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Reddit Shuts Down AMA from Former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney

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Re: Reddit Shuts Down AMA from Former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney

#31

Post by srfilipek »

nickysielicki wrote: post #15
AaronFriel wrote: post #9

The central component of the allegation that the DNC leak was an inside job as opposed to a hack has been repeated by writers at Consortium News and by journalist Patrick Lawrence: > Key among the findings of the independent forensic investigations is the conclusion that the DNC data was copied onto a storage device at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack. Here's the article from Patrick…

The argument isn't that 23MB/s is so outrageously fast that it must be from a USB drive and couldn't be from the internet. The argument is that 23 MB/s is a peculiar number because it is so close to USB 2 max throughput (480Mbit in spec, but practically closer to 280Mbit due to bus access overhead and underlying storage limitations.) It's not at all unreasonable to expect that a USB2 mass storage device would cap out…

It provides some indication that it may have been transferred to USB at some point.

That point could be directly from the server, or from the hacker's computer to a USB drive, or from a USB drive to another computer.

It says nothing about the original hack.

Re: Reddit Shuts Down AMA from Former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney

#32

Post by justanotheranon »

while i disagree with the Forenaicator's theory that file time stamps prove it was Seth Rich and not GRU, i think this is shameless censorship by Reddit.

Aaron Shwartz would be disgusted by what Reddit has become.

instead of censorship, the correct approach would be to refute Binney and Forensicator's claims with counter evidence. file time stamps can be trivially modified to whatever you want and so cannot be trusted. as we saw from the CIA Vault7 leaks on Wikileaks, CIA had dozens and dozens of programs for forging metadata in files to frame foreign govts with attribution, which is one of the biggest reasons why the whole narrative that Russia hacked the DNC is on shaky ground.

Re: Reddit Shuts Down AMA from Former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney

#33

Post by tanseydavid »

codezero wrote: post #16
kats wrote: post #8

That's outrageous. If someone is a public figure, they should be allowed to speak.

They allowed him to speak. The mods also made it clear that unsubstantiated claims (from users or the guest) would not be productive and would devolve - yet he did it anyways. I think it's safe to say the audience was aware of his POV, so expected more than regurgitation.

Who will substantiate the substantiators?

Re: Reddit Shuts Down AMA from Former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney

#34

Post by dustingetz »

"we have an economic phenomenon sometimes called the lemons problem. Suppose you want to sell a used car, and I’m looking for a car to buy. From my perspective, I have to worry that your car might be a “lemon”—that it has a serious mechanical problem that doesn’t appear every time you start the car, and is difficult or impossible to fix. Now, you know that your car isn’t a lemon. But if I ask you, “Hey, is this car a lemon?” and you answer “No,” I can’t trust your answer, because you’re incentivized to answer “No” either way. Hearing you say “No” isn’t much Bayesian evidence. Asymmetric information conditions can persist even in cases where, like an honest seller meeting an honest buyer, both parties have strong incentives for accurate information to be conveyed."

Yudkowsky, Eliezer. Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck (pp. 49-50). Machine Intelligence Research Institute. Kindle Edition.

Re: Reddit Shuts Down AMA from Former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney

#35

Post by blnqr »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #30

I think I will cancel my monthly support for Reddit, partly over this and partly because I find it less valuable than Twitter and HN and don't visit that often anymore. BTW, in general I support whistle blowers - they play an important part in free and open governments. I have heard Bill Binney before and thought that his experience and opinions were interesting.

Ever since my service in the Navy I've thought that whistleblowers (1) should definitely speak out, and (2) should be prepared to suffer the consequences.

Re: Reddit Shuts Down AMA from Former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney

#36

Post by joelkevinjones »

Calculating transfer rates based on time-stamps is ridiculous. At any point from source to destination, the individual files making up the emails could have been aggregated, transferred, and then disaggregated, potentially multiple times. Preserving time meta-data during these sorts of operations can go wrong even when one is trying to preserve it. The delta file times could simply reflect the transfer rate of the final disaggregation step in the chain. This could have been a from a directly connected storage device over a less than full-disk-speed interface, or from such a device accessed over a network.

Re: Reddit Shuts Down AMA from Former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney

#38

Post by [deleted] »

justanotheranon wrote: post #32

while i disagree with the Forenaicator's theory that file time stamps prove it was Seth Rich and not GRU, i think this is shameless censorship by Reddit. Aaron Shwartz would be disgusted by what Reddit has become. instead of censorship, the correct approach would be to refute Binney and Forensicator's claims with counter evidence. file time stamps can be trivially modified to whatever you want and so cannot be truste…

[deleted]

Re: Reddit Shuts Down AMA from Former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney

#39

Post by paulryanrogers »

blnqr wrote: post #35
mark_l_watson wrote: post #30

I think I will cancel my monthly support for Reddit, partly over this and partly because I find it less valuable than Twitter and HN and don't visit that often anymore. BTW, in general I support whistle blowers - they play an important part in free and open governments. I have heard Bill Binney before and thought that his experience and opinions were interesting.

Ever since my service in the Navy I've thought that whistleblowers (1) should definitely speak out, and (2) should be prepared to suffer the consequences.

What do you think these consequences should be?

What do you think of the consequences suffered by those who were exposed?

Re: Reddit Shuts Down AMA from Former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney

#40

Post by justinclift »

renewiltord wrote: post #28
AaronFriel wrote: post #9

The central component of the allegation that the DNC leak was an inside job as opposed to a hack has been repeated by writers at Consortium News and by journalist Patrick Lawrence: > Key among the findings of the independent forensic investigations is the conclusion that the DNC data was copied onto a storage device at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack. Here's the article from Patrick…

I had that speed to the US West Coast over Hyperoptic gigabit in 2017 from London. Very steady. There are qualifiers that are missing from the claim, I agree.

Agreed. A work colleague at Red Hat in the UK back in ~2014/2015 had a FTTH home internet connection, and he could download from public servers at 70MB/s.

So, ~20MB/s isn't "simply unobtainable" though I agree the figure is suspiciously like USB2 speeds for cheapo flash drives. eg the ones with slow write speeds

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