Wednesday, October 4, 2017

Censorship: “Everyday Liberals” Dangerously Unclear on the Concept



Unclear on the concept. Unclear on the concept.

Eric Mader







Fake news is primarily a right wing disease.












JONATHAN BARKLEY: Fuck you you ignorant twat.

Simple enough for you?



JONATHAN BARKLEY: Holy fuck you're full of shit.


Politifact disproves your entire premise.

You are the problem.





* * *


In short: We’re in big trouble.


Update: Mea culpa! A technically savvy commentator points out below that the Nation piece on which I base my argument on the "technical impossibility" of the DNC hack is not by any means the last word. Thanks to "nnnnn" for keeping me honest and reminding me to be humbler.



nnnnn said...

PSA: Eric, you should go look at the updates to that Nation article. They've walked back its major claim, that the DNC hack COULD NOT have been a hack. It's true that there's still no hard evidence available to the public that it WAS a hack, but it's incorrect to say that this article demonstrates that it COULD NOT have been a hack.

I agree with you that everyone should take care to avoid assuming that it definitely was a hack; but by the same token, your claim "that the Russian hacking never occurred and has basically been proved never to have occurred" is simply wrong. We normals just don't know, based on the information available to us.

This is exactly why there's an investigation underway! I trust you support legitimate efforts to get to the bottom of this? Guccifer 2.0 CLAIMED TO HAVE HACKED the DNC, so there's a testable claim of third-party interference in the wild. Everyone, of all political persuasions, should be intensely interested in sorting out the truth of this claim. The integrity of our democracy depends on it.

Eric Mader said...

I've only been able to find a statement by THE NATION's editor Katrina vanden Heuvel that they are reviewing the article after having received blowback from the DNC: "We believe it is important to challenge questionable conventional wisdom and to foster debate—not police it. Focusing on unreported or inadequately reported issues of major importance and raising questions that are not being asked have always been a central part of our work." Unless I'm missing something, i don't see that "They've walked back its major claim." Where have they done so? At the foot of the article itself, there are only two "Editor's note" additions.

I've already seen dissenting pieces in WaPo and elsewhere, but that's just par for the course. Especially re: WaPo, currently America's #1 "Russia Russia Russia" rag. One of THE most egregious pieces to appear yet, of the whole Russiagate epic slow-motion meltdown, was in WaPo late last year,
beautifully taken apart by Glenn Greenwald, one of the handful of real journalists still standing.

nnnnn said...

Yeah, sorry, they kind of buried the link inside the editor's note, grumble. Here's the clean link:

Particularly useful to me is the geek-speak from Nathaniel Freitas, the third item on that page. AFAIK you're not a technical person, so that may be a bit of a slog for you, but he's speaking my language. :-)


The original article was based substantially on the VIPS memo. VIPS's argument was that the data transfer rate was Very High, and that this means it's implausible that the data was transferred directly from the DNC server to a (singular) remote hacker's computer via the open Internet.

This is true, but incomplete. This rules out only one scenario: That there was a single hacker who connected directly to the DNC server and downloaded the entire data cache in one gulp to one remote computer. I agree, that scenario is out.

But that's not the only possible means of accomplishing this hack, and I don't even really think it's the most plausible scenario, given that we're talking about "professional hackers" doing illegal activities here. Freitas provides two other scenarios (of, presumably, many) that could EASILY result in the transfer speeds observed:

1. Do the initial data transfer to a temporary (virtual) cloud server in close network proximity to the DNC server (close network proximity means fast initial transfer, which would obviously be attractive if you're trying to steal something); then download it to the remote hacker's systems at leisure. Then kill the virtual server, making it seem like it never existed.

1a. Freitas doesn't mention this explicitly for some reason, but, using a swarm of virtual cloud servers attacking simultaneously would let you copy stuff much more quickly, and even further skew the apparent data transfer rate.

2. Even better: Compromise a workstation within the DNC's local network. (This is EXTREMELY EASY to do, if you're so inclined, via a phishing/spearphishing attack, or other means. I've had a Windows machine get compromised literally just sitting there....) Then copy the goods from the DNC server to that machine at high local-network speeds; then download to the remote hacker's systems at leisure.


nnnnn said...


The point here is that the VIPS memo significantly oversteps the available evidence when it makes the categorical claim that it's IMPOSSIBLE that the data was hacked by a remote hacker, that it HAD TO BE an insider copying the data and then leaking it. It COULD HAVE BEEN a leak, it COULD HAVE BEEN a hack, there's no conclusive evidence either way -- certainly not enough to support the categorical character of VIPS's claims.

Meanwhile, we have an explicit claim of responsibility from Guccifer 2.0 that it was, in fact, a hack. Without conclusive (or even particularly compelling, by my lights) evidence to disprove that claim of responsibility, it ought to remain the operative theory of what happened -- with due caution that it's the provisional theory, not anything that we should *assume* true. (I'm also with you in wishing that CNN et al would do a better job of observing this caution. Sigh. But by the same token, the Nation should have done a better job of evaluating the claims in the VIPS memo. The media is really really really really bad at reporting on technical subjects. This happens all the time, not just in ideologically charged contexts. Feel my engineer pain!)

Freitas's conclusion:

"Good-faith efforts to parse the available data to provide insight into the unlawful extraction of documents from the DNC in 2016 are admirable and necessary. All parties, however, must exercise much greater care in separating out statements backed by available digital metadata from thoughtful insights and educated guesses. Walking nontechnical readers down any narrative path that cannot be directly supported by evidence must be avoided. At this point, given the limited available data, certainty about only a very small number of things can be achieved."

Eric Mader said...

Sorry for not responding earlier, nnnnn. I wanted to have some time to look into your answers here. And I would say, after doing so, that yes, you're right. I placed too much confidence in the Nation piece, and that has to be put down to my naivete on technical matters, compounded in this case by my supposition that the Nation, being solidly on the left, wouldn't have gone with a story that undermined the liberal narrative unless that story panned out.

Many thanks for taking the time to lay out the possible alternate scenarios here. I'm going to add an update above in the blog post.