libraries are telling me to, so I'm
pretending they're books and citing them sort of that way.
<Indictment>, _United States of America v. Viktor Borisovich Netyksho,
Boris Alekseyevich Antonov, Dmitriy Sergeyevich Badin, Ivan
Sergeyevich Yermakov, Aleksey Viktorovich Lukashev, Sergey
Aleksandrovich Morgachev, Nikolay Yuryevich Kozachek, Pavel
Vyacheslavovich Yershov, Artem Andreyevich Malyshev, Aleksandr
Vladimirovich Osadchuk, Aleksey Aleksandrovich Potemkin, and Anatoliy
Sergeyevich Kovalev, Defendants_. Robert S. Mueller, III. United
States District Court for the District of Columbia, 2018.
Available at
<https://www.justice.gov/file/1080281/download>
Briefly: "Netyksho". This is the hacking indictment, part III.
<Indictment>. _United States of America v. Internet Research Agency
LLC a/k/a Mediasintez LLC a/k/a Glavset LLC a/k/a Mixinfo LLC a/k/a
Azimut LLC a/k/a Novinfo LLC, Concord Management and Consulting LLC,
Concord Catering, Yevgeniy Viktorovich Prigozhin, Mikhail Ivanovich
Bystrov, Mikhail Leonidovich Burchik a/k/a Mikhail Abramov,
Aleksandra Yuryevna Krylova, Anna Vladislavovna Bogacheva, Sergey
Pavlovich Polozov, Maria Anatolyevna Bovda a/k/a Maria Anatolyevna
Belyaeva, Robert Sergeyevich Bovda, Dzheykhun Nasimi Ogly Aslanov
a/k/a Jayhoon Aslanov a/k/a Jay Aslanov, Vadim Vladimirovich
Podkopaev, Gleb Igorevich Vasilchenko, Irina Viktorovna Kaverzina,
and Vladimir Venkov, Defendants_. Robert S. Mueller, III. United
States District Court for the District of Colubmia, 2018.
Available at
<https://www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download>
Briefly: "IRA". This is the "free speech" indictment, part V.
Post by J. ClarkePost by Joe BernsteinPost by J. ClarkePost by J. ClarkePost by Joe BernsteinRussians in fact exerted themselves to affect our 2016 election.
Donald Trump vocally encouraged them to do so. In office, he started
out surprisingly favourable to Russia's president. [1] It seems that
his campaign never got around to linking up with the Russians in a
useful way, so I suppose there was no fire, but there was a *lot* of
smoke, and it wasn't unreasonable to go look.
I suspect they exerted themselves to affect every election. So what?
Russia has a vested interest in who runs the US, and the US prides
itself on free speech--I guess that that's only for non-Russians
though. And yeah, the law this and the law that and the law is an
ass.
Russians didn't vote. Russians didn't interfere with the vote.
Russians tried to convince people to vote their way.
In the first quote, I'm essentially saying "Mueller" was worth
compiling, and we could argue about that, but the focus since then
has been on the second quote, in which my interlocutor says "Russians
didn't interfere with the vote" and proffers an alternative take on
Russian activities relevant to the 2016 election. I disagree with
that take, and my posts since have tried to refute it.
In this post I retract a whole bunch of things I've said in earlier
posts. My interlocutor may well take this as evidence that I can't
be trusted, and be proud of rhetorically having humbled me, but I
don't care. My concern is with the untruth of that second quote
above, and as long as I adduce evidence towards that, I'm not
embarrassed to have displayed some ignorance along the way, though I
am sorry if in doing so I've misinformed anyone who doesn't see these
corrections..
Post by J. ClarkeOn Tue, 4 Feb 2020 03:07:14 -0000 (UTC), Joe Bernstein
Post by Joe BernsteinPost by J. ClarkeOn Mon, 3 Feb 2020 18:20:19 -0000 (UTC), Joe Bernstein
Post by J. ClarkeOn Sat, 1 Feb 2020 22:37:09 -0000 (UTC), Joe Bernstein
II. Donald Trump quote
Post by J. ClarkePost by Joe BernsteinPost by J. ClarkePost by J. ClarkePost by Joe BernsteinRussians in fact exerted themselves to affect our 2016 election.
I suspect they exerted themselves to affect every election. So
what? Russia has a vested interest in who runs the US, and the US
prides itself on free speech--I guess that that's only for
non-Russians though. And yeah, the law this and the law that and
the law is an ass.
Russians didn't vote. Russians didn't interfere with the vote.
Russians tried to convince people to vote their way.
Post by Joe BernsteinDonald Trump vocally encouraged them to do so.
Please quote the statements in which he did this.
You know, I thought I'd have to concede you this, but I thought wrong.
"Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000
emails that are missing." 27 July 2016
<https://www.newsweek.com/trump-wikileaks-comments-timeline-dnc-hacki
ng-mueller-824898>
Can you say "grasping at straws"?
It's much weaker than I expected to find. I was actually surprised;
once I realised he'd talked more about WikiLeaks than about Russia, I
started looking at those quotes instead of looking for Russia ones,
and even there he talked a lot about how he loved WikiLeaks, how he
thought the mainstream press were conspiring to ignore the stuff they
released, but in what I found, he never said outright that he wanted
them to release more, which is what I (apparently wrongly) remembered.
So no, this wasn't a major feature of his campaign. But he did,
literally, vocally encourage Russia to interfere, in that quote.
I don't think I said anything wrong here, but it turns out others
grasped at those straws much more energetically than I did. Per
"Mueller" pp. 5, 49 and 62-65, a - Trump did really want the 30,000
e-mails, leading to determined efforts to obtain them on the black
market; and b - Russian activities occurred the night after Trump
made the statement, "Mueller" strongly implying that these events
were linked.
I'm not personally impressed by these things. In particular, the
change in Russian activities ostensibly resulting from the statement
strikes me as small beer.
[inserted here from later in the quoted post, to the end of this part]
Post by J. ClarkePost by Joe BernsteinPost by J. ClarkeSo essentially, Trump was encouraging Russia to hack a computer on
which official US government business had been conducted.
No, he was encouraging Russia to go through Edward Snowden's massive
collection of information already stolen for this purpose. If the
FBI, with the computer in their possession, cannot find the emails,
no amount of hacking of that computer by Russians will obtain them
because they are not there. What part of "LOST" are you having
trouble with?
I've never heard that Edward Snowden's stuff included Clinton's
e-mails. Did it, to your knowledge?
I do not have a catalog of what he has. Do you? Clinton's emails
could be there. Hell, so could the complete design drawing and
technical specifications for the alien starship that crashed at
Roswell.
To answer your question, no, I don't.
Post by J. ClarkePost by Joe BernsteinYou're right that Russia had little chance of finding the 30,000.
And although I hate to admit it, I think it's reasonably probable
that Trump knew that when he said what I quoted above. (That is, I
think it's very likely that Trump knows enough about computers to
know that those 30,000 were gone.) So yes, my offering that quote
was "grasping at straws", and I remembered the campaign wrong, but
you asked and I answered.
I have to retract some of *this*. Trump does seem to have known the
e-mails couldn't be recovered from the server, but doesn't seem to
have realised that hackers wouldn't be in a position to tie up the
missing 30,000 e-mails with a neat little bow, wouldn't know which
e-mails had been deleted by the time Clinton turned the data over.
What he was really looking for, of necessity, was the whole shebang,
not the missing 30,000. He doesn't seem to have found it.
III. Russian Hacking
Post by J. ClarkePost by Joe BernsteinPost by J. ClarkeSo maybe "the law is an ass", and I can even provide evidence that
it is, relevant to this discussion. I don't want to spend all day
on this, so I'll rely on my unreliable memory that people who've
reported security problems to private entities after hacking into
those entities' systems have sometimes been threatened with
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_hat_(computer_security)>
So breaching a computer system's security is illegal at least in the
UK, and perhaps a grey area in the US, *in and of itself*. When you
publish things you find there, you also, among other things, violate
copyright.
It is illegal in the US. What of it? What did the Russians
actually hack? Hint-hiring data scientists to mine Facebook isn't
"hacking".
I hadn't heard that they'd done that. Cambridge Analytica was
Russian?
Paid by the Russians to do what Cambridge Analytica does.
I feel no need to expand my remit to backing up *your* statement here.
But, technically, what Cambridge Analytica *did*. It seems to have a
new name now.
Post by J. ClarkePost by Joe BernsteinLater in the post you quoted, I said what the Russians actually
hacked. Do I need to state my entire case in every paragraph of that
case? And you complained about the length of that one!
No, you did not. You stated "various individuals computers". Please
identify one such individual and state the evidence on which you base
the contention that his or her computer was hacked.
That's a significant misquotation. I have, in my own opinion, at
best dubious evidence concerning individuals' computers, but that's
not what I actually wrote. I wrote "various Democratic individuals'
and organisations' computers".
[inserted here from later in the quoted post, to the end of this part]
Post by J. ClarkePost by Joe BernsteinPost by J. ClarkeYou may think "the law is an ass" for caring about whether things
like that are done, but I think that's actually a good thing about
the law. I want laws that protect private property.
So what? This wasn't private property to begin with, this was
public property.
No it wasn't. This was a computer server owned by Hillary Clinton.
The data belonged to the United States Government. It does not matter
where it was stored. If they stole her computer they would steal
private property. If they stole the government's data that was stored
on it they stole government property.
Post by Joe BernsteinShe was within her rights to take it with her when she left office,
The computer, yes, the data on it not so much.
Conceded.
Post by J. ClarkePost by Joe Bernsteinwhich is why the FBI didn't have access to it until she turned it
over. The *e-mails* may have been public property - I actually have
no idea how copyright works in situations like that - but the server
in question was her private property.
It isn't copyright, there are specific laws concerning classified
information.
Post by Joe BernsteinThe servers that we know were hacked in 2015-2016 were also private
property.
Which servers were those? Please identify one other than "servers".
Post by Joe BernsteinPost by J. ClarkeWe now know - modulo the fact that the indictees have not been tried
and convicted - that Russian government employees perpetrated the
hacks on various Democratic individuals' and organisations'
computers in 2016.
Name those individuals and state what the evidence is that anything
was hacked.
My, you're demanding boredom from me.
You're making the vague assertion that someone was hacked. So back it
up.
I can only name one of the individuals, and it appears clear that his
own computer was not hacked, rather his Gmail account; in other words,
the hacking took place on a computer or computers owned by Google.
This individual is, of course, John Podesta, whose e-mails are
believed to have been published in October 2016 shortly after the
<Access Hollywood> tape came out.
In "Netyksho", Mueller sometimes (e.g. p. 25, "Object of the
Conspiracy") refers to computers "of persons", or otherwise
identified with individuals. However, already on p. 2 we see "the
computers of dozens of DCCC and DNC employees". So it isn't clear
that any of the computers targeted were individuals' property, though
it remains, I suppose, possible.
I assume you already knew this, and your rhetorical purpose in the
misquotation is to restrict my assertion to the part I can't find
evidence for. However, I can find evidence for the other part,
"organisations' computers", and indeed can specify that those
organisations included corporations. (Google, Microsoft, and an
unnamed cloud computing service, at least.)
"Mueller" pp. 36-41 describe first a "spearphishing" expedition
trying to get logins of Clinton and Democratic individuals. These
often succeeded, but the only person publicly identified as having
fallen for the attack is John Podesta, then Clinton's campaign
chairman. Another victim must have been an employee of the
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC); Mueller goes
into detail about the methods the hackers used to download from this
organisation's, and then the Democratic National Committee's (DNC),
computers.
He *doesn't* go into detail about how the hackers downloaded from the
individual e-mail accounts. They're said to have been mostly Gmail
and Microsoft accounts, and I'm pretty sure it takes no special
techniques to download from Gmail. So perhaps another angle of the
trap you seem to be trying to steer me towards is that you don't
consider phishing hacking, in which case you could argue that Podesta
et al weren't hacked. We'll just have to disagree about that. At
any rate, Mueller's detailed description of what was done in the DCCC
and DNC computer networks is certainly a description of hacking.
Anyway. See also "Mueller" pp. 49-51 (numerous other entities
attacked in the same ways; Illinois and some counties in Florida,
at least, successfully breached), 175-176 (charging decisions,
followed by several mostly redacted pages), and "Netyksho" passim.
I've moved the following names adduced below from English Wikipedia
as accused of identity theft.
Post by J. ClarkePost by Joe BernsteinBoris
Antonov, Dmitriy Badin, Nikolay Kozachek, Aleksey Lukashev, Artem
Malyshev, Sergey Morgachev, Viktor Netyksho, Aleksey Potemkin, Ivan
Yermakov, and Pavel Yershov; and Aleksandr Osadchuk
They're covered "Netyksho" p. 20. Turns out the "identity theft"
here was the use of the stolen logins. I think that's probably a
just charge.
--
Joe Bernstein <***@gmail.com>