Even as news stories of the connections between Russian intelligence and the various hacking efforts against the DNC have been floating around IT circles for several weeks, WikiLeaks does yet another document dump that it claims shows some nebulous yet unforgivably nasty thing committed by the DNC and/or Hillary Clinton. (The WikiLeakers and the Hillary-haters who love them seem to think that the DNC and the Clinton campaign are identical, something which would be news to Robby Mook.) Yet when a DNC staffer suggested doing something skeevy, that suggestion was immediately and forcefully rejected.
In other words, it seems that the only really nasty thing that was actually committed here has been WikiLeaks’ doxxing of people who donated money to the Democratic Party — a doxxing that its Twitter jock says was not an accident:
Well, all I can say is that WikiLeaks had better not have anyone living outside of embassies in any country that has extradition treaties with the United States, because any WikiLeaks employees in that situation will, I believe, likely find themselves extradited to the US to face criminal charges.
Why would WikiLeaks doxx Democratic donors? Why would they admit to it? Who does this conceivably help?
Franklin Foer is one of the people wondering if (if not outright suggesting that) the recent WikiLeaks actions might be tied to the Kremlin’s wanting Donald Trump to win:
Vladimir Putin has a plan for destroying the West—and that plan looks a lot like Donald Trump. Over the past decade, Russia has boosted right-wing populists across Europe. It loaned money to Marine Le Pen in France, well-documented transfusions of cash to keep her presidential campaign alive. Such largesse also wended its way to the former Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi, who profited “personally and handsomely” from Russian energy deals, as an American ambassador to Rome once put it. (Berlusconi also shared a 240-year-old bottle of Crimean wine with Putin and apparently makes ample use of a bed gifted to him by the Russian president.)
There’s a clear pattern: Putin runs stealth efforts on behalf of politicians who rail against the European Union and want to push away from NATO. He’s been a patron of Golden Dawn in Greece, Ataka in Bulgaria, and Jobbik in Hungary. Joe Biden warned about this effort last year in a speech at the Brookings Institution: “President Putin sees such political forces as useful tools to be manipulated, to create cracks in the European body politic which he can then exploit.” Ruptures that will likely multiply after Brexit—a campaign Russia’s many propaganda organs bombastically promoted.
UPDATE: Two people have provided some interesting information:
In a private message, my correspondent passed along the following
Another piece that might be helpful is this 2014 piece from Sean Wilentz on Wikileaks. Wilentz is an academic historian whom I greatly respect. Really thorough research that touches on the racism, antisemitism, and indebtedness to Russia. It looks especially at Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange. Very useful, and not some immediate response tot he latest:
newrepublic.com/...
And this is another useful one, from 2015, about how Putin has been fucking about with European elections:
www.spectator.co.uk/...
....which sounds exactly like what they seem to be doing in the states.
And Catskill Julie in the comments posted this:
Someone called this story CT in a hidden comment above, so here are a couple of articles
Where the just released emails came from:
6/14/16� WaPo Russian government hackers penetrated DNC,
Fancy Bear is believed to work for the GRU, or Russia’s military intelligence service, he said. CrowdStrike is less sure of whom Cozy Bear works for but thinks it might be the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the country’s powerful security agency, which was once headed by Putin.
The lack of coordination is not unusual, he said. “There’s an amazing adversarial relationship” among the Russian intelligence agencies, Alperovitch said. “We have seen them steal assets from one another, refuse to collaborate. They’re all vying for power, to sell Putin on how good they are.”
snip
Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and gained access to the entire database of opposition research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, according to committee officials and security experts who responded to the breach.
The intruders so thoroughly compromised the DNC’s system that they also were able to read all email and chat traffic, said DNC officials and the security experts.
How the emails (and DNC data) came to be released by Wikileaks
Defense One: How Putin Weaponized Wikileaks to Influence the Election of an American President
But leave aside the purported content of the Wikileaks data dump (to which numerous other outlets have devoted considerable attention) and consider the source. Considerable evidence shows that the Wikileaks dump was an orchestrated act by the Russian government, working through proxies, to undermine Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign.
The use of Wikileaks as the publishing platform served to legitimize the information dump, which also contains a large amount of personal information related to democratic donors such as social security and credit card numbers. This suggests that Wikileaks didn’t perform a thorough analysis of the documents before they released them, or simply didn’t care.
It’s the latest installment in a trend that information security researcher Bruce Schneier calls organizational doxing and that Lawfare’s Nicholas Weaver calls the weaponization of Wikileaks.