By William Binney, Ray
McGovern
Source: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46166.htm
January 06, 2017 "Information Clearing House" - It has
been several weeks since the New York Times reported
that "overwhelming circumstantial evidence" led the CIA to believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin "deployed computer hackers" to
help Donald Trump win the election. But the evidence released so far has been
far from overwhelming.
The long anticipated Joint Analysis
Report issued by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI on Dec. 29 met widespread criticism in the technical
community. Worse still, some of the advice it offered led to a very alarmist false
alarm about supposed Russian hacking into a Vermont electric power
station.
Advertised in advance as providing proof of Russian hacking, the
report fell embarrassingly short of that goal. The thin gruel that it did
contain was watered down further by the following unusual warning atop page 1:
"DISCLAIMER: This report is provided 'as is' for informational purposes
only. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not provide any warranties
of any kind regarding any information contained within."
Also, curiously absent was any clear input from the CIA, NSA or
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Reportedly, Mr. Clapper will get a chance
tomorrow to brief an understandably skeptical Donald Trump, who has called the
briefing delay "very strange," even suggesting that top intelligence
officials "need more time to build a case."
Mr. Trump's skepticism is warranted not only by technical
realities, but also by human ones, including the dramatis personae involved.
Mr. Clapper has admitted giving Congress on March 12, 2013, false testimony
regarding the extent of NSA collection of data on Americans. Four months later,
after the Edward Snowden revelations, Mr. Clapper apologized to the Senate for
testimony he admitted was "clearly erroneous." That he is a survivor
was already apparent by the way he landed on his feet after the intelligence
debacle on Iraq.
Mr. Clapper was a key player in facilitating the fraudulent
intelligence. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put Mr. Clapper in charge of
the analysis of satellite imagery, the best source for pinpointing the location
of weapons of mass destruction — if any.
When Pentagon favorites like Iraqi émigré Ahmed Chalabi plied U.S.
intelligence with spurious "evidence" on WMD in Iraq, Mr. Clapper was
in position to suppress the findings of any imagery analyst who might have the
temerity to report, for example, that the Iraqi "chemical weapons
facility" for which Mr. Chalabi provided the geographic coordinates was
nothing of the kind. Mr. Clapper preferred to go by the Rumsfeldian dictum:
"The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." (It will be
interesting to see if he tries that out on the president-elect Friday.)
A year after the war began, Mr. Chalabi told the media,
"We are heroes in error. As far as we're concerned we've been entirely
successful." By that time it was clear there were no WMD in Iraq. When Mr.
Clapper was asked to explain, he opined, without adducing any evidence, that
they probably were moved into Syria.
With respect to the alleged interference by Russia and WikiLeaks in
the U.S. election, it is a major mystery why U.S. intelligence feels it must
rely on "circumstantial evidence," when it has NSA's vacuum cleaner
sucking up hard evidence galore. What we know of NSA's capabilities shows that
the email disclosures were from leaking, not hacking.
Here's the difference:
Hack: When someone in a
remote location electronically penetrates operating systems, firewalls or other
cyber-protection systems and then extracts data. Our own considerable
experience, plus the rich detail revealed by Edward Snowden, persuades us that,
with NSA's formidable trace capability, it can identify both sender and
recipient of any and all data crossing the network.
Leak: When someone
physically takes data out of an organization — on a thumb drive, for example —
and gives it to someone else, as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning did.
Leaking is the only way such data can be copied and removed with no electronic
trace.
Because NSA can trace exactly where and how any "hacked"
emails from the Democratic National Committee or other servers were routed
through the network, it is puzzling why NSA cannot produce hard evidence
implicating the Russian government and WikiLeaks. Unless we are dealing with a
leak from an insider, not a hack, as other reporting suggests. From a technical
perspective alone, we are convinced that this is what happened.
Lastly, the CIA is almost totally dependent on NSA for ground truth
in this electronic arena. Given Mr. Clapper's checkered record for accuracy in
describing NSA activities, it is to be hoped that the director of NSA will join
him for the briefing with Mr. Trump.
William Binney (williambinney0802@comcast.net) worked for NSA for
36 years, retiring in 2001 as the technical director of world military and
geopolitical analysis and reporting; he created many of the collection systems
still used by NSA. Ray McGovern (rrmcgovern@gmail.com) was a CIA analyst for 27
years; he briefed the president's daily brief one-on-one to President Reagan's
most senior national security officials from 1981-85.
