Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New Charges in Huge C.I.A. Breach Known as Vault 7

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 187 posts

Re: New Charges in Huge C.I.A. Breach Known as Vault 7

#41

Post by rosser »

vkou wrote: post #39
rosser wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The selectivity of Wikileaks' leaks put the lie to their claim of being a journalistic entity. Julian Assange has an agenda against certain people/parties, and has demonstrably leaked things that support that, and not leaked things that refute it. I say that as a detractor of many of the same people and institutions Assange dislikes, so check your assumptions of bias before you throw them, please.

> The selectivity of Wikileaks' leaks put the lie to their claim of being a journalistic entity. It really doesn't, though. You don't have to be unbiased to be a journalist, a journalistic entity, or whatever you want to call it. Fox News, biased as it is, is still news.

Fox News isn't journalism. It's opinion wrapped around selective "reporting".

EDIT: Yes, of course it's impossible to eliminate bias. To extrapolate from that to accepting overtly biased and selectively published content as journalism is unsupported, at best.

It's the selectivity of reporting that compromises the claim of journalism, not the bias. When you don't report on things that don't support your narrative, you're no longer reporting.

Re: New Charges in Huge C.I.A. Breach Known as Vault 7

#42

Post by gowld »

jessaustin wrote: post #19
influx wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the IRC logs, and I'm skeptical that anyone not deeply versed in the lingo, tone, and character of that scene could fake them. It's not impossible, but it was pretty convincing to me.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but ISTM the question isn't really whether the logs are of a genuine conversation about CP, but rather whether the accused really was a part of that conversation? After all, if he really took part in a conversation about procuring such material, it wouldn't have mattered if he talked like a newb. Likewise, if he wasn't in on it, it doesn't matter that everyone who was in on it got "t…

Send an undercover agent to immerse himself in the community, learn the lingo, etc, and use opsec to protect him from detection by external authorities (the same authorities that failed to bus everyone else in the community already). Then when you want to disappear someone, create some links between the real person and the online persona created by the undercover agent.

Re: New Charges in Huge C.I.A. Breach Known as Vault 7

#43

Post by gowld »

rspeer wrote: post #40
DINKDINK wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mind enlightening us how Wikileaks was a propaganda arm of the Russian government when they released video of US war crimes (murder of journalists in the Collateral Murder video)? If another news organization received the DNC leaks and chose to not publish them, do you think that would have been ethical? Is your position that, one cannot be a US citizen and oppose the US government and if you do you're a Russi…

The WikiLeaks that released the "Collateral Murder" video was a very different thing from the Russian organization that exists today. That WikiLeaks even had a wiki.

WikiLeaks has a long and ongoing history, and Assange founded it long before the Russia stuff. When and how did it change?

Re: New Charges in Huge C.I.A. Breach Known as Vault 7

#44

Post by djsumdog »

Cacti wrote: post #27
salimmadjd wrote: post #5

Mr. Schulte had been charged last year in New York with possession of child pornography Very interesting! It almost seems like the pornography charges against him was a way to punish him but without prosecuting him for the actual leakage. Perhaps the government wanted to still point the fingers at someone else or avoid embarrassment?

You should read the indictment. That porn was not planted. https://www.scribd.com/document/379346745/Joshua-Adam-Schult...

eh, you should still be skeptical. This is a CIA contractor/employee we're talking about here. Child pornography is an interesting situation because no one outside of the justice department and a few key people can even legally examine the evidence.

It shouldn't be beyond the realm of believeability to this bad actors created these charges in retaliation.

Re: New Charges in Huge C.I.A. Breach Known as Vault 7

#45

Post by cortesoft »

Cacti wrote: post #27
salimmadjd wrote: post #5

Mr. Schulte had been charged last year in New York with possession of child pornography Very interesting! It almost seems like the pornography charges against him was a way to punish him but without prosecuting him for the actual leakage. Perhaps the government wanted to still point the fingers at someone else or avoid embarrassment?

You should read the indictment. That porn was not planted. https://www.scribd.com/document/379346745/Joshua-Adam-Schult...

How would an indictment prove or disprove whether it was planted?

Re: New Charges in Huge C.I.A. Breach Known as Vault 7

#46

Post by StanislavPetrov »

rubbingalcohol wrote: post #38
StanislavPetrov wrote: post #11

Crickets from all of the "news" outlets that pointed to this incident as more "proof" of a Russia-Wikileaks partership. Very much like the Sony hack, which was widely attributed to North Korea (again, without a shred of evidence), you can be sure that there will be very few, if any, mea-culpas issued by those media organizations that uncritically swallowed DC/CIA misinformation and reported that misinformation as fac…

I researched your claim. For the Sony hack, no actual evidence was ever provided implicating North Korea - just unsupported allegations. [Independent researchers]( https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/dec/30/sony-hack-resea... ) found it was much more likely to have been disgruntled employees. However, for the Vault 7 leak, almost no major news organizations cited Russia as a likely culprit for this. I agree with yo…

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/mar/07/wikileaks-cia-...

>no actual evidence was ever provided implicating North Korea - just unsupported allegations.

No actual evidence has been provided implicating Wikileaks received anything from Russia either - just unsupported allegations. If you disagree, I welcome you to link below actual evidence that has been provided. Despite the exhorations of many, claims made by spooks, spies, employees of think tanks and 3-letter agencies is not proof of anything, in any context, ever. Its extremely troubling, and very revealing, that this simple fact is an anathema to so many.

Re: New Charges in Huge C.I.A. Breach Known as Vault 7

#47

Post by djsumdog »

simion314 wrote: post #31
staunch wrote: post #9

> Mr. Schulte had been charged last year in New York with possession of child pornography. The fact that they found child porn on his computer is the scariest part. Almost any technical person could frame almost anyone else with CP possession. It's just a matter of putting some files on a computer and/or faking some logs, browser history, etc. It would be incredibly trivial for the CIA to put CP on his computer and t…

Exactly, some bad iframe could load CP files and not display them, later if someone checks the network logs they can "prove" you visited and watched those urls. Combine this with the very specific ad targeting that is possible to pull of(like the guy that managed to make FB to show his ad to his roommate) and you get an easy and remote way to frame people

It's also a strict liability crime, so intent doesn't matter. The evidence can't be viewed except by very few people approved by the justice department, so CP might just be pictures of a 17th year old that the person didn't even know was underage.

Re: New Charges in Huge C.I.A. Breach Known as Vault 7

#48

Post by cortesoft »

influx wrote: post #6
rando444 wrote: post #4

While I won't justify anything this person allegedly did.. it seems open to speculation whether the child pornography stuff was actually legitimate, or some sort of targeted attack. (whether to destroy his character/career or keep him under judicial watch / within the country)

I read the IRC logs, and I'm skeptical that anyone not deeply versed in the lingo, tone, and character of that scene could fake them. It's not impossible, but it was pretty convincing to me.

You don't think the CIA would be able to fake the lingo, tone, and character of the scene? I mean, they certainly have access to a ton of real IRC logs about the subject, would probably be pretty easy to swap out some usernames.

Re: New Charges in Huge C.I.A. Breach Known as Vault 7

#49

Post by gowld »

Cacti wrote: post #30
staunch wrote: post #9

> Mr. Schulte had been charged last year in New York with possession of child pornography. The fact that they found child porn on his computer is the scariest part. Almost any technical person could frame almost anyone else with CP possession. It's just a matter of putting some files on a computer and/or faking some logs, browser history, etc. It would be incredibly trivial for the CIA to put CP on his computer and t…

The indictment goes into some detail on this: https://www.scribd.com/document/379346745/Joshua-Adam-Schult... The guy is clearly guilty.

That's not how justice works. The indictment is the prosecutor's claims, not established facts that have survived subject to cross-examinations. The listed evidence could be fake, could be real but linked to the accused, or could be real and linked.

Re: New Charges in Huge C.I.A. Breach Known as Vault 7

#50

Post by abiox »

colordrops wrote: post #32
wyldfire wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or option C: a propaganda arm of the Russian Government. EDIT: downvoters aren't offering a response, so I'll just hope or assume that they want evidence: [1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/17/wikileaks-turned-down-l... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/07/putin-dismisses... [3] http://www.haaretz.com/us-news/1.771716 [4] http://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/25/politics/cambridge-analyti... [5] https://sunli…

Calling wikileaks a propaganda arm of the Russian Government is just US propaganda. 1984 double-speak here. Can you point to ANYTHING that wikileaks has reported or released that is untrue?

does anything necessarily need to be 'untrue'? (a lot of propaganda is 'true')
Post reply on HN