The CA data is a BS story. But its also more or less definitive that Russia's slow leaking of otherwise innocuous emails really hurt Clinton's campaign. Its easy to get confused because there's so much going on.
I still remain unconvinced that was really “Russia” (as opposed to, say, some bored Russian teens).
The reason for my skepticism is the crappy podunk nature of the leaked material. The FSB spends billions every year spying on US politicians, surely they’ve managed to find stuff a lot more embarrassing than the boring emails of some dude whose password was “passw0rd”?
I'm extremely interested in learning more about the crowdstrike arrangment. As someone who is interested in both politics and cybersecurity, it leaves a lot of open questions.
Here's some dangling questions brought out from the Mueller report:
* Mueller’s decision not to interview Assange – a central figure who claims Russia was not behind the hack – suggests an unwillingness to explore avenues of evidence on fundamental questions.
* U.S. intelligence officials cannot make definitive conclusions about the hacking of the Democratic National Committee computer servers because they did not analyze those servers themselves. Instead, they relied on the forensics of CrowdStrike, a private contractor for the DNC that was not a neutral party, much as “Russian dossier” compiler Christopher Steele, also a DNC contractor, was not a neutral party. This puts two Democrat-hired contractors squarely behind underlying allegations in the affair – a key circumstance that Mueller ignores.
* Lawyers for Stone discovered that CrowdStrike submitted three forensic reports to the FBI that were redacted and in draft form. When Stone asked to see CrowdStrike's un-redacted versions, prosecutors made the explosive admission that the U.S. government does not have them.
They never even turned over the servers to the FBI? They only submitted a draft report?
Also, why use a Ukrainian company for something so important, do we not have the expertise here in the US to do this? If there's anything we've learned about Ukraine in the last few months, it's that many politician children were making a lot of money there through... let's just say questionable arrangements.
"Dmitri Alperovitch is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of CrowdStrike – responsible for the company’s overall technology vision, strategy, and architecture as well as R&D initiatives."
It does seem odd that the FBI has claimed in legal filings not to have taken the DNC computers into its possession for forensic analysis, relying entirely on 3rd party analysis, though. I believe this info can be sourced from filings in the Flynn case, which I really wish someone would put up a full archive of, it's been pretty crazy.
Add to the list of your suspect observations those of Steele and his dossier. He was hired by Republicans before he was hired by Democrats. And his dossier was largely accurate—surprisingly so given that the target was (at the time) a wealthy, media-savvy businessman and television celebrity.
The dossier was oppo research. There’s literally nothing controversial about any of it, other than it was leaked and its target successfully spun the few disputed claims into evidence of mass political conspiracy.
The DNC hired them to do a forensic analysis of their email servers after they learned they may have been hacked. Forensic analysis is one of the security services CrowdStrike provides, they also provide defensive services to detect intrusions or attempts.
