Claim: DNC Hack Was Not a Foreign Hack, But Done In-Person By Someone With Access to the System

Via Instapundit, Just One Minute links an article in The Nation claiming a report of intelligence experts says the "hack" wasn't really a remote hack at all, but an internal leak by a DNC official with close physical access to the system.

The Nation isn't at all clear about who it is publishing this report, but it could be a group called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, who have disputed these claims before. They previously tried to debunk the case for the Iraq War when Bush was President. So they seem left-wing. (RUSSIA!!!)

This seems to be the most easily provable or disprovable -- and most dispositive on the subject -- claim being made:

There was no hack of the Democratic National Committee’s system on July 5 last year—not by the Russians, not by anyone else. Hard science now demonstrates it was a leak—a download executed locally with a memory key or a similarly portable data-storage device. In short, it was an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system. This casts serious doubt on the initial “hack,” as alleged, that led to the very consequential publication of a large store of documents on WikiLeaks last summer.

The VIPS group also made this claim on July 24th -- that the speed of the download was not possible over the internet, but could only be accomplished through the computer downloading to a physically-attached external storage device. Their report claimed:

The Key Event

July 5, 2016: In the early evening, Eastern Daylight Time, someone working in the EDT time zone with a computer directly connected to the DNC server or DNC Local Area Network, copied ,1,976 MegaBytes of data in 87 seconds onto an external storage device. That speed is much faster than what is physically possible with a hack.

It thus appears that the purported "hack" of the DNC by Guccifer 2.0 (the self-proclaimed WikiLeaks source) was not a hack by Russia or anyone else, but was rather a copy of DNC data onto an external storage device.

I don't know if that's true -- but it seems easily checkable, and we deserve answers about that.

Given The Nation's long, long history of flacking on behalf of Mother Russia, I am suspicious of their interest in disproving a Russia Hack narrative.

But, as I said, the case seems to be made upon two checkable facts: How much/how fast information was downloaded, and whether such download speeds are capable via remote hacking, or can only be done through a computer's physical ports.

I'd like this either rebutted or admitted by the "intelligence" community.

posted by Ace at 01:59 PM

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