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Who Taught Trump about Weaponized Migration?

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Amid the ongoing family separation crisis, I want to look back at something that raised a few eyebrows among the more generalized nausea at Trump’s behavior at the G-7. The WSJ reported this comment Trump made to Shinzo Abe in the context of the horror it elicited from European leaders and along with a related comment he made to Emmanuel Macron.

At one point, Mr. Trump brought up migration as a big problem for Europe and then told Mr. Abe, “Shinzo, you don’t have this problem, but I can send you 25 million Mexicans and you’ll be out of office very soon,” according to the senior EU official who was in the room. A sense of irritation with Mr. Trump could be felt, “but everyone tried to be rational and calm,” the person said.

The EU official said at another point, in a discussion over Iran and terrorism, Mr. Trump verbally jabbed at Mr. Macron, “You must know about this, Emmanuel, because all the terrorists are in Paris,’” the senior official said.

What Trump is talking about when he suggests he could send 25 million Mexicans to Japan is weaponized migration, as envisioned here, the deliberate creation of migration influxes to take out a political leader. In spite of the salience of racism in our politics, it’s not a common concept here. But in Europe, where migration from a destabilized Northern Africa and Middle East poses (as I heard a few MEPs say just before the election in 2016) the single biggest threat to the EU project, it’s a very real concern. For some time, the political cost of her human rights approach to migration has been the key weakness Angela Merkel’s opponents exploit. And in the days since the G-7, the topic of migration has threatened, for the second time this year, to collapse Merkel’s governing coalition.

For some time, there have been signs that the migration from (especially) Syria had been weaponized in two ways: first, by the seeming release of waves of migration that in their intensity would overwhelm Europe’s ability to respond. And more importantly, by the inclusion of terrorists, including returning European Arabs, among the waves of migrations. Most notably, four of the men who attacked the Stade de France on November 13, 2015 came in with a wave of other migrants. While Europeans respond more rationally to terrorist attacks than Americans do, by tying this one to migration, it made the waves of migrants in Europe far more politically toxic than they would otherwise be.

And while it was clear that the migration from Libya and Syria was being orchestrated for maximum damage, at the time (and still) it wasn’t clear who was behind it. Turkey (as the host of many of the Syrian refugees), Saudi Arabia (which maximized the instability of Syria to support ousting Assad), and Syria itself were all possibilities. On February 25, 2016 testimony viewed as particularly inflammatory, then NATO Commander Phillip Breedlove placed the blame squarely on Russia and Syria.

To the South from the Levant through North Africa, Europe faces a complicated mix of mass migration spurred by state instability and state collapse.

And masking the movement of criminals, terrorists and foreign fighters. Within this mix, Daesh — ISIL or Daesh, as I called them, is spreading like a cancer, taking advantage of paths of least resistance, threatening European nations and our own with terrorist attacks. Its brutality is driving millions to flee from Syria and Iraq, creating an almost unprecedented humanitarian challenge.

Russia’s enter into the fight in Syria has wildly exacerbated the problem, changing the dynamic in the air and on the ground. Despite public pronounces (sic) to the contrary, Russia (inaudible) has done little to counter Daesh but a great deal to bolster the Assad regime and its allies. Together, Russia and the Assad regime are deliberately weaponizing migration from Syria. In an attempt to overwhelm European structures and break European resolve.

Around the time Breedlove gave this testimony, GRU hackers would hack Breedlove as a key focus of the DC Leaks campaign that paralleled — but should in my opinion be considered a separate campaign from — the hack and leak of the DNC.

So Trump’s comment, while addressed to Abe, was instead intended for the benefit of Macron and, even more specifically, Merkel, and subsequent events have only borne out the salience of the comment.

I want to know who prepped the fantastically unprepared Trump to deliver this line. Trump knows virtually no policy well enough to deliver a zinger like this, and yet he knew how best to deliver a line to exploit the real vulnerabilities of all the European members of the G-7. And while, from the comments kicking off his campaign by inventing rapist immigrations from Mexico, Trump is perhaps at his best when he’s mobilizing racism, this comment had a more sophisticated vector than his usual bombast. Further, Trump public comments are, so often, just a regurgitation of the last person he engaged closely with. Which makes me acutely interested in who has both the access and the ability to direct his interests such that he managed this line.

There are certainly candidates in his orbit. Obviously, Stephen Miller is all too happy to politicize immigration. But in truth, it’s not clear (though the jury may still be out) that he’s any good at it. The Muslim ban has serially backfired (though we’ll see what SCOTUS says in a few hours), and unified centrists and even conservative supporters of America’s wonderful diversity against Trump in early days of his regime. The family separation policy, thus far, has provided Democrats an effective way to humanize Trump’s vicious policies, and the White House’s failure to manage the messaging of Miller’s hostage-taking has only made things worse. The other key policy effort to politicize immigration, Jeff Sessions’ focus on MS-13, has largely been a laughable dud, both because those who actually comment on the policy recognize that MS-13 is an American phenomenon, and because MS-13 has never done anything as spectacular as ISIS and Al Qaeda with which to generate visceral fear or even much press attention on the policy.

Steve Bannon, who has hob-nobbed with the European far right and is far more sophisticated than Miller, is another likely source for Trump’s remarkably sophisticated understanding of weaponized migration.

I think neither John Bolton nor John Kelly would be the culprit, the former because he’s a different kind of asshole than the racists Miller and Bannon, the latter because his racism has always lagged Trump’s and he seems to have lost much of the control he has over Trump in recent days. Mike Pompeo is also a racist, and a savvy one at that, but I’m not sure even he is cynical enough to prep this line from Trump.

Whoever it was, that line is not just horrifying on its face, but horrifying because whoever explained how weaponized migration works when wielded by competent actors seems to have privileged access to Trump right now.

Update: I first posted this at 8:27. At , Trump tweeted this:

Facebook Anonymously Admits It IDed Guccifer 2.0 in Real Time

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The headline of this story focuses on how Obama, in the weeks after the election, nine days before the White House declared the election, “free and fair from a cybersecurity perspective,” begged Mark Zuckerberg to take the threat of fake news seriously.

Now huddled in a private room on the sidelines of a meeting of world leaders in Lima, Peru, two months before Trump’s inauguration, Obama made a personal appeal to Zuckerberg to take the threat of fake news and political disinformation seriously. Unless Facebook and the government did more to address the threat, Obama warned, it would only get worse in the next presidential race.

But 26 paragraphs later, WaPo reveals a detail that should totally change the spin of the article: in June, Facebook not only detected APT 28’s involvement in the operation (which I heard at the time), but also informed the FBI about it (which, along with the further details, I didn’t).

It turned out that Facebook, without realizing it, had stumbled into the Russian operation as it was getting underway in June 2016.

At the time, cybersecurity experts at the company were tracking a Russian hacker group known as APT28, or Fancy Bear, which U.S. intelligence officials considered an arm of the Russian military intelligence service, the GRU, according to people familiar with Facebook’s activities.

Members of the Russian hacker group were best known for stealing military plans and data from political targets, so the security experts assumed that they were planning some sort of espionage operation — not a far-reaching disinformation campaign designed to shape the outcome of the U.S. presidential race.

Facebook executives shared with the FBI their suspicions that a Russian espionage operation was in the works, a person familiar with the matter said. An FBI spokesperson had no immediate comment.

Soon thereafter, Facebook’s cyber experts found evidence that members of APT28 were setting up a series of shadowy accounts — including a persona known as Guccifer 2.0 and a Facebook page called DCLeaks — to promote stolen emails and other documents during the presidential race. Facebook officials once again contacted the FBI to share what they had seen.

Like the U.S. government, Facebook didn’t foresee the wave of disinformation that was coming and the political pressure that followed. The company then grappled with a series of hard choices designed to shore up its own systems without impinging on free discourse for its users around the world. [my emphasis]

But the story doesn’t provide the details you would expect from such disclosures.

For example, where did Facebook see Guccifer 2.0? Did Guccifer 2.0 try to set up a Facebook account? Or, as sounds more likely given the description, did he/they use Facebook as a signup for the WordPress site?

More significantly, what did Facebook do with the DC Leaks account, described explicitly?

It seems Facebook identified, and — at least in the case of the DC Leaks case — shut down an APT 28 attempt to use its infrastructure. And it told FBI about it, at a time when the DNC was withholding its server from the FBI.

This puts this passage from Facebook’s April report, which I’ve pointed to repeatedly, in very different context.

Facebook is not in a position to make definitive attribution to the actors sponsoring this activity. It is important to emphasize that this example case comprises only a subset of overall activities tracked and addressed by our organization during this time period; however our data does not contradict the attribution provided by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence in the report dated January 6, 2017.

In other words, Facebook had reached this conclusion back in June 2016, and told FBI about it, twice.

And then what happened?

Again, I’m sympathetic to the urge to blame Facebook for this election. But this article describes Facebook’s heavy handed efforts to serve as a wing of the government to police terrorist content, without revealing that sometimes Facebook has erred in censoring content that shouldn’t have been. Then, it reveals Facebook reported Guccifer 2.0 and DC Leaks to FBI, twice, with no further description of what FBI did with those leads.

Yet from all that, it headlines Facebook’s insufficient efforts to track down other abuses of the platform.

I’m not sure what the answer is. But it sounds like Facebook was more forthcoming with the FBI about APT 28’s efforts than the DNC was.

What Was the Relationship Between FSB and GRU in the DNC Hack, Redux?

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I want to return to last week’s House Intelligence Hearing on Russia (because that fecker Devin Nunes canceled my birthday hearing with James Clapper and John Brennan today), to revisit a question I’ve asked a number of times (in most detail here): what was the relationship between Russia’s FSB and GRU intelligence services in the DNC hack?

The public narrative (laid out in this post) goes like this: Sometime in summer 2015, APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) 29 (associated with FSB, Russia’s top intelligence agency) hacked the DNC along with 1,000 other targets and because DNC ignored FBI’s repeated warnings, remained in their network unnoticed. Then, in March 2016, APT 28 (generally though not universally associated with GRU, Russia’s military intelligence) hacked DNC and John Podesta. According to the public story, GRU oversaw the release (via DC Leaks and Guccifer 2.0) and leaking (to Wikileaks via as-yet unidentified cut-outs) of the stolen documents.

Under the public story, then, FSB did the same kind of thing the US does (for example, with Enrique Peña Nieto in 2012), collecting intelligence on a political campaign, whereas GRU did something new (though under FBI-directed Sabu, we did something similar to Bashar al-Assad in 2012), leaking documents to Wikileaks.

Obama’s sanctions to retaliate for the hack primarily focused on GRU, but did target FSB as well, though without sanctioning any FSB officers by name. And in its initial report on the Russian hack, the government conflated the two separate groups, renaming attack tools previously dubbed Cozy and Fancy Bear the “Grizzly Steppe,” making any detailed discussion of how they worked together more confusing. As I noted, however, the report may have offered more detail about what APT 29 did than what APT 28 did.

Last week’s hearing might have been an opportunity to clarify this relationship had both sides not been interested in partisan posturing. Will Hurd even asked questions that might have elicited more details on how this worked, but Admiral Mike Rogers refused to discuss even the most basic details  of the hacks.

HURD: Thank you, Chairman.

And gentlemen, thank you all for being here. And thank you for your continued service to your country. I’ve learned recently the value of sitting in one place for a long period of time and listening and today I’m has added to that understanding and I’m going to try to ask questions that y’all can answer in this format and are within your areas of expertise. And Director Rogers, my first question to you — the exploit that was used by the Russian’s to penetrate the DNC, was it sophisticated? Was it a zero day exploit? A zero day being some type of — for those that are watching, an exploit that has never been used before?

ROGERS: In an open unclassified forum, I am not going to talk about Russian tactics, techniques or procedures about how they executed their hacks.

HURD: If members of the DNC had not — let me rephrase this, can we talk about spear fishing?

ROGERS: Sure, in general terms, yes sir.

HURD: Spear fishing is when somebody sends an email and they — somebody clicks on something in that email…

ROGERS: Right, the user of things (inaudible) they’re receiving an email either of interest or from a legitimate user, they open it up and they’ll often click if you will on a link — an attachment.

HURD: Was that type of tactic used in the…

ROGERS: Again, I’m not in an unclassified forum just not going to be…

The refusal to discuss the most basic details of this hack — even after the government listed 31 reports describing APT 28 and 29 (and distinguishing between the two) in its updated report on the hacks — is weird, particularly given the level of detail DOJ released on the FSB-related hack of Yahoo. Given that the tactics themselves are not secret (and have been confirmed by FBI, regardless of what information NSA provided), it seems possible that the government is being so skittish about these details because they don’t actually match what we publicly know. Indeed, at least one detail I’ve learned about the documents Guccifer 2.0 leaked undermines the neat GRU-FSB narrative.

Comey did confirm something I’ve been told about the GRU side of the hack: they wanted to be found (whereas the FSB side of the hack had remained undiscovered for months, even in spite of FBI’s repeated efforts to warn DNC).

COMEY: The only thing I’d add is they were unusually loud in their intervention. It’s almost as if they didn’t care that we knew what they were doing or that they wanted us to see what they were doing. It was very noisy, their intrusions in different institutions.

There is mounting evidence that Guccifer 2.0 went to great lengths to implicate Russia in the hack. Confirmation GRU also went out of its way to make noise during the DNC hack may suggest both within and outside of the DNC the second hack wanted to be discovered.

I have previously pointed to a conflict between what Crowdstrike claimed in its report on the DNC hack and what the FBI told FireEye. Crowdstrike basically said the two hacking groups didn’t coordinate at all (which Crowdstrike took as proof of sophistication). Whereas FireEye said they did coordinate (which it took as proof of sophistication and uniqueness of this hack). I understand the truth is closer to the latter. APT 28 largely operated on its own, but at times, when it hit a wall of sorts, it got help from APT 29 (though there may have been some back and forth before APT 29 did share).

All of which brings me to two questions Elise Stefanik asked. First, she asked — casually raising it because it had “been in the news recently” — whether the FSB was collecting intelligence in its hack of Yahoo.

STEFANIK: Thank you. Taking a further step back of what’s been in the news recently, and I’m referring to the Yahoo! hack, the Yahoo! data breech, last week the Department of Justice announced that it was charging hackers with ties to the FSB in the 2014 Yahoo! data breech. Was this hack done to your knowledge for intelligence purposes?

COMEY: I can’t say in this forum.

STEFANIK: Press reporting indicates that Yahoo! hacked targeted journalists, dissidence and government officials. Do you know what the FSB did with the information they obtained?

COMEY: Same answer.

Again, in spite of the great deal of detail in the indictment, Comey refused to answer these obvious questions.

The question is all the more interesting given that the indictment alleges that Alexsey Belan (who was sanctioned along with GRU in December) had access to Yahoo’s network until December 2016, well after these hacks. More interestingly, Belan was “minting” Yahoo account credentials at least as late as May 20, 2016. That’s significant, because one of the first things that led DNC to be convinced Russia was hacking it was when Ali Chalupa, who was then collecting opposition research on Paul Manafort from anti-Russian entities in Ukraine, kept having her Yahoo account hacked in early May. With the ability to mint cookies, the FSB could have accessed her account without generating a Yahoo notice. Chalupa has recently gone public about some, though not all, of the other frightening things that happened to her last summer (she was sharing them privately at the time). So at a time when the FSB could have accomplished its goals unobtrusively, hackers within the DNC network, Guccifer 2.0 outside of it, and stalkers in the DC area were all alerting Chalupa, at least, to their presence.

While it seems increasingly likely the FSB officers indicted for the Yahoo hack (one of whom has been charged with treason in Russia) were operating at least partly on their own, it’s worth noting that overlapping Russian entities had three different ways to access DNC targets.

Note, Dianne Feinstein is the one other person I’m aware of who is fully briefed on the DNC hack and who has mentioned the Yahoo indictment. Like Comey, she was non-committal about whether the Yahoo hack related to the DNC hack.

Today’s charges against hackers and Russian spies for the theft of more than 500 million Yahoo user accounts is the latest evidence of a troubling trend: Russia’s sustained use of cyber warfare for both intelligence gathering and financial crimes. The indictment shows that Russia used these cyberattacks to target U.S. and Russian government officials, Russian journalists and employees of cybersecurity, financial services and commercial entities.

There seems to be a concerted effort to obscure whether the Yahoo hack had any role in the hack of the DNC or other political targets.

Finally, Stefanik asked Comey a question I had myself.

STEFANIK: OK, I understand that. How — how did the administration determine who to sanction as part of the election hacking? How — how familiar with that decision process and how is that determination made?

COMEY: I don’t know. I’m not familiar with the decision process. The FBI is a factual input but I don’t recall and I don’t have any personal knowledge of how the decisions are made about who to sanction.

One place you might go to understand the relationship between GRU and FSB would be to Obama’s sanctions, which described the intelligence targets this way.

  • The Main Intelligence Directorate (a.k.a. Glavnoe Razvedyvatel’noe Upravlenie) (a.k.a. GRU) is involved in external collection using human intelligence officers and a variety of technical tools, and is designated for tampering, altering, or causing a misappropriation of information with the purpose or effect of interfering with the 2016 U.S. election processes.
  • The Federal Security Service (a.k.a. Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti) (a.k.a FSB) assisted the GRU in conducting the activities described above.

[snip]

  • Sanctioned individuals include Igor Valentinovich Korobov, the current Chief of the GRU; Sergey Aleksandrovich Gizunov, Deputy Chief of the GRU; Igor Olegovich Kostyukov, a First Deputy Chief of the GRU; and Vladimir Stepanovich Alexseyev, also a First Deputy Chief of the GRU.

Remember, by the time Obama released these sanctions, several FSB officers, including Dmitry Dokuchaev (who was named in the Yahoo indictment) had been detained for treason for over three weeks. But the officers named in the sanctions, unlike the private companies and individual hackers, are unlikely to be directly affected by the sanctions.

The sanctions also obscured whether Belan was sanctioned for any role in the DNC hack.

  • Aleksey Alekseyevich Belan engaged in the significant malicious cyber-enabled misappropriation of personal identifiers for private financial gain.  Belan compromised the computer networks of at least three major United States-based e-commerce companies.

Again, all of this suggests that the intelligence community has reason to want to obscure how these various parts fit together, even while publicizing the details of the Yahoo indictment.

Which suggests a big part of the story is about how the public story deviates from the real story the IC is so intent on hiding.

The Evidence to Prove the Russian Hack

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In this post, I’m going to lay out the evidence needed to fully explain the Russian hack. I think it will help to explain some of the timing around the story that the CIA believes Russia hacked the DNC to help win Trump win the election, as well as what is new in Friday’s story. I will do rolling updates on this and eventually turn it into a set of pages on Russia’s hacking.

As I see it, intelligence on all the following are necessary to substantiate some of the claims about Russia tampering in this year’s election.

  1. FSB-related hackers hacked the DNC
  2. GRU-related hackers hacked the DNC
  3. Russian state actors hacked John Podesta’s emails
  4. Russian state actors hacked related targets, including Colin Powell and some Republican sites
  5. Russian state actors hacked the RNC
  6. Russian state actors released information from DNC and DCCC via Guccifer 2
  7. Russian state actors released information via DC Leaks
  8. Russian state actors or someone acting on its behest passed information to Wikileaks
  9. The motive explaining why Wikileaks released the DNC and Podesta emails
  10. Russian state actors probed voter registration databases
  11. Russian state actors used bots and fake stories to make information more damaging and magnify its effects
  12. The level at which all Russian state actors’ actions were directed and approved
  13. The motive behind the actions of Russian state actors
  14. The degree to which Russia’s efforts were successful and/or primary in leading to Hillary’s defeat

I explain all of these in more detail below. For what it’s worth, I think there was strong publicly available information to prove 3, 4, 7, 11. I think there is weaker though still substantial information to support 2. It has always been the case that the evidence is weakest at point 6 and 8.

At a minimum, to blame Russia for tampering with the election, you need high degree of confidence that GRU hacked the DNC (item 2), and shared those documents via some means with Wikileaks (item 8). What is new about Friday’s story is that, after months of not knowing how the hacked documents got from Russian hackers to Wikileaks, CIA now appears to know that people close to the Russian government transferred the documents (item 8). In addition, CIA now appears confident that all this happened to help Trump win the presidency (item 13).

1) FSB-related hackers hacked the DNC

The original report from Crowdstrike on the DNC hack actually said two separate Russian-linked entities hacked the DNC: one tied to the FSB, which it calls “Cozy Bear” or APT 29, and one tied to GRU, which it calls “Fancy Bear” or APT 28. Crowdstrike says Cozy Bear was also responsible for hacks of unclassified networks at the White House, State Department, and US Joint Chiefs of Staff.

I’m not going to assess the strength of the FSB evidence here. As I’ll lay out, the necessary hack to attribute to the Russians is the GRU one, because that’s the one believed to be the source of the DNC and Podesta emails. The FSB one is important to keep in mind, as it suggests part of the Russian government may have been hacking US sites solely for intelligence collection, something our own intelligence agencies believe is firmly within acceptable norms of spying. In the months leading up to the 2012 election, for example, CIA and NSA hacked the messaging accounts of a bunch of Enrique Peña Nieto associates, pretty nearly the equivalent of the Podesta hack, though we don’t know what they did with that intelligence. The other reason to keep the FSB hack in mind is because, to the extent FSB hacked other sites, they also may be deemed part of normal spying.

2) GRU-related hackers hacked the DNC

As noted, Crowdstrike reported that GRU also hacked the DNC. As it explains, GRU does this by sending someone something that looks like an email password update, but which instead is a fake site designed to get someone to hand over their password. The reason this claim is strong is because people at the DNC say this happened to them.

Note that there are people who raise questions of whether this method is legitimately tied to GRU and/or that the method couldn’t be stolen and replicated. I will deal with those questions at length elsewhere. But for the purposes of this post, I will accept that this method is a clear sign of GRU involvement. There are also reports that deal with GRU hacking that note high confidence GRU hacked other entities, but less direct evidence they hacked the DNC.

Finally, there is the real possibility that other people hacked the DNC, in addition to FSB and GRU. That possibility is heightened because a DNC staffer was hacked via what may have been another method, and because DNC emails show a lot of password changes off services for which DNC staffers had had their accounts exposed in other hacks.

All of which is a way of saying, there is some confidence that DNC got hacked at least twice, with those two revealed efforts being done by hackers with ties to the Russian state.

3) Russian state actors (GRU) hacked John Podesta’s emails

Again, assuming that the fake Gmail phish is GRU’s handiwork, there is probably the best evidence that GRU hacked John Podesta and therefore that Russia, via some means, supplied Wikileaks, because we have a copy of the actual email used to hack him. The Smoking Gun has an accessible story describing how all this works. So in the case of Podesta, we know he got a malicious phish email, we know that someone clicked the link in the email, and we know that emails from precisely that time period were among the documents shared with Wikileaks. We just have no idea how they got there.

4) Russian state actors hacked related targets, including some other Democratic staffers, Colin Powell and some Republican sites

That same Gmail phish was used with victims — including at a minimum William Rinehart and Colin Powell — that got exposed in a site called DC Leaks. We can have the same high degree of confidence that GRU conducted this hack as we do with Podesta. As I note below, that’s more interesting for what it tells us about motive than anything else.

5) Russian state actors hacked the RNC

The allegation that Russia also hacked the RNC, but didn’t leak those documents — which the CIA seems to rely on in part to argue that Russia must have wanted to elect Trump — has been floating around for some time. I’ll return to what we know of this. RNC spox Sean Spicer is denying it, though so did Hillary’s people at one point deny that they had been hacked.

There are several points about this. First, hackers presumed to be GRU did hack and release emails from Colin Powell and an Republican-related server. The Powell emails (including some that weren’t picked up in the press), in particular, were detrimental to both candidates. The Republican ones were, like a great deal of the Democratic ones, utterly meaningless from a news standpoint.

So I don’t find this argument persuasive in its current form. But the details on it are still sketchy precisely because we don’t know about that hack.

6) Russian state actors released information from DNC and DCCC via Guccifer 2

Some entity going by the name Guccifer 2 started a website in the wake of the announcement that the DNC got hacked. The site is a crucial part of this assessment, both because it released DNC and DCCC documents directly (though sometimes misattributing what it was releasing) and because Guccifer 2 stated clearly that he had shared the DNC documents with Wikileaks. The claim has always been that Guccifer 2 was just a front for Russia — a way for them to adopt plausible deniability about the DNC hack.

That may be the case (and obvious falsehoods in Guccifer’s statements make it clear deception was part of the point), but there was always less conclusive (and sometimes downright contradictory) evidence to support this argument (this post summarizes what it claims are good arguments that Guccifer 2 was a front for Russia; on the most part I disagree and hope to return to it in the future). Moreover, this step has been one that past reporting said the FBI couldn’t confirm. Then there are other oddities about Guccifer’s behavior, such as his “appearance” at a security conference in London, or the way his own production seemed to fizzle as Wikileaks started releasing the Podesta emails. Those details of Guccifer’s behavior are, in my opinion, worth probing for a sense of how all this was orchestrated.

Yesterday’s story seems to suggest that the spooks have finally figured out this step, though we don’t have any idea what it entails.

7) Russian state actors released information via DC Leaks

Well before many people realized that DC Leaks existed, I suspected that it was a Russian operation. That’s because two of its main targets — SACEUR Philip Breedlove and George Soros — are targets Russia would obviously hit to retaliate for what it treats as a US-backed coup in Ukraine.

DC Leaks is also where the publicly released (and boring) GOP emails got released.

Perhaps most importantly, that’s where the Colin Powell emails got released (this post covers some of those stories). That’s significant because Powell’s emails were derogatory towards both candidates (though he ultimately endorsed Hillary).

It’s interesting for its haphazard targeting (if someone wants to pay me $$ I would do an assessment of all that’s there, because some just don’t make any clear sense from a Russian perspective, and some of the people most actively discussing the Russian hacks have clearly not even read all of it), but also because a number of the victims have been affirmatively tied to the GRU phishing methods.

So DC Leaks is where you get obvious Russian targets and Russian methods all packaged together. But of the documents it released, the Powell emails were the most interesting for electoral purposes, and they didn’t target Hillary as asymmetrically as the Wikileaks released documents did.

8) Russian state actors or someone acting on its behest passed information to Wikileaks

The basis for arguing that all these hacks were meant to affect the election is that they were released via Wikileaks. That is what was supposed to be new, beyond just spying (though we have almost certainly hacked documents and leaked them, most probably in the Syria Leaks case, but I suspect also in some others).

And as noted, how Wikileaks got two separate sets of emails has always been the big question. With the DNC emails, Guccifer 2 clearly said he had given them to WL, but the Guccifer 2 ties to Russia was relatively weak. And with the Podesta emails, I’m not aware of any known interim step between the GRU hack and Wikileaks.

A late July report said the FBI was still trying to determine how Russia got the emails to Wikileaks or even if they were the same emails.

The FBI is still investigating the DNC hack. The bureau is trying to determine whether the emails obtained by the Russians are the same ones that appeared on the website of the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks on Friday, setting off a firestorm that roiled the party in the lead-up to the convention.

The FBI is also examining whether APT 28 or an affiliated group passed those emails to WikiLeaks, law enforcement sources said.

An even earlier report suggested that the IC wasn’t certain the files had been passed electronically.

And the joint DHS/ODNI statement largely attributed its confidence that Russia was involved in the the leaking (lumping Guccifer 2, DC Leaks, and Wikileaks all together) not because it had high confidence in that per se (a term of art saying, effectively, “we have seen the evidence”), but instead because leaking such files is consistent with what Russia has done elsewhere.

The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts.

Importantly, that statement came out on October 7, so well after the September briefing at which CIA claimed to have further proof of all this.

Now, Julian Assange has repeatedly denied that Russia was his source. Craig Murray asserted, after having meeting with Assange, that the source is not the Russian state or a proxy. Wikileaks’ tweet in the wake of yesterday’s announcement — concluding that an inquiry directed at Russia in this election cycle is targeted at Wikileaks — suggests some doubt. Also, immediately after the election, Sergei Markov, in a statement deemed to be consistent with Putin’s views, suggested that “maybe we helped a bit with WikiLeaks,” even while denying Russia carried out the hacks.

That’s what’s new in yesterday’s story. It stated that “individuals with connections to the Russian government” handed the documents to Wikileaks.

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.

[snip]

[I]ntelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin “directing” the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks, a second senior U.S. official said. Those actors, according to the official, were “one step” removed from the Russian government, rather than government employees. Moscow has in the past used middlemen to participate in sensitive intelligence operations so it has plausible deniability.

I suspect we’ll hear more leaked about these individuals in the coming days; obviously, the IC says it doesn’t have evidence of the Russian government ordering these people to share the documents with Wikileaks.

Nevertheless, the IC now has what it didn’t have in July: a clear idea of who gave Wikileaks the emails.

9) The motive explaining why Wikileaks released the DNC and Podesta emails

There has been a lot of focus on why Wikileaks did what it did, which notably includes timing the DNC documents to hit for maximum impact before the Democratic Convention and timing the Podesta emails to be a steady release leading up to the election.

I don’t rule out Russian involvement with all of that, but it is entirely unnecessary in this case. Wikileaks has long proven an ability to hype its releases as much as possible. More importantly, Assange has reason to have a personal gripe against Hillary, going back to State’s response to the cable release in 2010 and the subsequent prosecution of Chelsea Manning.

In other words, absent really good evidence to the contrary, I assume that Russia’s interests and Wikileaks’ coincided perfectly for this operation.

10) Russian state actors probed voter registration databases

Back in October, a slew of stories reported that “Russians” had breached voter related databases in a number of states. The evidence actually showed that hackers using a IP tied to Russia had done these hacks. Even if the hackers were Russian (about which there was no evidence in the first reports), there was also no evidence the hackers were tied to the Russian state. Furthermore, as I understand it, these hacks used a variety of methods, some or all of which aren’t known to be GRU related. A September DHS bulletin suggested these hacks were committed by cybercriminals (in the past, identity thieves have gone after voter registration lists). And the October 7 DHS/ODNI statement affirmatively said the government was not attributing the probes to the Russians.

Some states have also recently seen scanning and probing of their election-related systems, which in most cases originated from servers operated by a Russian company. However, we are not now in a position to attribute this activity to the Russian Government.

In late November, an anonymous White House statement said there was no increased malicious hacking aimed at the electoral process, though remains agnostic about whether Russia ever planned on such a thing.

The Federal government did not observe any increased level of malicious cyber activity aimed at disrupting our electoral process on election day. As we have noted before, we remained confident in the overall integrity of electoral infrastructure, a confidence that was borne out on election day. As a result, we believe our elections were free and fair from a cybersecurity perspective.

That said, since we do not know if the Russians had planned any malicious cyber activity for election day, we don’t know if they were deterred from further activity by the various warnings the U.S. government conveyed.

Absent further evidence, this suggests that reports about Russian trying to tamper with the actual election infrastructure were at most suspicions and possibly just a result of shoddy reporting conflating Russian IP with Russian people with Russian state.

11) Russian state actors used bots and fake stories to make information more damaging and magnify its effects

Russia has used bots and fake stories in the past to distort or magnify compromising information. There is definitely evidence some pro-Trump bots were based out of Russia. RT and Sputnik ran with inflammatory stories. Samantha Bee famously did an interview with some Russians who were spreading fake news. But there were also people spreading fake news from elsewhere, including Macedonia and Surburban LA. A somewhat spooky guy even sent out fake news in an attempt to discredit Wikileaks.

As I have argued, the real culprit in this economy of clickbait driven outrage is closer to home, in the algorithms that Silicon Valley companies use that are exploited by a whole range of people. So while Russian directed efforts may have magnified inflammatory stories, that was not a necessary part of any intervention in the election, because it was happening elsewhere.

12) The level at which all Russian state actors’ actions were directed and approved

The DHS/ODNI statement said clearly that “We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.” But the WaPo story suggests they still don’t have proof of Russia directing even the go-between who gave WL the cables, much less the go-between directing how Wikileaks released these documents.

Mind you, this would be among the most sensitive information, if the NSA did have proof, because it would be collection targeted at Putin and his top advisors.

13) The motive behind the actions of Russian state actors

The motive behind all of this has varied. The joint DHS/ODNI statement said it was “These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process.” It didn’t provide a model for what that meant though.

Interim reporting — including the White House’s anonymous post-election statement — had suggested that spooks believed Russia was doing it to discredit American democracy.

The Kremlin probably expected that publicity surrounding the disclosures that followed the Russian Government-directed compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations, would raise questions about the integrity of the election process that could have undermined the legitimacy of the President-elect.

At one level, that made a lot of sense — the biggest reason to release the DNC and Podesta emails, it seems to me, was to confirm the beliefs a lot of people already had about how power works. I think one of the biggest mistakes of journalists who have political backgrounds was to avoid discussing how the sausage of politics gets made, because this material looks worse if you’ve never worked in a system where power is about winning support. All that said, there’s nothing in the emails (especially given the constant release of FOIAed emails) that uniquely exposed American democracy as corrupt.

All of which is to say that this explanation never made any sense to me; it was mostly advanced by people who live far away from people who already distrust US election systems, who ignored polls showing there was already a lot of distrust.

Which brings us to the other thing that is new in the WaPo story: the assertion that CIA now believes this was all intended to elect Trump, not just make us distrust elections.

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.

[snip]

“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.”

For what it’s worth, there’s still some ambiguity in this. Did Putin really want Trump? Or did he want Hillary to be beat up and weak for an expected victory? Did he, like Assange, want to retaliate for specific things he perceived Hillary to have done, in both Libya, Syria, and Ukraine? That’s unclear.

14) The degree to which Russia’s efforts were successful and/or primary in leading to Hillary’s defeat

Finally, there’s the question that may explain Obama’s reticence about this issue, particularly in the anonymous post-election statement from the White House, which stated that the “election results … accurately reflect the will of the American people.” It’s not clear that Putin’s intervention, whatever it was, had anywhere near the effect as (for example) Jim Comey’s letters and Bret Baier’s false report that Hillary would be indicted shortly. There are a lot of other factors (including Hillary’s decision to ignore Jake Sullivan’s lonely advice to pay some attention to the Rust Belt).

And, as I’ve noted repeatedly, it is no way the case that Vladimir Putin had to teach Donald Trump about kompromat, the leaking of compromising information for political gain. Close Trump associates, including Roger Stone (who, by the way, may have had conversations with Julian Assange), have been rat-fucking US elections since the time Putin was in law school.

But because of the way this has rolled out (and particularly given the cabinet picks Trump has already made), it will remain a focus going forward, perhaps to the detriment of other issues that need attention.

A Busy Day for the Bears

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Yesterday, there were three arguably big events associated with stolen records alleged to have ties to Russia’s GRU.

Simon Biles treats her ADHD

The first is the leak, by a group explicitly calling itself Fancy Bear (though the hack was once tied to Polish Anonymous), of anti-doping agency records showing the Williams sisters and Simone Biles all got approval for and took drugs on a list of otherwise banned substances. While there are no allegations of impropriety — indeed, Biles explained that in her case the exception involved treating ADHD — the story got covered by the major international press, including the Beeb, NBC, and NYT.

Colin Powell rants

The second alleged-Bear event is the release of Colin Powell emails, obtained by DC Leaks, to The Intercept, BuzzFeed, and Politico. The emails include quite recent ones, including one from August 26. Powell now uses GMail, suggesting his emails should be harder to hack than (for example) his State emails on AOL or emails run on a private server. Whether you worry about Russian influence or not, this hack is quite newsworthy.

There are embarrassing emails with Powell asserting that “Everything HRC touches she kind of screws up with hubris,” as well as emails with Powell complaining about Trump’s racism and the press’ stoking of it.

The emails are not limited to election-related ones, either. They also include correspondence between Powell and Jack Straw and how the Chilcot report got buried in all the Brexit news.

Guccifer 2 goes mainstream

dncarchitecture_mc

Finally, there was the “appearance” at a security conference by Guccifer 2.0, the guy who has released the DNC emails that gave the Democrats an excuse to force Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s to resign, though they had been looking for an excuse for some time.

In point of fact, Guccifer 2.0 didn’t appear in person at the conference. Rather, he sent a speech which got read at the conference, with the transcript released to journalists. The speech focused on the negligence of software companies in security. Guccifer went on for several paragraphs about the power and sloppiness of tech companies, arguing they were to blame for hacks.

The next reason, and the crucial one, is software vulnerability. Tech companies hurry to finish the work and earn money. So they break development cycle very often omitting the stage of testing. As a result, clients have raw products installed on their systems and networks with a great number of bugs and holes.

Fourth. It’s well known that all large companies look forward to receiving governmental contracts. They develop governmental websites, communication systems, electronic voting systems, and so on and have their products installed to critical infrastructure objects on the national level.

They are aggressively lobbying their interests. You can see it at the diagram that they spent millions of dollars for lobbying. That doesn’t mean they will produce better software. That means they will get even more money in return.

Then he returned to a claim he has made on two earlier occasions: that he hacked DNC via a vulnerability in VAN.

So, what’s the right question we should ask about cyber crime?

Who hacked a system?

Wrong. The right question is: who made it possible that a system was hacked? In this regard, what question should you ask me?

How I hacked the DNC???

Now you know this is a wrong question. Who made it possible, that I hacked into the DNC? This is the question. And I suppose, you already know the answer. This is NGP VAN Company that operates the DNC network. And this is its CEO Stu Trevelyan who is really responsible for the breach.

Their software is full of holes. And you knew about it even before I came on stage.

You may remember Josh Uretsky, the national data director for Sander’s presidential campaign. He was fired in December, 2015 after improperly accessing proprietary data in the DNC system. As it was agreed, he was intentionally searching for voter information belonging to other campaigns.

However, he is not to blame. The real reason voter information became available for non-authorized users was NGP VAN’s raw software which had holes and errors in the code. And this is the same reason I managed to get access to the DNC network. Vulnerabilities in the NGP VAN software installed on its server which they have plenty of. Shit! Yeah?

This scheme shows how NGP VAN is incorporated in the DNC infrastructure.

One of two schemes released with the speech appears above.

Now, Guccifer’s allegation — tying vulnerabilities in the VAN software to his own hack — could be newsworthy. Recall, after all, that one excuse the Bernie staffer gave for nosing around Hillary’s side of VAN was that Sanders’ own data had been compromised earlier that year. Importantly, Guccifer’s persistent focus on VAN, which was a signature moment in Sanders’ voters disillusionment with the DNC conduct in the election, would provide an alternative motive for this hack rather than just a Putinesque plot to tamper with Hillary’s election.

Thing is, there’s nothing in the materials released on VAN that indicates any particular vulnerability (though the dump does include some dated information on DNC’s computer security): effectively Guccifer makes an allegation but — at least from what I’ve seen and heard from a few people who know security better — doesn’t deliver the goods.

Indeed, while there are documents acknowledging the kind of pay-to-play appointments for big donors that both parties practice, and some other financial data that I suspect may prove more interesting with further scrutiny, there’s nothing really newsworthy in this dump. It seems to be interesting primarily to Bernie diehards, not the press generally, which is rightly more interested by the Powell emails.

Which, again, emphasizes how much Guccifer has been feeding Bernie diehards, either out of his own motivation or his handler’s. It is worth noting that while Guccifer claims to oppose Trump’s policies, he did say this about Sanders: “I have nothing to say about Bernie Sanders. It seems he never had a chance to win the nomination as the Democratic Party itself stood against him!”

Why stomp on the Bears other big blasts?

Which has me wondering about yesterday generally. If someone is orchestrating all these leaks, why have Guccifer “give a speech” on the same day as two highly managed releases, especially given that Guccifer failed to deliver the goods? Indeed, why invite Guccifer to, or have him accept an invitation from, a pretty staid security conference at all?

And what is the role of Darren Martyn, a LulzSec Irish hacker who was indicted along with Jeremy Hammond but apparently never extradited. He’s apparently the one who read Guccifer’s speech. Which raises all sorts of questions about Guccifer’s ties to the Anon group of hackers, or maybe also to what Martyn has been doing since he was indicted in the US.

Let me just close with an observation.

The Democrats have, rightly, been worried about what Guccifer will release closer to the election; I’ve heard specific concerns from connected Dems that he will release far more damning financial documents. The FBI, too, appears uncertain whether the set of documents Guccifer has is the same that the GRU-related hackers are believed to have spied on at the DNC. Thus, both the DNC and FBI would love to do something to make Guccifer show more of his hand.

Before this hack, we were all just waiting to see what Julian Assange, who is clearly maximizing damage to Hillary, will drop next.

And instead, by inviting Guccifer to appear at a conference, someone got Guccifer to drop an additional 700 MB of files while everyone is busy looking at the Powell emails.