On the eve of Julian Assange announcing he can prove the DNC Russian hacking story is a hoax, Salon admits that the ‘hack’ may have been a ‘leak’.
Irish freelance journalist and Salon contributor Danielle Ryan questions the official DNC narrative that Russians were responsible for the email leak that compromised Clinton’s chance at the Oval Office in the 2016 election. Ryan indicts both the media and the DNC in their willingness to promote what may turn out to be a hoax carried out on the American people.
If all this [Russian hoax] is true, these findings would constitute a massive embarrassment for not only the DNC itself but the media, which has breathlessly pushed the Russian hacking narrative for an entire year, almost without question but with little solid evidence to back it up.
Ryan points to a report, compiled by a variety of intelligence experts affiliated with Disobedient Media, that implies, based on forensic evidence, that the “DNC suffered an insider leak, conducted in the Eastern time zone of the United States by someone with physical access to a DNC computer’.
The report claims there is no evidence that the hacker known as Guccifer 2.0 infiltrated the DNC and no evidence that Guccifer sent documents to Assange and Wikileaks. The speed at which information was downloaded suggests that someone with physical access to a computer in the DNC HQ accessed files, which were then processed to appear that Russian handling had occurred.
Investigators found that 1,976 megabytes of data were downloaded locally on July 5, 2016. The information was downloaded with a memory key or some other portable storage device. The download operation took 87 seconds — meaning the speed of transfer was 22.7 megabytes per second — “a speed that far exceeds an internet capability for a remote hack,” as Lawrence puts it. What’s more, they say, a transoceanic transfer would have been even slower (Guccifer claimed to be working from Romania).
If files downloaded from a DNC computer running an American (as opposed to a Russian) OS were sent to Assange, he would be able to reveal files and keys affiliated with the original OS registry, offering definitive proof that the Russian hack is really a Russian hoax.
Featured image by Craig Chemaly via LinkedIn.