We need to talk about Donald: cursing and swearing allowed

[tattuchu]

To quote Bella Fortuna, "This tweet is so juvenile, Roy Moore wants to date it."

[Forty Two]

Republican tax plan 'includes major break for golf course owners'

The House version of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act currently retains the easement for golf courses, Bloomberg reported.

It is used more often by farmers and others whose land is of conservation value, however.

An Obama-era proposal for discontinuing the deduction for golf courses alone suggested it could save the US tens of millions of dollars a year.

The House version of the bill passed through the Ways and Means committee on 9 November.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 51861.html

What's the tax break, specifically, which is more often used by farmers and others? It lets them deduct or write off what, exactly?

[Forty Two]

I must admit that this: "The chief executive of Cambridge Analytica has confirmed that the UK data research firm contacted Julian Assange to ask WikiLeaks to share hacked emails related to Hillary Clinton at about the time it started working for the Trump campaign in summer 2016."
doesn't really leap out as something too terrible, at least in comparison with other Trumpian shenanigans...

Allegedly hacked emails. A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year’s DNC Hack
Former NSA experts say it wasn’t a hack at all, but a leak—an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system. https://www.thenation.com/article/a-new ... -dnc-hack/

To this day, however, the intelligence agencies that released this assessment have failed to provide the American people with any actual evidence substantiating their claims about how the DNC material was obtained or by whom. Astonishingly and often overlooked, the authors of the declassified ICA themselves admit that their “judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.”

Not the language I bolded there, for anyone who says that "the intelligence agencies all found X" andcthat they have evidence that is classified and we can't see....the memo says they are not intending to imply that they have proof that shows something to be a fact.

Despite all the media coverage taking the veracity of the ICA assessment for granted, even now we have only the uncorroborated assertion of intelligence officials to go on. Indeed, this was noticed by The New York Times’s Scott Shane, who wrote the day the report appeared: “What is missing from the public report is…hard evidence to back up the agencies’ claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack…. Instead, the message from the agencies essentially amounts to ‘trust us.’”

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.

Forensic investigations of documents made public two weeks prior to the July 5 leak by the person or entity known as Guccifer 2.0 show that they were fraudulent: Before Guccifer posted them they were adulterated by cutting and pasting them into a blank template that had Russian as its default language. Guccifer took responsibility on June 15 for an intrusion the DNC reported on June 14 and professed to be a WikiLeaks source—claims essential to the official narrative implicating Russia in what was soon cast as an extensive hacking operation. To put the point simply, forensic science now devastates this narrative.

Two, houses built on sand and made of cards are bound to collapse, and there can be no surprise that the one resting atop the “hack theory,” as we can call the prevailing wisdom on the DNC events, appears to be in the process of doing so. Neither is there anything far-fetched in a reversal of the truth of this magnitude. American history is replete with similar cases. The Spanish sank the Maine in Havana harbor in February 1898. Iran’s Mossadegh was a Communist. Guatemala’s Árbenz represented a Communist threat to the United States. Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh was a Soviet puppet. The Sandinistas were Communists. The truth of the Maine, a war and a revolution in between, took a century to find the light of day, whereupon the official story disintegrated. We can do better now. It is an odd sensation to live through one of these episodes, especially one as big as Russiagate. But its place atop a long line of precedents can no longer be disputed.

Forensicator’s first decisive findings, made public in the paper dated July 9, concerned the volume of the supposedly hacked material and what is called the transfer rate—the time a remote hack would require. The metadata established several facts in this regard with granular precision: On the evening of July 5, 2016, 1,976 megabytes of data were downloaded from the DNC’s server. The operation took 87 seconds. This yields a transfer rate of 22.7 megabytes per second.

These statistics are matters of record and essential to disproving the hack theory. No Internet service provider, such as a hacker would have had to use in mid-2016, was capable of downloading data at this speed. Compounding this contradiction, Guccifer claimed to have run his hack from Romania, which, for numerous reasons technically called delivery overheads, would slow down the speed of a hack even further from maximum achievable speeds.

What is the maximum achievable speed? Forensicator recently ran a test download of a comparable data volume (and using a server speed not available in 2016) 40 miles from his computer via a server 20 miles away and came up with a speed of 11.8 megabytes per second—half what the DNC operation would need were it a hack. Other investigators have built on this finding. Folden and Edward Loomis say a survey published August 3, 2016, by www.speedtest.net/reports is highly reliable and use it as their thumbnail index. It indicated that the highest average ISP speeds of first-half 2016 were achieved by Xfinity and Cox Communications. These speeds averaged 15.6 megabytes per second and 14.7 megabytes per second, respectively. Peak speeds at higher rates were recorded intermittently but still did not reach the required 22.7 megabytes per second.

“A speed of 22.7 megabytes is simply unobtainable, especially if we are talking about a transoceanic data transfer,” Folden said. “Based on the data we now have, what we’ve been calling a hack is impossible.” Last week Forensicator reported on a speed test he conducted more recently. It tightens the case considerably. “Transfer rates of 23 MB/s (Mega Bytes per second) are not just highly unlikely, but effectively impossible to accomplish when communicating over the Internet at any significant distance,” he wrote. “Further, local copy speeds are measured, demonstrating that 23 MB/s is a typical transfer rate when using a USB–2 flash device (thumb drive).”

Time stamps in the metadata provide further evidence of what happened on July 5. The stamps recording the download indicate that it occurred in the Eastern Daylight Time Zone at approximately 6:45 pm. This confirms that the person entering the DNC system was working somewhere on the East Coast of the United States. In theory the operation could have been conducted from Bangor or Miami or anywhere in between—but not Russia, Romania, or anywhere else outside the EDT zone. Combined with Forensicator’s findings on the transfer rate, the time stamps constitute more evidence that the download was conducted locally, since delivery overheads—conversion of data into packets, addressing, sequencing times, error checks, and the like—degrade all data transfers conducted via the Internet, more or less according to the distance involved.

In addition, there is the adulteration of the documents Guccifer 2.0 posted on June 15, when he made his first appearance. This came to light when researchers penetrated what Folden calls Guccifer’s top layer of metadata and analyzed what was in the layers beneath. They found that the first five files Guccifer made public had each been run, via ordinary cut-and-paste, through a single template that effectively immersed them in what could plausibly be cast as Russian fingerprints. They were not: The Russian markings were artificially inserted prior to posting. “It’s clear,” another forensics investigator self-identified as HET, wrote in a report on this question, “that metadata was deliberately altered and documents were deliberately pasted into a Russianified [W]ord document with Russian language settings and style headings.”

To be noted in this connection: The list of the CIA’s cyber-tools WikiLeaks began to release in March and labeled Vault 7 includes one called Marble that is capable of obfuscating the origin of documents in false-flag operations and leaving markings that point to whatever the CIA wants to point to. (The tool can also “de-obfuscate” what it has obfuscated.) It is not known whether this tool was deployed in the Guccifer case, but it is there for such a use.

It is not yet clear whether documents now shown to have been leaked locally on July 5 were tainted to suggest Russian hacking in the same way the June 15 Guccifer release was. This is among several outstanding questions awaiting answers, and the forensic scientists active on the DNC case are now investigating it. In a note Adam Carter sent to Folden and McGovern last week and copied to me, he reconfirmed the corruption of the June 15 documents, while indicating that his initial work on the July 5 documents—of which much more is to be done—had not yet turned up evidence of doctoring.

In the meantime, VIPS has assembled a chronology that imposes a persuasive logic on the complex succession of events just reviewed. It is this:

On June 12 last year, Julian Assange announced that WikiLeaks had and would publish documents pertinent to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
On June 14, CrowdStrike, a cyber-security firm hired by the DNC, announced, without providing evidence, that it had found malware on DNC servers and had evidence that Russians were responsible for planting it.
On June 15, Guccifer 2.0 first appeared, took responsibility for the “hack” reported on June 14 and claimed to be a WikiLeaks source. It then posted the adulterated documents just described.
On July 5, Guccifer again claimed he had remotely hacked DNC servers, and the operation was instantly described as another intrusion attributable to Russia. Virtually no media questioned this account.

It does not require too much thought to read into this sequence. With his June 12 announcement, Assange effectively put the DNC on notice that it had a little time, probably not much, to act preemptively against the imminent publication of damaging documents. Did the DNC quickly conjure Guccifer from thin air to create a cyber-saboteur whose fingers point to Russia? There is no evidence of this one way or the other, but emphatically it is legitimate to pose the question in the context of the VIPS chronology. WikiLeaks began publishing on July 22. By that time, the case alleging Russian interference in the 2016 elections process was taking firm root. In short order Assange would be written down as a “Russian agent.”

By any balanced reckoning, the official case purporting to assign a systematic hacking effort to Russia, the events of mid-June and July 5 last year being the foundation of this case, is shabby to the point taxpayers should ask for their money back. The Intelligence Community Assessment, the supposedly definitive report featuring the “high confidence” dodge, was greeted as farcically flimsy when issued January 6. Ray McGovern calls it a disgrace to the intelligence profession. It is spotlessly free of evidence, front to back, pertaining to any events in which Russia is implicated. James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, admitted in May that “hand-picked” analysts from three agencies (not the 17 previously reported) drafted the ICA. There is a way to understand “hand-picked” that is less obvious than meets the eye: The report was sequestered from rigorous agency-wide reviews. This is the way these people have spoken to us for the past year.

Behind the ICA lie other indefensible realities. The FBI has never examined the DNC’s computer servers—an omission that is beyond preposterous. It has instead relied on the reports produced by Crowdstrike, a firm that drips with conflicting interests well beyond the fact that it is in the DNC’s employ. Dmitri Alperovitch, its co-founder and chief technology officer, is on the record as vigorously anti-Russian. He is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, which suffers the same prejudice. Problems such as this are many.

[Seabass]

Oh my god, that face. He's too fat to cross his arms. Oh, how I hate his guts.

[Seabass]

[pErvinalia]

[L'Emmerdeur]

The article from The Nation was later shown to be based on faulty and disputed analyses. While the published intelligence report states that it is not meant to imply there is proof, that doesn't eliminate the fact that there is evidence which was not published, as noted in the article below.

'Why the latest theory about the DNC not being hacked is probably wrong'

A forensic report claiming to show that a Democratic National Committee insider, not Russia, stole files from the DNC is full of holes, say cybersecurity experts.

“In short, the theory is flawed,” said FireEye’s John Hultquist, director of intelligence analysis at FireEye, a firm that provides forensic analysis and other cybersecurity services.

“The author of the report didn’t consider a number of scenarios and breezed right past others. It completely ignores all the evidence that contradicts its claims.”

...

A blogger named “The Forensicator” analyzed the "last modified" times in one set of documents released by Guccifer 2.0. Based on the size of the documents and the times they were downloaded, Forensicator calculated that a hacker was able to copy the files at a speed of more than 20 megabytes per second.

That is faster than consumer internet services in the United States can upload documents.

As a result, Forensicator concluded that the documents could not have been copied over the internet. Instead, someone with physical access to the network must have copied them in person to a USB drive, the blogger concluded.

“This theory assumes that the hacker downloaded the files to a computer and then leaked it from that computer,” said Rich Barger, director of security research at Splunk.

But, said Barger and other experts, that overlooks the possibility the files were copied multiple times before being released, something that may be more probable than not in a bureaucracy like Russian intelligence.

“A hacker might have downloaded it to one computer, then shared it by USB to an air gapped [off the internet] network for translation, then copied by a different person for analysis, then brought a new USB to an entirely different air gapped computer to determine a strategy all before it was packaged for Guccifer 2.0 to leak,” said Barger.

Every time the files were copied, depending on the method they were transmitted, there would be a new chance for the metadata to be changed.

Hultquist said the date that Forensicator believes that the files were downloaded, based on the metadata, is almost definitely not the date the files were removed from the DNC.

That date, July 5, 2016, was far later than the April dates when the DNC hackers registered “electionleaks.com” and “DCLeaks.com.” Hulquist noted that the DNC hackers likely had stolen files by the time they began determining their strategy to post them.

The July date is also months after the DNC brought in FireEye competitor CrowdStrike to remove the hackers from their network and well after Crowdstrike first attributed the attack to Russia.

With increased scrutiny on the network, it would be a high-risk way to remove files. And if an insider removed files from the DNC on July 5, it could just as likely be a second, unrelated attack to the Russian one.

Even if there were no other scenarios that would create the same metadata, experts note that metadata is among the easiest pieces of forensic evidence to falsify. It would be far more difficult to fabricate other evidence pointing to Russia, including the malware only known to be used by the suspected Russian hackers, and internet and email addresses seen in previous attacks by that group.

Forensicator’s claim that 20 to 25 megabyte per second downloads would be impossible over the internet also raised eyebrows.

John Bambenek, threat systems manager at the security firm Fidelis, noted that while home internet, where uploads are much slower than downloads, would not allow that speed, corporate and cloud networks could do so.

The DNC would not provide details about its upload speeds in July of 2016.

Proponents of the Forensicator theory have accused CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch of being biased against Russia, negating his firm’s analysis.

But CrowdStrke was not the only firm to conclude Russia was behind the attack.

Other companies independently discovered evidence that linked the attacks to the same culprit. SecureWorks found an improperly secured URL shortening account used by Fancy Bear while investigating other attacks by the group. That account contained evidence of nearly 4,000 phishing attacks Fancy Bear waged against Gmail addresses — the attack that ensnared Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s email account among them.

In the end, Fidelis, FireEye, SecureWorks, Threat Connect and other CrowdStrike competitors all confirmed Crowdstike’s results.

The intelligence community, including the CIA, FBI and NSA, also claims to have evidence the attacks were coordinated by Moscow, though they have not released their evidence to the public.

“I find it interesting that people are so eager to believe that Dmitri Alperovitch is biased, but willing to accept the forensics of an anonymous blogger, with no reputation, that no one knows anything about,” said Hultquist.

The cybersecurity industry is not shy about shaming competitors for spurious research. Companies have gone out of business after high-profile reports were disproven.

Note that nobody has disproven the consensus of the private cybersecurity firms and the US intelligence community, despite the clear incentives to do so.

Note also that the implications of the editor's note posted at the beginning of the current version of the article in The Nation are ignored in Forty Two's extensive quotes of that article.

'The Nation adds lengthy editor's note to story questioning DNC hack'

The Nation magazine acknowledged on Friday that an article claiming it would have been "impossible based on the data” for Russia-backed hackers to be behind the leak of Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails was not supported by its own evidence.

The article, penned by reporter Patrick Lawrence and published in early August, hinged on technical claims roundly disputed by technical experts — including the expert brought in by The Nation in its review of the article.

...

Lawrence claimed that it would be impossible for a remote hacker — including one in Russia — to have downloaded leaked DNC documents at the high speeds implied by metadata contained in the files. Therefore, Lawrence reasoned, it would only be possible for the files to be downloaded directly from a DNC terminal to a USB drive, suggesting that the emails were taken by an internal leaker instead of hackers.

That claim was based on metadata showing that the documents had, at one point, been copied at a speed of about 23 megabytes-per-second, a rate faster than home internet services allow.

But experts note that commercial internet services used by businesses can reach speeds more than five times as fast as 23 megabytes-per-second. And, even if the data had showed that a USB drive was used at one point, there would be no reason to believe that it wasn’t used to transport the documents from one Russian system to another.

Lawrence’s article presented evidence from two major sources. A pseudonymous blogger known as “The Forensicator” and a public letter by a group known as Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), an organization composed of former intelligence agents.

After publication, vanden Heuvel wrote, the magazine learned that the letter was controversial within VIPS.

“We have also learned since publication, from longtime VIPS member Thomas Drake, that there is a dispute among VIPS members themselves about the July 24 memo. This is not the first time a VIPS report has been internally disputed, but it is the first time one has been released over the substantive objections of several VIPS members,” she wrote.

Despite acknowledging that the article’s central arguments that Russia could not have hacked the DNC are only “possibilities,” the magazine has not withdrawn the original article.

[Tero]

Delegitimizing the media
Whataboutism
Trolling
A great compliment it is not, according to Oliver: “Sometimes, when you do something that makes a lot of people mad, it’s because you’re a dick.”
http://www.newsweek.com/how-donald-trum ... ver-709212

[Brian Peacock]

Locked: http://www.rationalia.com/forum/viewtop ... 22&t=53197