UPDATE — Foer’s article is quickly spreading on social media, and looks to be going viral. You will want to read the article to which I link!!
Also, Clinton campaign now on this:
At 5:36 this evening Eastern Time Slate posted a “cover story” titled Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia? The piece was written by Franklin Foer and explores in detail communications between a server that belongs to the Trump organization and two servers belonging to a very politically connected Russian bank, Alfa.
The subtitle on the article hints at where the article is going: “This spring, a group of computer scientists set out to determine whether hackers were interfering with the Trump campaign. They found something they weren’t expecting.”
I am going summarize. They found an unusual pattern of communication, one that tended to spike around political events, for example, the two conventions. Apparently the New York Times was going to do a story on this, and suddenly the DNS path to the Trump server disappeared. Shortly thereafter an alternative path was created.
I am simplifying the explanation, which is provided in great detail by Foer, who spoke with multiple notable experts who deal with the issues involved primarily because they are involved in combatting malware.
But here’s a key:
The researchers quickly dismissed their initial fear that the logs represented a malware attack. The communication wasn’t the work of bots. The irregular pattern of server lookups actually resembled the pattern of human conversation—conversations that began during office hours in New York and continued during office hours in Moscow. It dawned on the researchers that this wasn’t an attack, but a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank.
Hopefully I have now whet your appetites.
Given Harry Reid’s letter and the CNBC story today about Comey rejecting a statement about Russian involvement with the election because it was too close to the election (and Sam Stein has separately from a different source confirmed the story about Comey's objection) this very much caught my attention.
I would presume the FBI knows about this. I wonder if this is part of Reid’s reference to “explosive” evidence.
I certainly would appreciate responses from those with the requisite expertise, which I do not claim to have. I certainly have some understanding, but not enough.
And of course even if you have even less understanding of the technical details than do I, you are also more than welcome to comment/react/respond.