As we all now know Russian intelligence services were behind the various hacks of the DNC, Clinton confidants such a John Podesta as well as the voter registration files in 20 different states. This week we were informed that CIA has determined that this was done specifically to impact the results of our election and hence a storm of political infighting has begun over the implications.
The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.
Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, according to U.S. officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s chances.
“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. senators. “That’s the consensus view.”
Most have written off the impact of these hacks as inconsequential arguing that since the voting machines weren’t themselves connected to the internet they therefore “couldn’t have been hacked.”
Unfortunately this presumption is incorrect and I will explain exactly how and why.
The current reporting is that the Obama Administration brought this to the Gang of 12 in Congress months ago seeking a bipartisan statement and action only to have that request denied by Mitch McConnell. Since then we’ve had the President-Elect in yet another classic case of dangerously deluded Trumpism not only deny that Russia hacked our election systems in order to modify the outcome, but that they were the ones behind the hack at all.
“I don’t believe they interfered” in the election, he told Time magazine this week. The hacking, he said, “could be Russia. And it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.”
Yeah, right… except that way back in July the link to Russia was established because they left behind Russian metadata in the documents uploaded to Wikileaks.
It began ominously. Nearly two months earlier, in April, the Democrats had noticed that something was wrong in their networks. Then, in early May, the DNC called in CrowdStrike, a security firm that specializes in countering advanced network threats. After deploying their tools on the DNC’s machines, and after about two hours of work, CrowdStrike found “two sophisticated adversaries” on the Committee’s network. The two groups were well-known in the security industry as “APT 28” and “APT 29.” APT stands for Advanced Persistent Threat—usually jargon for spies.
CrowdStrike linked both groups to “the Russian government’s powerful and highly capable intelligence services.” APT 29, suspected to be the FSB, had been on the DNC’s network since at least summer 2015. APT 28, identified as Russia’s military intelligence agency GRU, had breached the Democrats only in April 2016, and probably tipped off the investigation. CrowdStrike found no evidence of collaboration between the two intelligence agencies inside the DNC’s networks, “or even an awareness of one by the other,” the firm wrote.
…
The metadata in the leaked documents are perhaps most revealing: one dumped document was modified using Russian language settings, by a user named “Феликс Эдмундович,” a code name referring to the founder of the Soviet Secret Police, the Cheka, memorialised in a 15-ton iron statue in front of the old KGB headquarters during Soviet times. The original intruders made other errors: one leaked document included hyperlink error messages in Cyrillic, the result of editing the file on a computer with Russian language settings. After this mistake became public, the intruders removed the Cyrillic information from the metadata in the next dump and carefully used made-up user names from different world regions, thereby confirming they had made a mistake in the first round.
So we have GRU and FSB plus Russian metadata. None of this is in dispute, the only issue that is under debate is “why?” Were the Russians just trying to embarrass us and make us look bad or were they literally trying to modify the outcome of the election? The intensity of the response from the GOP shows that they’re literally terrified of the later possibility. You can tell be how hard they push back from the idea that Russia could have accomplished that later even though almost no one, except for me — right here and now — has even seriously suggested it yet.
RNC spokesman Sean Spicer nearly jumped out of his skin to counter the suggestion that the RNC had also been hacked and Russia had chosen not to release any of that information, never mind the fact that it’s still suspicious even if they didn’t hack the RNC at all, considering how many Democratic sources were targeted. Judy Miller equated the Obama Administration ‘full review” of the situation to leaving the Trump Administration with a “Tar Baby” which is particularly racially disgusting imagery. Meanwhile as Morning Joe says not investigating the hack would be a “disservice to the country” and Fox’s Judge Jeanine says that such an investigation would be “Anti-American.”
“LOOK IT’S TIME TO TAKE SIDES…THE ELECTION IS OVER – YOU’RE EITHER WITH US OR AGAINST US,” she said. “THAT IS… WITH THE UNITED STATES OR AGAINST THE UNITED STATES.”
“Why are you so obsessed with Russia?” she demanded of Obama, going on to accuse him of sympathizing with radical Muslims instead of a “Christian” like Vladimir Putin.
“I despise all dictators, but between the dictator that thinks I’m an infidel and [wants to] have our heads cut off and the dictator from whom I simply want to keep my distance… the choice is a no-brainer,” she said, although it was not clear what dictator she believes wants to decapitate her.
WE HAVE A NEW PRESIDENT ELECT…. HIS NAME IS DONALD J TRUMP. SO MOVE OVER BARACK,” Pirro wrote.
“MOVE OVER HILLARY, HARRY, JILL AND ALL YOU NAMBY PAMBY PATHETIC LOSERS STILL CRYING IN YOUR GRANDE DOUBLE SHOT SKINNY LATTES,” she fumed.
“THERE WAS A TIME IN THIS COUNTRY WHEN WE UNITED BEHIND THE FLAG IN CELEBRATION OF AMERICA’S NEW PRESIDENT, OUR NEW LEADER, WE ALL DID SO IN 2008 WHEN BARACK OBAMA WAS ELECTED. WE HAD HIGH HOPES FOR A UNITED COUNTRY, IRRESPECTIVE OF OUR POLITICS. AND IT’S TIME FOR THE LEFT, ASSUMING THEY ARE CAPABLE, TO SHOW THE SAME DIGNITY AND CLASS TO THE 45TH PRESIDENT-ELECT,” she said.
Yeah, discovering the truth is against America. Riiight.
All this hyperventilating is having the desired effect, it’s keeping us distracted from analyzing the possibility that Russia actually DID Hack our election because simply put: if that was there goal, why would they even bother unless they had at least a possibility of success?
This simple answer is Yes, Russia could have hacked our election even though the machines themselves may have not been connected to the internet and even if largely paper ballots were used. We already know this, because we were the ones who already did it with the Iranian centrifuges using the viral worm called “Stuxnet.”
Stuxnet is a malicious computer worm believed to be a jointly built American-Israeli cyberweapon,[1] although no organization or state has officially admitted responsibility. However, anonymous US officials speaking to The Washington Post claimed the worm was developed during the Bush administration to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program with what would seem like a long series of unfortunate accidents.[2]
Stuxnet specifically targets programmable logic controllers (PLCs), which allow the automation of electromechanical processes such as those used to control machinery on factory assembly lines, amusement rides, or centrifuges for separating nuclear material. Exploiting four zero-day flaws,[3] Stuxnet functions by targeting machines using the Microsoft Windows operating system and networks, then seeking out Siemens Step7 software. Stuxnet reportedly compromised Iranian PLCs, collecting information on industrial systems and causing the fast-spinning centrifuges to tear themselves apart.[4] Stuxnet’s design and architecture are not domain-specific and it could be tailored as a platform for attacking modern SCADA and PLC systems (e.g., in automobile[vague] or power plants), the majority of which reside in Europe, Japan and the US.[5] Stuxnet reportedly ruined almost one fifth of Iran's nuclear centrifuges.[6]
Stuxnet has three modules: a worm that executes all routines related to the main payload of the attack; a link file that automatically executes the propagated copies of the worm; and a rootkit component responsible for hiding all malicious files and processes, preventing detection of the presence of Stuxnet.
Stuxnet is typically introduced to the target environment via an infected USB flash drive. The worm then propagates across the network, scanning for Siemens Step7 software on computers controlling a PLC. In the absence of either criterion, Stuxnet becomes dormant inside the computer. If both the conditions are fulfilled, Stuxnet introduces the infected rootkit onto the PLC and Step7 software, modifying the codes and giving unexpected commands to the PLC while returning a loop of normal operations system values feedback to the users.
Stuxnet was able to reach the targeted machines by burrowing itself into a system, remaining dormant until if found the target programs and copying itself onto removable media such as USB drives to reach other systems until it was loaded onto the right machine. A ballot counting malware worm could work the same way. Even if paper ballots were used they could still be vulnerable to this attack as those ballots are still counted by electronic machines either at the poling station or at a central ballot collection station, a fact which I’m quite familiar because I’ve been a poll worker in my local precinct going all the way back to 2004 and I’ve had to physically load and activate these machines many times. I’m also aware that in California e-voting machines have been severely limited and even the ballot machines that are available in every precinct which are capable of counting the paper votes have had that feature disabled by our Secretary of State has because of security concerns.
Debra Bowen: When I took office, I commissioned a top-to-bottom review of all our voting systems: paper-based optical scan systems, as well as the e-voting or touchscreen systems. The University of California took the lead, and it involved universities and private-sector people from around the country. I have about 700 pages of documentation that are publicly available on my Web site, and I had another private security report that was released only to me and the people involved because it has secrecy issues. It was really clear that there was no way we could guarantee existing equipment in the field had not already been compromised, and that we could not prevent compromises from affecting future elections. It was also clear that there was no [method] people felt was trustworthy to audit something where the vote was stored electronically. So we simply went to an older, tested technology that we've had billions of pages of experience with: the optical scan system.
This malware idea I came up with on my own, but it happens to be exactly the method described as possible by J. Alex Halderman of Verified Voting.com.
You may have read at NYMag that I’ve been in discussions with the Clinton campaign about whether it might wish to seek recounts in critical states. That article, which includes somebody else’s description of my views, incorrectly describes the reasons manually checking ballots is an essential security safeguard (and includes some incorrect numbers, to boot). Let me set the record straight about what I and other leading election security experts have actually been saying to the campaign and everyone else who’s willing to listen.
How might a foreign government hack America’s voting machines to change the outcome of a presidential election? Here’s one possible scenario. First, the attackers would probe election offices well in advance in order to find ways to break into their computers. Closer to the election, when it was clear from polling data which states would have close electoral margins, the attackers might spread malware into voting machines in some of these states, rigging the machines to shift a few percent of the vote to favor their desired candidate. This malware would likely be designed to remain inactive during pre-election tests, do its dirty business during the election, then erase itself when the polls close. A skilled attacker’s work might leave no visible signs — though the country might be surprised when results in several close states were off from pre-election polls.
Could anyone be brazen enough to try such an attack? A few years ago, I might have said that sounds like science fiction, but 2016 has seen unprecedented cyberattacks aimed at interfering with the election. This summer, attackers broke into the email system of the Democratic National Committee and, separately, into the email account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, and leaked private messages. Attackers infiltrated the voter registration systems of two states, Illinois and Arizona, and stole voter data. And there’s evidence that hackers attempted to breach election offices in several other states.
They even made a video of how this could be done featuring actor Zachary Quinto.
Let’s recall that what was found on the DNC network — was malware — it wasn’t an active hack by somebody logged in surreptitiously through a remote modem or a telnet socket as one might expect if you’ve seen WarGames, Hackers or from someone like Kevin Mitnick (who truth be told was one of my friends in high school and helped introduce me to computer hacking when we would break into the school after class and hack our way into the LAUSD, USC and UCLA computer systems remotely for fun). Modern hackers don’t do it the way we used to, now they have robots do their work for them, and consequently they don’t need a direct internet connection to their target — they just need to delivery the malware to a system that has removable media that might, just might, end up attached to the right target system.
But did that happen? I honestly don’t know but as it turns out there is evidence that something went wrong with an inordinate number of vote tallying machines in Michigan.
Was it merely old equipment which incompetent officials had failed to bother getting serviced, or was there something intentionally sinister going on? That’s the question now coming out of Michigan, where just as the statewide recount is getting underway, officials are finally admitting that the majority of vote counting machines in Detroit broke on election day. The stunning admission, which is getting virtually no national news coverage despite appearing in a major Detroit newspaper, casts doubt on the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s supposed narrow win in the state.
Even now, elections director Daniel Baxter appears to only be making the admission as part of a convoluted argument for why the ballots in those Detroit precincts can’t be recounted. He’s acknowledging that eighty-seven optical scanners in Detroit simply “broke” on the same day. But he and other Michigan officials are now making the argument that, because the broken machines resulted in different vote totals on the machines than on the precinct log books, state law means those ballots can’t be recounted.
The paradoxical argument, which is on full display in the Detroit News today, seems unlikely to pass the scrutiny of the federal judge who ruled on Sunday night that every county and precinct must immediately recount its votes by hand. But third party candidate Jill Stein, who initiated the recount and is paying for it, would need to take the matter back to the judge.
Meanwhile, the mere fact that fifty-nine percent of the vote counting machines in Michigan’s biggest city all broke on the same day is standing out as a stunning development. It calls into question why officials failed to publicly disclose this information until they needed it for their convoluted argument against recounting the majority of Detroit’s votes. With Detroit being 82% African-American and thus demographically likely to have heavily favored Hillary Clinton, it directly calls into question whether Donald Trump won Michigan. If you enjoy Palmer Report, consider making a contribution:
Many of these problem precincts may not actually be recounted because of discrepancies between the number of ballots counted by the poll workers in their registration books and the count generated by the counting machines which appear to have jammed and caused ballots to be repeatedly entered.
One-third of precincts in Wayne County could be disqualified from an unprecedented statewide recount of presidential election results because of problems with ballots.
Michigan’s largest county voted overwhelmingly for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, but officials couldn’t reconcile vote totals for 610 of 1,680 precincts during a countywide canvass of vote results late last month.
Most of those are in heavily Democratic Detroit, where the number of ballots in precinct poll books did not match those of voting machine printout reports in 59 percent of precincts, 392 of 662.
Approximately 87,810 ballots in Michigan were fully filled out but had no selection for office of President. The majority of those ballots came from the same precincts where the 87 counting machines were broken in urban Detroit, which also happen to be the same precincts that might not be included in the recount.
Now this could all be coincidence certainly and anything deliberate remains to be proven, it could have just been bad luck, old equipment and a bad overconfident candidate, or else it could be the result of malware attack that disabled those machines on exactly that day in a heavily Democratic area removing tens of thousands of votes that would have probably gone to Hillary Clinton in a state where the final difference in votes was only 10,612.
A hack like this would be the near perfect crime because the hack itself would cause a discrepancy between the machine count and the manual vote count, one which would cause those precincts to not. be. recounted. in the future. The only way to verify this would be to force a manual recount of all precincts, particularly those with count discrepancies, and then do a forensic analysis of each of these machines to ensure they haven’t been invected or compromised with any malware or worms.
Unfortunately since everyone is assuming that simply because these machines are not connected directly to the internet, then they’re very unlikely to perform exactly that type of analysis.
Monday, Dec 12, 2016 · 7:34:04 PM +00:00 · Frank Vyan Walton
In fairness I must add that while the CIA feels one way about this the FBI thinks something different.
WASHINGTON — For much of the summer, the F.B.I. pursued a widening investigation into a Russian role in the American presidential campaign. Agents scrutinized advisers close to Donald J. Trump, looked for financial connections with Russian financial figures, searched for those involved in hacking the computers of Democrats, and even chased a lead — which they ultimately came to doubt — about a possible secret channel of email communication from the Trump Organization to a Russian bank.
Law enforcement officials say that none of the investigations so far have found any conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government. And even the hacking into Democratic emails, F.B.I. and intelligence officials now believe, was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump.
This isn’t to say that they don’t think the hacks were of Russian origin, only that they disagree with the reason for those hacks — so far. But then again Harry Reid says there’s more to this.
The FBI covered up information about Russia seeking to tip the 2016 presidential election in Donald Trump’s favour, a senior Democrat claimed on Saturday, after reports emerged about spy agencies’ investigations into hacks of US political parties
Harry Reid, outgoing Senate minority leader, compared FBI director James Comey to the agency’s notorious founder, J Edgar Hoover, and called for his resignation.
A secret CIA analysis found that people with connections to the Russian government provided emails, hacked from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks in the final months of the election, according to a Washington Post report published late Friday.
“The FBI had this material for a long time but Comey, who is of course a Republican, refused to divulge specific information about Russia and the presidental election,” Reid told MSNBC’s AM Joy on Saturday. Comey testified to Congress in July that he was no longer a registered Republican, though he belonged to the party most of his life.
Director James Comey went miles out of his way to project the appearance of political impartiality with his unprecedented press conference and subsequent congressional testimony on the Clinton email server — which almost totally exonerated her — even though his office found no legal wrongdoing on the Secretary of State’s part. Perhaps that was because he was dealing with internal pressures caused by an anti-Clinton Cabal inside the FBI.
Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election.
Current and former FBI officials, none of whom were willing or cleared to speak on the record, have described a chaotic internal climate that resulted from outrage over director James Comey’s July decision not to recommend an indictment over Clinton’s maintenance of a private email server on which classified information transited.
“The FBI is Trumpland,” said one current agent.
This atmosphere raises major questions about how Comey and the bureau he is slated to run for the next seven years can work with Clinton should she win the White House.
The currently serving FBI agent said Clinton is “the antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel,” and that “the reason why they’re leaking is they’re pro-Trump.”
With this atmosphere, is it really surprising that the FBI is now unwilling to confirm the CIA’s analysis that the Russian hacks were intended to help place Trump in Office? Again, still speculative — but not implausible.
Monday, Dec 12, 2016 · 8:54:00 PM +00:00 · Frank Vyan Walton
Ruh Roh, this is getting serious.
A group of bipartisan electors are calling on U.S. intelligence officials to release findings on Russia’s involvement in the U.S. election prior to the Electoral College vote that will make Donald Trump’s presidential election official.
In an open letter to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on Monday, a group of nine electors representing both parties vow to discharge their duties by the standard described in Alexander Hamilton’s The Federalist Paper No. 68.
“We intend to discharge our duties as Electors by ensuring that we select a candidate for president who, as our Founding Fathers envisioned, would be ‘endowed with the requisite qualifications,'” the letter states. “[T]he Constitution envisions the Electoral College as a deliberative body that plays a critical role in our system of government — ensuring that the American people elect a president who is constitutionally qualified and fit to serve.”
The electors note that the intelligence community has concluded with “high confidence” that Russia acted to interfere in the U.S. election to the benefit of Trump.
…
The electors also demand that Trump provide “conclusive evidence that he and his staff and advisors did not accept Russian interference, or otherwise collaborate during the campaign, and conclusive disavowal and repudiation of such collaboration and interference going forward.”
Tuesday, Dec 13, 2016 · 1:00:14 AM +00:00 · Frank Vyan Walton
And now we’re never going to know exactly what happened in Michigan one way other another as the MI SCOTUS has shutdown the recount.
During a rally that drew dozens of supporters in frigid Detroit temperatures, Stein slammed the voting system in the Wolverine State, The Detroit News reported.
The Michigan Supreme Court put a halt to the recount a day earlier by a vote of 3-2, ending whatever faint hopes there were of going over all 4.8million ballots.
Stein insists that if the recount went ahead, Donald Trump, who officially won the state by 10,704 votes over Hillary Clinton, would have his victory overturned.
Wonderful.