dnc – Techdirt (original) (raw)

New Report Shows How 2016 ‘DNC Hacked Itself’ Story Was Fabricated Garbage And The Nation Ran With It Anyway

from the propaganda-bonanza dept

Back in 2015, you might recall how the Russian Government was caught hacking into the DNC. It wasn’t particularly subtle; a Russian intelligence officer pretending to be a Romanian hacker made the dumb mistake of forgetting to turn on his VPN, revealing his Russian intelligence agency IP address to the world. The data he obtained concerning ongoing squabbling within the DNC was later leaked to the press to influence the 2016 election, and the rest is well documented history.

In the wake of the attack, a baseless rumor began to mysteriously make the rounds, suggesting that the DNC had, for some reason, hacked itself. The claim popped up everywhere, but its most notable traction came courtesy of an article over at The Nation, which took the claim and ran with it without doing even the most basic of fact checking. The claim then popped up all over the Internet, from Bloomberg opinion columns and Breitbart, to out of Donald Trump’s own mouth.

The problem: it was all absolute, unrefined, 100% bullshit.

What actually happened? Seven years after the fact, and journalist Duncan Campbell has finally published a story examining The Nation’s odd editorial history of stifling criticism of Russia internally. It also rips apart the Nation’s article, written by Patrick Lawrence, who, Campbell claims, repeated baseless claims made by pro-Trump trolls and hackers pretending to be intelligence analysts:

Lawrence invented situations and people, got facts wrong, and made far-reaching claims without substantiation. Information that Lawrence described as “hard evidence” had, in reality, been manufactured by members of a Trump-supporting website, Disobedient Media, founded in 2017 by William Craddick, a former law student who claimed to have started the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory. The primary source in Lawrence’s story, cited eighteen times, was an anonymous figure, a supposed forensic expert known as “Forensicator.” That name was created by Disobedient Media in consultation with Tim Leonard, a British hacker, as an identity through which to present the “Forensicator report,” the document purporting to substantiate the “inside job” theory.

At the time, we pointed out how one of the key claims, that the speed at which the files had been transferred were too fast to have been done remotely over broadband, were absolute bullshit any actual intelligence expert or fact checker would have noticed. That resulted in an anti-Techdirt temper tantrum by the fake news troll in question over at his since-dismantled website.

Another cornerstone of The Nation’s story, the claim that a group of intelligence professionals like William Binney (dubbed the “VIPS”) had reviewed “Forensicator’s” evidence and corroborated its claims, also proved to be bullshit. Later on, Binney would admit to Campbell the entire thing was a “fabrication”:

When I met with Binney the next month, however, he told me that, when the Lawrence piece was published, the VIPS had not actually checked the evidence or reasoning in the Forensicator report. When Binney eventually looked into one of its key claims—that the stolen data could be proven to have been copied directly at a computer on the east coast—he changed his mind. There was “no evidence to prove where the copy was done”, he told me. The data “Forensicator” had given to VIPS had been “manipulated”, Binney said, and was “a fabrication”.

At that point, the pile on was afoot, and numerous outlets had security experts who also noted that The Nation story was bullshit. Instead of pulling the story, Campbell states that after significant pressure, The Nation co-owner and former editor Katrina vanden Heuvel finally affixed a “we were just asking questions” pre-amble to the head of piece, which was only quietly pulled offline last year (copy here).

Both vanden Huevel and new Nation editorial boss D.D. Guttenplan downplay the monumental fuck up in conversations with Campbell, at one point urging him to “get a life”:

When I ask Guttenplan about the controversy surrounding the Lawrence piece, he replies, “Water has gone under the bridge. I am comfortable.” He adds, “The Nation is a beacon for progressive ideas, democratic politics, women’s rights, racial and economic justice, and open debate between liberals and radicals.” Any damage done to the reputation of the magazine is minor, he argues, compared to all of the good it has done. What about the objections of his staff? “I don’t see the point of obsessing about it,” Guttenplan concludes. “Get a life!”

In 2018, a DOJ indictment against nearly a dozen Russian hackers would lay out in detail how Russian intelligence compromised the DNC, stole data, then carefully leaked that data to outlets like The Intercept to divide Democrats and improve Trump’s chance of winning the 2016 election (the author of said piece has since enjoyed a lucrative career spreading authoritarian apologia).

Fast forward seven years later, and there’s no shortage of supposed progressive journalists (some regulars at the Nation) with a strange affection for parroting Russian propaganda, and downplaying every and any instance of Russian authoritarian aggression, whether it’s denying the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons on civilians, denying the idea that a Russian-government linked group shot down a civilian airliner over Ukraine, or pretending that Ukraine is to blame for the war.

Campbell notes that Lawrence was allowed to write fifteen more features for The Nation in the year after the story was published, and there’s been no shortage of similar stories at the outlet written since by other authors with a tendency to downplay Russian authoritarianism. Some even referencing the “DNC hacked itself” theory as established fact.

Originally slated to appear in 2018, Campbell claims that his story was killed by Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) and then new editor Kyle Pope. Pope this week denied the story was killed, claiming it wasn’t run because it was late. Campbell has since written a second story outlining his experiences with CJR killing his story, claiming CJR had previously undisclosed business relationships with The Nation they didn’t want to jeopardize, and the story was “slow-walked to dismissal” after a year-long editing process.

Ultimately the whole dumb thing remains a cautionary tale of propaganda’s effective reach and U.S. journalism’s ongoing failure to counter or even recognize it, whether it’s coming from the U.S. or Russian government or a basement-dwelling troll half a world away. To this day, the lie that the DNC hacked itself remains a stone-cold fact in the brains of many right wingers and conspiracy theorists, and The Nation still, the better part of a decade later, hasn’t meaningfully owned the “error” heard ’round the world.

Filed Under: disinformation, dnc, dnc hacked itself, duncan campbell, guccifer 2.0, hacking, misinformation, privacy, propaganda, russian intelligence, security, trump
Companies: the nation

Journalists: Stop Pretending The GOP Actually Cares About Regulating ‘Big Corporations’

from the big-dumb-performance dept

Tue, May 24th 2022 06:23am - Karl Bode

For more than forty years, the GOP (and to a more sporadic degree the DNC) mindlessly supported giant corporations, consolidation, and monopolization. The evidence is everywhere (banking, insurance, health, air travel, energy), but particularly obvious in telecom. The GOP has endlessly, ceaselessly, cheered on telecom monopolization, and all it usually entails (high prices, poor service, privacy issues).

Yet over the last five years, the GOP has attempted to reframe itself as a party of “antitrust reform,” dedicated to cracking down on “big corporations” — despite the lack of any evidence whatsoever that’s actually true. It’s a big dumb performance designed to mask something else: namely party anger at a handful of tech companies that have belatedly and sloppily been reining in a few types of extreme disinformation that has resulted in real world harms.

The GOP, facing unfavorable shifting demographics and an aging electorate, has come to heavily rely on culture war bullshit as its primary avenue for party recruitment and base support, especially among younger white men. Often there are no underlying policies; it’s just grievance, outrage, and propaganda all the way down to the bone marrow level.

Now the GOP can’t just come out and say that its whole assault on “big tech” and Section 230 is simply because it wants to ensure it can keep spewing nonsense political propaganda online at impressionable white dudebros, so they’ve dressed up the effort as something far more noble and intellectual: “antitrust reform,” “free speech protection,” and an “assault on unchecked corporate power.”

And the mainstream U.S. press seems comically desperate to help them despite absolutely none of it being true.

Case in point: the Washington Post last week penned a bizarre piece documenting the GOP’s incoherent policy shift from the net neutrality era (government is always bad and completely lacks the authority or cause to meddle in the affairs of telecom monopolies) to the “big tech” era (government should absolutely meddle in the affairs of social media giants even in cases where it has no authority to do so).

We’ve already talked about how FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr is the poster child of this new disingenuous GOP movement. Carr was a cornerstone of Ajit Pai and Trump’s efforts to effectively lobotomize all U.S. telecom consumer protection. Any effort to rein in Comcast or AT&T was deemed an absolute outrage and a clear sign of government running amok, if not a “government takeover of the internet.”

But Twitter kicks a few white supremacists offline for being hateful assholes, and Carr, like so many other modern Trump acolytes, pulled a complete 180 to demand even more extreme government interventions in the business practices of Silicon Valley tech giants. He then engaged in contortions and calisthenics to pretend this shift made any legal or policy sense whatsoever.

Note that guys like Carr aren’t actually interested in the genuine problems presented by big tech or the many solutions being floated to address them. They don’t care about privacy abuses at scale, or the catch and kill acquisitions that stifle competition. And the solutions presented aren’t actual solutions for the problems in “big tech,” like, say, forcing tech giants to pay telecom giants a new tax for no reason.

That’s again because this is a performance — with a side helping of “owning the libs,” — not real policy.

The Washington Post could clearly point out the blistering inconsistencies here. Instead they quote Carr’s bad faith arguments without really challenging them at all. Like here, where Carr claims that rules preventing telecom monopolies from abusing their market power (net neutrality) are irrelevant and unnecessary, but nondiscrimination rules for big tech are needed due to “censorship”:

Carr argued the dynamics between the two industries are distinct because the “abusive practices that we’re seeing with Big Tech” in barring some speech necessitate nondiscrimination rules, unlike with ISPs.

This has basically been the GOP’s mantra all along. That monopolies or bad actors literally don’t exist in markets like telecom or banking or energy. The only industry that’s problematic enough to trigger government intervention is big tech. And not because of any of the real abuses the sector engages in, but because they’re allegedly mean to right wingers.

Functional news outlets should clearly point out that the GOP’s ongoing claims of “censorship” are bullshit. That’s not an opinion. Data routinely shows that if content moderation at sites like Twitter is biased, it’s biased toward misinformation. The Trump GOP is getting moderated more often because it has adopted culture war bullshit and hateful, trolling propaganda as its primary output.

Getting the GOP to accept this creates painful cognitive dissonance, so they… don’t.

The pretense that the increasingly authoritarian GOP is somehow being “censored” is itself propaganda designed to prevent anybody from doing anything about propaganda. That’s too heady a concept for mainstream press outlets to grasp, so they tap dance around it.

This has allowed the GOP to wage a fairly successful campaign that portrays any attempt at all to rein in political propaganda and bigotry online as an assault on “free speech” and an act of absolute tyranny. The goal: completely unfettered ability for the authoritarian GOP to bullshit the public across its traditional media and online propaganda empire built over the last 40 years.

It’s a functional news organization’s responsibility to highlight the hollowness of these arguments clearly. Not only does the Post not do that, at all, it allows Carr to again push the claim that the GOP is now a party that really cares about reining in corporate power:

[Carr] said the embrace of common carrier-style regulation for Silicon Valley companies reflects a bigger shift within the GOP on attitudes toward big businesses.

Carr said there’s a “broader realignment that we’re seeing within the conservative movement, where there is a moving away from the view that if a large corporation wants to do it, who am I as a conservative to get in the way? That has changed.”

But the GOP hasn’t changed. The GOP talks a LOT about a sudden renewed interest in “antitrust reform” and “corporate power,” but they’ve done little to address any real problems. The interest in “antitrust reform” is a big dumb performance masking the fact that the GOP’s real interest is in gaining leverage over big tech to force the mandated carriage of race-baiting party propaganda.

The GOP has engaged in a lot of pseudo-intellectual, legally incoherent theatrics to try and make this all sound like real, adult policy. But it’s all as hollow as a cheap dollar store chocolate Easter bunny.

The Post could clearly point this out, but instead they embrace the old “he said, she said” framing adored by major outlets. A format where unfettered bullshit by the GOP is presented largely unchallenged. A few dissenting opinions by folks on the left are presented for counterbalance, with both given equal weight. It’s then left up to the reader to vaguely infer where the truth actually resides.

As authoritarianism continues to take root in the U.S., that kind of feckless inability to call a duck a duck when necessary will ultimately prove fatal.

Filed Under: antitrust, antitrust reform, big tech, big telecom, brendan carr, conservative censorship, dnc, gop, journalism, monopolies, net neutrality, section 230

Despite DC Sound And Fury, Public Support For Regulating ‘Big Tech’ Is Actually Down

from the sound-and-fury dept

Wed, May 18th 2022 05:36am - Karl Bode

For several years now there’s been an endless amount of clamor in DC about how we “need to regulate big tech.” Unfortunately, many of the solutions on this front have ranged from incoherent to performative, failing utterly to actually shore up genuine problems in the sector (catch and kill tactics, mindless consolidation, vast privacy and surveillance issues).

Leading the charge for reform that isn’t actually reform has been the GOP, a party very angry because some social media companies began belatedly and sloppily moderating race-baiting political propaganda and hate speech, cornerstones of GOP power in the face of a shifting and aging electorate.

Despite three years of press coverage of the “need to regulate big tech” (which again can have inconsistent and incoherent definitions), a new Pew study makes it clear that support for “regulating big tech” across both sides of the aisle has actually… decreased, with 44 percent of Americans believing major technology companies should be regulated more than they are now, down from 56 percent in April 2021.

Despite all the endless noise from the likes of Ken Buck and Josh Hawley about how big tech is a giant, dangerous, devil machine and must be “regulated” to save the world from alien pedo grifters (or whatever the argument is this week), even support for it among Republicans is way down:

So the public, including Republicans, don’t actually support “regulating big tech” (whatever that even means to them). And they might support it less if the press did a better job explaining how many of the solutions being bandied about are performative, and often involve trying to mandate the forced carriage of authoritarian propaganda (see the assault on Section 230).

For years, experts pointed out that U.S. antitrust reform had grown toothless and frail, our competition laws needed updating in the Amazon era, and “are consumers happy?” (the traditional consumer welfare standard) doesn’t actually measure all aspects of potential harm in complex markets.

So the need for reform is genuine, but even the best solutions DC has tabled are weirdly narrow and not particularly well written. Several mask other agendas.

For example, the GOP attack on “big tech” specifically is really about the mandated carriage of right-wing political propaganda. This gets dressed up as “antitrust reform,” and a fight for “free speech” against “censorship,” which itself has proven to be effective propaganda for those that don’t actually understand the real threat of authoritarianism and content moderation at scale (see Elon Musk).

The Pew survey makes it pretty clear that this effort — to reframe sloppy, belated content moderation of largely right-wing hate speech and political propaganda as “broad censorship of political opinions across all of social media and all political ideologies” — has been rather effective:

Data keeps showing that most content moderation is “biased” against misinformation and hate speech, not conservatives specifically. It’s just that as the GOP has shifted harder toward bigotry, authoritarianism, and bullshit in the Trump era, they’re engaging in more misinformation and hate speech online. The cognitive dissonance to process this reality is too difficult, so they instead embrace victimization.

The GOP largely wants the public to believe that any effort to regulate hate speech and political propaganda is an act of vile censorship. Because propaganda is all the party has. It’s facing unfavorable shifting demographics and its actual policies are broadly unpopular (see: abortion, book bans, firing teachers for acknowledging that slavery is real).

The sad irony to all of this is that this GOP quest to use “antitrust reform” as leverage in a bad faith quest to perpetuate propaganda will likely result in none of the actual problems with big tech getting fixed. This distorted, politicized version of the “need to regulate big tech” has also distracted policymakers from countless other segments rife with monopoly harms (telecom, banking, travel, insurance).

In the end the GOP’s attack on “big tech” isn’t based on reality, doesn’t propose any real solutions for the broader markets or public, and isn’t supported by huge swaths of voters anyway. Just a big, dumb noise machine whose output is anger and confusion.

Filed Under: antitrust reform, big tech, censorship, dnc, gop, regulating, social media

Biden Broadband Event Showcases Why U.S. Telecom Policy, Press Coverage Is So Broken

from the band-aid-on-a-mortal-wound dept

Fri, May 13th 2022 05:52am - Karl Bode

Earlier this week, the Biden administration announced a “new” broadband plan that wasn’t actually new. The rose garden event featured executives from twenty ISPs who all got a pat on the back in front of the cameras for voluntarily and temporarily participating in a Biden plan to provide a $30 discount off of the broadband bills of low-income Americans.

The Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) is a temporary plan that provides 30offlow−incomebroadbandbillsusingalimitedpooloftaxpayermoney.Theplanisvoluntary,andparticipatingISPscanquitatanytime.It’sarevampofaprevious“EmergencyBroadbandBenefit”COVIDrecoveryplanthatwasextended(butreducedfrom30 off low-income broadband bills using a limited pool of taxpayer money. The plan is voluntary, and participating ISPs can quit at any time. It’s a revamp of a previous “Emergency Broadband Benefit” COVID recovery plan that was extended (but reduced from 30offlow−incomebroadbandbillsusingalimitedpooloftaxpayermoney.Theplanisvoluntary,andparticipatingISPscanquitatanytime.It’sarevampofaprevious“EmergencyBroadbandBenefit”COVIDrecoveryplanthatwasextended(butreducedfrom50 to $30) as part of the Biden broadband infrastructure bill.

To be clear it’s a good thing that low-income Americans get some temporary relief from high prices. But again, the Biden team seems completely unwilling to explain or address why U.S. broadband bills are so high in the first place. 20-40 million Americans lack access to broadband. 83 million live under a monopoly, resulting in high prices, spotty access, and historically terrible customer service.

The reality is that U.S. lawmakers and regulators, under both parties, have turned a blind eye as an essential utility was monopolized over 30 years. And when they do act, they routinely don’t target the thing causing the problem in the first place (Comcast, AT&T regional monopolies), they apply strange and convoluted band-aids, such as net neutrality or this temporary low-income broadband discount.

This was all nuance that was widely missed by the vast majority of news coverage on the Biden announcement. If you dug through the news coverage of the event, you literally could not find a single one that noted why U.S. broadband prices are so high in the first place. Broadband monopolies are often not and, instead, are replaced by a nebulous “digital divide” with no known cause.

This new Biden program doesn’t fix the U.S. broadband problem. It takes a wad of taxpayer cash, and gives it to ISPs (with a long history of misspending subsidies and who created the problem in the first place), who then pass the discount on to low-income Americans (hopefully, after they jump through numerous convoluted hoops). And again, ISPs can quit any time.

It’s also worth noting that several participating ISPs abused the plan when it was first announced to upsell struggling Americans to more expensive tiers. It’s also worth noting that several of the ISPs Biden held a press event with are busy trying to scuttle Biden’s belated nominee to the FCC, Gigi Sohn, an actual monopoly reformer Biden has yet to publicly protect from an ongoing telecom smear campaign.

Which is to say there’s some mixed messaging here. We care about low-income Americans, but not enough to publicly support an FCC nominee and reformer that could actually help them. We care about U.S. broadband, but not enough to accurately single out what’s really causing the problem. We care about the “digital divide,” but we don’t want to make the companies responsible for it mad.

The GOP adores telecom monopolies to a point where the two entities are indistinguishable.

The DNC often is notably better on the subject, but it also often likes to pretend that telecom monopolization doesn’t exist, or isn’t a problem. They talk endlessly about the “digital divide,” but they lack the political courage to acknowledge why it exists or genuinely do much about it (for example, try to find a single time either of the two existing Democratic FCC Commissioners clearly criticized monopolization specifically).

Biden did mention a lack of competition late in the event, but didn’t call out what causes that lack of competition (regional monopolization and the state/federal corruption that protects it). And the $42 billion we’re spending to expand broadband will help address some broadband coverage gaps, though there’s some big issues there as well (see this story on our crappy broadband maps, and this one on how states are trying to make sure this money goes largely to monopolies and not competitors).

So again, is a temporary $30 discount for poor people on broadband good? Yeah. But again it’s just a band-aid for a deeper problem we refuse to address. And we refuse to address it in large part because many of the monopolies causing the problem (Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, Charter) are bone-grafted to both our intelligence gathering apparatus and our first responder networks. They’re part of the government.

As such, calling them out for predatory, monopolistic behavior would come with political and campaign contribution costs many lawmakers and policymakers aren’t willing to incur. As a result, in very American fashion, we often focus on treating the symptoms, but not the disease.

Filed Under: biden, broadband, digital divide, dnc, fcc, gop, high speed internet, internet access, monopolies, telecom

Telecom Lobby Targets Senators Manchin, Kelly, And Cortez Masto In Bid To Scuttle Sohn FCC Nomination

from the dysfunction-junction dept

Tue, Apr 19th 2022 03:40pm - Karl Bode

We just got done noting how the telecom industry has been pushing misleading editorials in Arizona to derail the nomination of popular and well-qualified telecom and telecom reformer Gigi Sohn to the FCC. The editorials are full of false claims that Sohn has a terrible track record on media diversity, shoveled by organizations with longstanding financial ties to AT&T.

During the Trump era the telecom industry effectively controlled the FCC, which in turn did pretty much everything the nation’s biggest media and telecom giants wanted, including rubber stamping mergers before even reading the details, gutting FCC consumer protection authority, and demolishing decades-old media consolidation rules crafted with broad bipartisan consensus.

Telecom monopolies are now terrified that the Sohn appointment won’t just break 2-2 commissioner gridlock (they created) at the agency, it will mean the restoration of meaningful federal oversight over one of the least popular and least competitive industries in the Internet ecosystem.

The entirety of the GOP, always in perfect lockstep with AT&T and Comcast on every issue (despite feigned party interest in “antitrust reform”), blanketly refuses to vote for Sohn. She can still be appointed exclusively with Democratic votes, which is why AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and Charter lobbyists are now targeting Democratic Senators who are looking vulnerable during the upcoming midterms.

They’re specifically targeting Senators Mark Kelly of Arizona, and Catherine Cortez Mastro of Nevada, though once again Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia also appears in play:

Manchin remains undecided after meeting her, his office confirmed. Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), facing a tough reelection battle this November, said he’s “continuing to evaluate her record” after a similar meeting. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), who is facing attacks from a GOP opponent over the nominee, didn’t respond when asked about Sohn.

How are telecom lobbyists doing this? Well, one, as noted above, is by spreading false claims through co-opted policy groups and op-eds that she has a bad record on media and minority diversity (again, that’s patently false if you ask anybody who knows Sohn or spends 5 minutes looking at her policy history). They’ve also gotten the Fraternal Order of Police to attack Sohn with some feverish gibberish.

More recently, the telecom lobby appears to have hired former Senator Heidi Heitkamp (who’s been having an…interesting year) to run a crunch time social media campaign under the banner of something called the “One Country Project”:

Meanwhile, a political advocacy group headed by former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) just launched a $250,000 social media advertising campaign against Sohn, set to run for three weeks starting over the congressional recess. This group, the One Country Project, has accused Sohn of dismissing rural America, pointing to comments in which the nominee accused policymakers of “disproportionately” steering broadband dollars to those communities and giving urban dwellers the short shrift — an attack coming as Biden this week launches a “rural infrastructure tour,” including a focus on broadband.

Only after the Politico piece ran, did the group publicly announce it had launched a “six figure ad campaign aimed at raising awareness” by trying to claim that Sohn — who, again, has spent years trying to ensure even coverage of broadband to neglected U.S. communities (something you can confirm with five minutes of research) — is somehow the enemy of rural America:

The group, which of course doesn’t share funding sources, basically takes a bunch of Sohn comments, then distorts them to claim she hates rural America:

Sohn has made several public comments that call into question her commitment to rural communities, such as her testimony to the House Energy & Commerce Committee where she stated “policymakers have focused disproportionately on broadband deployment in rural areas of the United States” or her claims that FCC broadband policies have “made it really easy” for rural broadband companies “to basically suck at the government teat to the tune of tens of billions of dollars.”

If you actually read Sohn’s testimony, Sohn was pointing out that U.S. telecom policy (which basically involves throwing unchecked billions at AT&T and Comcast in exchange for networks that are always mysteriously half delivered) isn’t exclusively a rural U.S. problem. Urban broadband gaps remain a significant problem, and broadband affordability impacts rural and urban Americans alike.

Why a group purportedly self-tasked with representing the concerns of rural Americans would actively misrepresent Sohn’s positions isn’t clear, but it’s not particularly difficult to guess given the variety of other flimsy attacks on Sohn of late, and the telecom and media (Rupert Murdoch) industry’s long history of using proxy groups as public policy marionettes to impact legislation and policy decisions.

Some of this falls on the shoulders of the Biden policy advisors.

They lagged on even announcing the Sohn choice for nine months, showcasing precisely the level of importance they’ve affixed to telecom and media policy. They could have announced her appointment alongside the speedy appointment of FTC boss Lina Khan, whose nomination terrified telecom execs afraid of reform. They’ve also repeatedly stumbled on pushing the confirmation vote over the line.

Still, while many Biden appointments have been hit or miss, Sohn is hugely qualified and widely respected across both sides of the aisle in DC. Sohn’s so popular, and the goals of telecom monopolies (less competition, more revenue, no oversight) are so viciously unpopular, they’ve been forced to fabricate flimsy complaints and funnel them through proxy organizations in a bid to derail the popular nomination.

If Sohn’s nomination is scuttled, it will come at the hands of Senators Joe Manchin, Catherine Cortez Masto, Kyrsten Sinema, or Mark Kelly, who will, not coincidentally, parrot the false justifications for opposing Sohn’s nomination concocted by the telecom lobby. And, in the process, scuttle a popular nominee with a very clear track record of supporting all the things they’ll profess to be concerned with.

If successful, it will set a high water mark for modern U.S. corruption and the games we play to pretend that’s not a problem. It will leave a permanent and violent scar on the political and policy landscape, loudly advertising once again that the voice of the public (which overwhelmingly supports holding telecom and media giants meaningfully accountable) simply doesn’t matter in our purported democracy.

Filed Under: big telecom, broadband, catherine cortez masto, consumer protection, digital divide, dnc, fcc, gigi sohn, gop, joe manchin, krysten sinema, mark kelly, net neutrality, republican, telecom

Suspected DNC & German Parliament Hacker Used His Name As His Email Password

from the opsec-yo dept

You may have seen the news reports this week that German prosecutors have issued an arrest warrant for Dmitry Badin for a massive hack of the German Parliament that made headlines in 2016. The reports about the German arrest warrant all mention that German authorities “believe” that Badin is connected to the Russian GRU and its APT28 hacking group.

The folks over at Bellingcat have done their open source intelligence investigation thing, and provided a ton of evidence to show that Badin almost certainly is part of GRU… including the fact that he registered his 2018 car purchase to the public address of a GRU building. This is not the first time this has happened. A few years back, Bellingcat also connected a bunch of people to the GRU — including some accused of hacking by the Dutch government — based on leaked car registration info.

There’s much, much more in the Bellingcat report, but the final paragraph really stands out. Bellingcat also found Badin — again, a hacker who is suspected in multiple massive and consequential hacks, including of email accounts — didn’t seem to be all that careful with his own security:

The most surreal absence of ?practice-what-you-breach? among GRU hackers might be visible in their lackadaisical attitude to their own cyber protection. In 2018, a large collection of hacked Russian mail accounts, including user name and passwords, was dumped online. Dmitry Badin?s email ? which we figured out from his Skype account, which we in turn obtained from his phone number, which we of course got from his car registration ? had been hacked. He had apparently been using the password Badin1990. After this, his email credentials were leaked again as part of a larger hack, where we see that he had changed his password from Badin1990 to the much more secure Badin990.

Yes, the password for at least one of his email accounts… was apparently his own last name and the year he was born. The cobbler’s kids go shoeless again.

Filed Under: apt28, dmitry badin, dnc, dnc emails, email, germany, gru, hacking, opsec, passwords, podesta emails, russia

Yes, The DNC's Debate Format Sucks, And There's An Easy Fix

from the DIY dept

Man, these presidential election years sure seem to last longer than a year, don’t they? And, in our hyper-partisan world of never ending political stupidity, it’s somewhat comforting that the one thing we can all agree on is that the debate formats recently have basically sucked out loud. The complaints about debate formats started with the 2016 RNC primaries, with its crowded field and strange varsity/JV debate night structure. Fast-forward to 2019 and the DNC’s Democratic debates are being pilloried as well. In the latter case, the chief criticism appears to be that there is far too little substance discussed, with moderators for cable and OTA networks instead focusing on getting the candidates to clash in the most easy-to-soundbite fashion. Even from the major print media, you get takes such as:

Democrats woke up Thursday to find that the debate format they have agreed to is an unmitigated disaster designed to hype ratings (hence baiting the candidates to attack one another) but not to educate voters or really test candidates’ fitness for office.

Sure, getting rid of most of the field in September by raising the qualifications to 2 percent support in designated polls and 130,000 unique donors will help. If the threshold went up a percentage point each month, we might finally get to a manageable field in which candidates have more than one minute to spit out an answer and 30 seconds to rebut. However, this won’t solve all the problems with the current system

That’s right, although it seems somewhat lost that the real problem here is identified in that opening paragraph. The system today is one in which the DNC and RNC partner with cable and OTA broadcasters to televise the debate. As part of that deal, those same broadcasters put their own news personalities in the chairs of moderators. This creates a pretty obvious conflict of interest. The debates is supposed to be a method through which small-D democratic process functions: voters are introduced to candidates they may not previously have been aware of, they learn those candidates’ positions, and all of this is reflected in public polling to inform those candidates as to whether they should stay in the race or not. This process winnows the field down to a functional choice between select candidates.

But this isn’t what happens. Instead, the moderators, many of which host their own news programs, push the preferred process of the founding fathers to the side and instead adopt the ideals of the founder of the Maury Pauvich Show. Candidates are incentivized both in the coverage and by the time-restrictions on responses to questions to spit out sound-bite-y quips rather than debate true policy. And there is a pretty simple way to change the misalignment of incentives in all of this: the DNC should stream and broadcast the debate itself and then license network and cable TV providers to rebroadcast it.

Thanks to the internet and the rise of quality equipment with which to stream stuff, the parties no longer need to dole out broadcast partnerships for their debates. Instead, the parties can handle all of this themselves and stream the debates either on their own sites, or via platforms like Facebook or YouTube. TV partners can then be allowed to re-transmit that, which they’ll absolutely want to do. If they somehow do not, the stream will be available on the internet.

This move would do several things. First, it would end the insanity that is DMCA notices and platform bans that happen when people re-transmit the broadcast of a TV partner on streaming sites. The idea that a major party debate should be locked up behind copyright notices surely would make the founding fathers shit themselves. And, yet, that’s what’s happening today.

More importantly, it would leave moderator seats vacant for those with actual expertise on the topics to be discussed. Those moderators would also not be incentivized to generate soundbites or easy-to-repackage quips for cable news broadcasts. Literally everything would be better and there is no longer a technological or cost barrier to do all of this.

So, RNC and DNC: when the campaigns start for 2024, which will likely start roughly ten minutes after the 2020 election, consider this your DIY project.

Filed Under: debate, dnc, election, politics, primaries

As 'DNC Hacked Itself' Conspiracy Theory Collapses, Key Backer Of Claim Exposed As UK Troll

from the disinformation-nation dept

Fri, Aug 3rd 2018 05:41am - Karl Bode

Roughly a year ago you might recall that numerous outlets happily parroted claims that the DNC wasn’t hacked by Russian intelligence (as latter reports would make clear), but had somehow actually hacked itself. The theory was never particularly well cooked, though outlets like The Nation ran with it anyway, claiming that “forensic investigators, intelligence analysts, system designers, program architects, and computer scientists of long experience and strongly credentialed” had all collectively unearthed undeniable evidence that the DNC had committed cyber-seppuku.

The widely-circulated report leaned heavily on a published memo by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), a collection of former intelligence experts and whistleblowers like William Binney and Ray McGovern. It also leaned heavily on the input of several, anonymous, self-professed “computer forensics investigators” who, the news outlet informed readers, had “split the DNC case open like a coconut,” providing incontrovertible evidence that Russian intelligence played no role in the now-legendary breach.

But the entire claim was little more than fluff and nonsense.

As we noted at the time, The Nation story relied heavily on the allegation the stolen files must have been copied locally to USB by a DNC insider because, as The Nation claimed, “no Internet service provider was capable of downloading data at this speed” (22.7 megabytes per second). In reality, 22.7 megabytes per second was simply a 180 Mbps connection, widely available around the world at the time the DNC hack took place. That includes Romania, the country that the Russian cutout Guccifer 2.0 pretended (at the time) to have originated from.

We weren’t alone in pointing out that the story was flimsy, relied largely on cherry-picked evidence, and frequently stumbled into the realm of the “incoherent.” And it’s only gone downhill since. The Nation was forced to review the report, adding a meandering preamble to address criticism. In the year since, reports have forged a new infosec community consensus that yes, Guccifer 2.0 was GRU, and had been amusingly caught because Russian intelligence forgot to activate its VPN before logging into the bogus persona’s WordPress site on one occasion (one of several opsec errors made by Russian intel).

But at the time, any reporter that dared report on the emerging links between Russia and the hack were quickly smeared by a website custom built to try and downplay any Russian connection. The creator of the website went by the name of Adam Carter, who was broadly cited as a respected “independent researcher” in The Nation and other unskeptical reports. Carter’s website, a collection of half-cooked straw men and conspiratorial faux-technical nonsense, also took time to go after Techdirt, claiming our pretty rudimentary analysis of the theory’s principle error was “pedantic, sleazy & condescending” (thank you).

Fast forward to this week, and a new Computer Weekly report notes that Carter wasn’t much of an intelligence expert or “researcher” at all. He was, according to infosec reporter Duncan Campbell, a British IT manager and shitposter from Darlington, working in concert with U.S. trolls on a widespread online disinformation effort to downplay and discredit any and every connection between the DNC attack and Russia:

“The campaign is being run from the UK by 39-year-old programmer Tim Leonard, who lives in Darlington, using the false name ?Adam Carter?. Starting after the 2016 presidential election, Leonard worked with a group of mainly American right-wing activists to spread claims on social media that Democratic ?insiders? and non-Russian agents were responsible for hacking the Democratic Party.”

The story is long and incredibly weedy, so it’s going to be overlooked by many who lack patience or attention span during an oft-apocalyptic news cycle. But it’s definitely worth winding your way through and fully digesting to understand the sheer scope of the effort. Especially if you’re interested in understanding how incoherent internet bullshit has been industrialized and weaponized on an international scale for relatively little money.

Campbell methodically spent months tracking down Carter’s real identity, noting his tactic of pretending to be combating disinformation while actively spreading it around the internet, from his g-2.space website (which he built on the back of an employer’s server without their apparent knowledge), to the bowels of Reddit’s r/conspiracy subreddit, where he was routinely found feeding baseless conspiracy theories to the aggressively gullible. Campbell states Leonard attempted to lend credibility to the theories by co-creating a second fake identity known as “Forensicator” (also cited by media outlets as a real, but anonymous intel expert).

Campbell states that this analysis (again: bogus insight created by fake people), was then recirculated by an “independent” outlet by the name of Disobedient Media, which utilized Carter as a “technology correspondent” (they’re understandably none too happy with Campbell’s reporting). According to Campbell, Disobedient media has played more than a passing role in spreading conspiracy theories internationally, usually with the help of forged documents:

“Disobedient Media is a so-called ?independent media? site that describes ?Adam Carter? as its technology correspondent. It claims to ?bring honesty and integrity back into journalism?. The site has recycled paedophile allegations directed at Hillary Clinton and fellow democrats, and has made repeated attempts to frame murdered DNC official Seth Rich. Newspapers in France, Germany, Spain and Britain have identified Disobedient Media as an epicentre of Russian-backed attacks on Europe, using forged documents, including smears against Angela Merkel, Sadiq Khan and Emmanuel Macron.

While it’s easy to dismiss this as just some incoherent rambling by the 4chan / Qanon conspiracy set, the report notes how some of the effort’s “evidence” comically-managed to worm its way into White House policy circles. That was courtesy of William Binney, who met with CIA director Mike Pompeo at Trump’s request to dig deeper into the “DNC hacked itself” conspiracy. Nothing appears to have come of that meeting (because again, the whole DNC hacked itself theory is garbage), but it’s still worth pointing out that much of the underlying evidence was intentionally manipulated in order to deceive:

“One document ? a tip-off file obtained in June 2017 by Leonard?s site from an ?anonymous source? ? took new disinformation all the way to the White House and the CIA…The team that created Forensicator, including Leonard, gave away that they were not the real authors of the analysis when they inaccurately copied a Linux ?Bash? script they had been sent, breaking it. This suggested that they did not write, understand, or test the script before they published. Someone else had sent the script, together with the fake conclusion they wanted discovered and published ? that DNC stolen files had been copied in the US Eastern Time zone on 5 July 2016, five days before DNC employee Seth Rich was killed.”

One year later and The Nation’s original theory isn’t looking so hot, with even many of the original VIPS supporters running in the opposite direction, including Binney:

“A month after visiting CIA headquarters, Binney came to Britain. After re-examining the data in Guccifer 2.0 files thoroughly with the author of this article, Binney changed his mind. He said there was ?no evidence to prove where the download/copy was done?. The Guccifer 2.0 files analysed by Leonard?s g-2.space were ?manipulated?, he said, and a ?fabrication?.

But the damage was done, and the Brietbart, Bloomberg, Nation and other reports remain online, still widely circulated as “evidence” that the DNC hacked itself. Amusingly, many of the same people (quite justly) railing against the over-reliance on anonymous sources in stories supporting Russian involvement in the hack saw no problem amplifying this dubious report, despite the warnings that the report was leaning largely on extremely dubious, anonymous experts.

Obviously real investigators continue to dig through the aftermath of the 2016 election to determine the width and breadth of Russia’s global disinformation and hacking efforts in retribution for the Magnitsky sanctions. That process should slowly unravel which organizations and individuals were simply useful idiots, and which organizations and individuals actively coordinated their disinformation assault with the help of foreign governments.

But with questions arising about a evolved disinformation campaign on Facebook and another major internet disiformation effort operating out of Macedonia, it raises plenty of questions about just what real forensic investigators will unearth by this time next year.

Filed Under: adam carter, dnc, duncan campbell, forensicator, gru, guccifier 2.0, hack, russia, tim leonard, troll, vips, william binney

Press Wakes Up To The Fact That DNC's Lawsuit Against Wikileaks Could Harm Press Freedoms

from the dnc-stomping-on-free-speech dept

Back in April, when lots of anti-Trump folks were cheering on the decision of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to sue various Russians and Wikileaks for hacking and publishing DNC emails, we pointed out that the lawsuit was full of some pretty crazy claims, especially those against Wikileaks. As we said, even if you really hate the role that Julian Assange and Wikileaks played in the 2016 election, the lawsuit itself could have serious ramifications on press freedom, at a time when you would think that those who don’t support the President would want the press to have more freedom to report on him and the various things happening in his administration.

Thankfully, many in the media are recognizing this as well. The Committee to Protect Journalism recently put out a strong article about how this lawsuit could endanger important press freedoms:

Marcy Wheeler, an independent national security reporter who has reviewed the DNC complaint, said the legal theory behind it could be applied to other leaks such as the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers–internal documents that were likely obtained illegally from law firms and financial institutions, and then passed to the press. Similar legal cases have already been brought in Europe. One of the law firms named in the Paradise Papers case sued the BBC and the Guardian, the BBC reported. The DNC’s argument, Wheeler said, could be replicated by the Department of Justice to target an outlet like The Intercept. “If this precedent is out there, the government would happily describe The Intercept as a co-conspirator,” in the Winners or Albury leaks, she told CPJ, referring to former military contractor Reality Winners, and former FBI agent Terry Albury, whom several news outlets speculated were the sources for major leak investigations revealed by The Intercept.

Or, as I noted in my original piece, if this argument flies, what’s to stop the Trump DOJ from going after any publisher (the NY Times? the Washington Post?) who gets its hands on Trump’s hidden tax returns and publishes them?

This does not mean that Wikileaks is a perfect organization — far from it. Wikileaks has a long history of problematic behavior. But that doesn’t mean we should obliterate press freedoms just because Wikileaks made choices many people disagree with:

This is why CPJ has long maintained that WikiLeaks and Assange should not be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for publishing classified documents procured by someone else. WikiLeaks, however, has not always been a responsible steward of its materials. In 2011, the organization released unredacted diplomatic cables that endangered the life of the Ethiopian reporter Argaw Ashine. And in general, WikiLeak’s practice of publicizing large data dumps without probing the context or motivations of leakers can render it vulnerable to manipulation, as CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon has written. Still, as CPJ wrote in a letter to the Obama administration in 2010, arresting Assange would set dangerous precedent for publishers everywhere.

Despite the challenges in dealing with large scale leaks from state hackers, it has become an increasingly routine practice. In the most recent, attorneys for Republican fundraiser Elliot Broidy filed a subpoena May 16 for documents from The Associated Press as part of a civil suit against the Qatar government, which he accuses of hacking his emails and leaking them to journalists at the AP and other news organizations. The AP told the Freedom of the Press Foundation that it intends to fight the subpoena. And the Qataris denied any role in the hack, The New York Times reported.

And, of course, all of this by the DNC plays right into the administration’s hands:

The U.S. government already uses vague terminology, which is potentially damaging to publishers, to describe WikiLeaks. Last year, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo–then CIA Director–labeled WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service.” The language was also inserted into a Senate appropriations bill. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, who accused WikiLeaks of participating in an “attack” on American democracy, nonetheless raised alarms about the terminology. In a statement issued by his office last August, he said, “The use of the novel phrase ‘non-state hostile intelligence service’ may have legal, constitutional, and policy implications, particularly should it be applied to journalists inquiring about secrets.”

The notion that journalistic activity such as cultivating sources and receiving illegally obtained documents could be construed as part of a criminal conspiracy is, according to Goodale, the “greatest threat to press freedom today.” “It will inhibit reporters’ ability to get whistleblower information, because as soon as you talk to them in any aggressive fashion you could be guilty of a crime,” Goodale said.

There’s a lot more in the article, and the end result highlights just how problematic the lawsuit is. The DNC appears so focused on the many failures of 2016, that it has no problem taking a shotgun to the very freedoms that the press relies on to (hopefully) continue to investigate and reveal illegal activities on the part of this administration (and future administrations). It seems both incredibly short sighted and… par for the course.

Filed Under: dnc, free speech, julian assange, press freedom
Companies: wikileaks

Democratic National Committee's Lawsuit Against Russians, Wikileaks And Various Trump Associates Full Of Legally Nutty Arguments

from the slow-down-there-dnc dept

This morning I saw a lot of excitement and happiness from folks who greatly dislike President Trump over the fact that the Democratic National Committee had filed a giant lawsuit against Russia, the GRU, Guccifier 2, Wikileaks, Julian Assange, the Trump campaign, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and a few other names you might recognize if you’ve followed the whole Trump / Russia soap opera over the past year and a half. My first reaction was that this was unlikely to be the kind of thing we’d cover on Techdirt, because it seemed like a typical political thing. But, then I looked at the actual complaint and it’s basically a laundry list of the laws that we regularly talk about (especially about how they’re abused in litigation). Seriously, look at the complaint. There’s a CFAA claim, an SCA claim, a DMCA claim, a “Trade Secrets Act” claim… and everyone’s favorite: a RICO claim.

Most of the time when we see these laws used, they’re indications of pretty weak lawsuits, and going through this one, that definitely seems to be the case here. Indeed, some of the claims made by the DNC here are so outrageous that they would effectively make some fairly basic reporting illegal. One would have hoped that the DNC wouldn’t seek to set a precedent that reporting on leaked documents is against the law — especially given how reliant the DNC now is on leaks being reported on in their effort to bring down the existing president. I’m not going to go through the whole lawsuit, but let’s touch on a few of the more nutty claims here.

The crux of the complaint is that these groups / individuals worked together in a conspiracy to leak DNC emails and documents. And, there’s little doubt at this point that the Russians were behind the hack and leak of the documents, and that Wikileaks published them. Similarly there’s little doubt that the Trump campaign was happy about these things, and that a few Trump-connected people had some contacts with some Russians. Does that add up to a conspiracy? My gut reaction is to always rely on Ken “Popehat” White’s IT’S NOT RICO, DAMMIT line, but I’ll leave that analysis to folks who are more familiar with RICO.

But let’s look at parts we are familiar with, starting with the DMCA claim, since that’s the one that caught my eye first. A DMCA claim? What the hell does copyright have to do with any of this? Well…

Plaintiff’s computer networks and files contained information subject to protection under the copyright laws of the United States, including campaign strategy documents and opposition research that were illegally accessed without authorization by Russia and the GRU.

Access to copyrighted material contained on Plaintiff’s computer networks and email was controlled by technological measures, including measures restricting remote access, firewalls, and measures restricting acess to users with valid credentials and passwords.

In violation of 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a), Russia, the GRU, and GRU Operative #1 circumvented these technological protection measures by stealing credentials from authorized users, condcting a “password dump” to unlawfully obtain passwords to the system controlling access to the DNC’s domain, and installing malware on Plaintiff’s computer systems.

Holy shit. This is the DNC trying to use DMCA 1201 as a mini-CFAA. They’re not supposed to do that. 1201 is the anti-circumvention part of the DMCA and is supposed to be about stopping people from hacking around DRM to free copyright-covered material. Of course, 1201 has been used in all sorts of other ways — like trying to stop the sale of printer cartridges and garage door openers — but this seems like a real stretch. Russia hacking into the DNC had literally nothing to do with copyright or DRM. Squeezing a copyright claim in here is just silly and could set an awful precedent about using 1201 as an alternate CFAA (we’ll get to the CFAA claims in a moment). If this holds, nearly any computer break-in to copy content would also lead to DMCA claims. That’s just silly.

Onto the CFAA part. As we’ve noted over the years, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is quite frequently abused. Written in response to the movie War Games to target “hacking,” the law has been used for basically any “this person did something we dislike on a computer” type issues. It’s been dubbed “the law that sticks” because in absence of any other claims that one always sticks because of how broad it is.

At least this case does involve actual hacking. I mean, someone hacked into the DNC’s network, so it actually feels (amazingly) that this may be one case where the CFAA claims are legit. Those claims are just targeting the Russians, who were the only ones who actually hacked the DNC. So, I’m actually fine with those claims. Other than the fact that they’re useless. It’s not like the Russian Federation or the GRU is going to show up in court to defend this. And they’re certainly not going to agree to discovery. I doubt they’ll acknowledge the lawsuit at all, frankly. So… reasonable claims, impossible target.

Then there’s the Stored Communications Act (SCA), which is a part of ECPA, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which we’ve written about a ton and it does have lots of its own problems. These claims are also just against Russia, the GRU and Guccifer 2.0, and like the DMCA claims appear to be highly repetitive with the CFAA claims. Instead of just unauthorized access, it’s now unauthorized access… to communications.

It’s then when we get into the trade secrets part where things get… much more problematic. These claims are brought against not just the Russians, but also Wikileaks and Julian Assange. Even if you absolutely hate and / or distrust Assange, these claims are incredibly problematic against Wikileaks.

Defendants Russia, the GRU, GRU Operative #1, WikiLeaks, and Assange disclosed Plaintiff’s trade secrets without consent, on multiple dates, discussed herein, knowing or having reason to know that trade secrets were acquired by improper means.

If that violates the law, then the law is unconstitutional. The press regularly publishes trade secrets that may have been acquired by improper means by others and handed to the press (as is the case with this content being handed to Wikileaks). Saying that merely disclosing the information is a violation of the law raises serious First Amendment issues for the press.

I mean, what’s to stop President Trump from using the very same argument against the press for revealing, say, his tax returns? Or reports about business deals gone bad, or the details of secretive contracts? These could all be considered “trade secrets” and if the press can’t publish them that would be a huge, huge problem.

In a later claim (under DC’s specific trade secrets laws), the claims are extended to all defendants, which again raises serious First Amendment issues. Donald Trump Jr. may be a jerk, but it’s not a violation of trade secrets if someone handed him secret DNC docs and he tweeted them or emailed them around.

There are also claims under Virginia’s version of the CFAA. The claims against the Russians may make sense, but the complaint also makes claims against everyone else by claiming they “knowingly aided, abetted, encouraged, induced, instigated, contributed to and assisted Russia.” Those seem like fairly extreme claims for many of the defendants, and again feel like the DNC very, very broadly interpreting a law to go way beyond what it should cover.

As noted above, there are some potentially legit claims in here around Russia hacking into the DNC’s network (though, again, it’s a useless defendant). But some of these other claims seem like incredible stretches, twisting laws like the DMCA for ridiculous purposes. And the trade secret claims against the non-Russians is highly suspect and almost certainly not a reasonable interpretation of the law under the First Amendment.

Filed Under: cfaa, conspiracy, dmca, dnc, donald trump junior, ecpa, gru, hack, hacking, jared kushner, julian assange, paul manafot, rico, roger stone, russia, sca, trade secrets
Companies: dnc, wikileaks