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Critiques of the DHS and FBI’s Grizzly Steppe Report

robertmlee.org

41–50 of 114 posts

Re: Critiques of the DHS and FBI’s Grizzly Steppe Report

#41
post #10

This is theatre. Were Congress to expand tort law to mandate standards and consequences similar to products liability regulations for other products, then the attack surface available to state and non-state actors would meaningfully shrink. If there is one thing the plaintiff's lawyers excel at, it is inflicting extensive expenses and pain on parties who negligently or fraudulently create, fund creation, or use produ…

But if we did that, it would be harder to spy on other people, no?

sigh

Re: Critiques of the DHS and FBI’s Grizzly Steppe Report

#42

Throwaway because I work in a related field. This is a public service announcement: if you haven't seen enough information to prove to you, independent of the claims of the White House, CIA & FBI, that Russia was behind this, you should file a Freedom of Information Act Request for sufficient evidence to independently reach that conclusion. Citizens of the US in particular should do this to hold their government acco…

I don't really care that much about this specific event.

It's a bunch of liars (Russian government, various US intelligence services, Russian and American politicians) trying to tell me that "the other guy" is a liar and did something bad.

My life continues as it does, working against all those listed above because none of them particularly deserve my assistance or respect.

Re: Critiques of the DHS and FBI’s Grizzly Steppe Report

#43
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously the pizzagate stuff is stupid and unfounded. It does a great disservice to people that were victims of real sexual abuse. But can't you see the vast amount of corruption? The DNC rigged the primary for one candidate. We need to hold our political parties accountable for their actions.

They preferred a candidate, but 'rigging' implies fraudulently manipulating the votes, which didn't happen. I'd like to see the RNC's emails now. What kind of dirt do the republicans have? Is it not being released because it's being used to blackmail them?

Rigging doesn't specifically mean manipulating votes. It means taking what is presumably an open and fair contest and taking some actions to ensure it isn't.

The big things that came out of the leaks for me is the explicit and cosy relationship with specific members of the media who were instructed to produce and disseminate certain messaging against Bernie Sanders.

They also asked those "media resources" to prop up Trump, Cruz and Carson because they naively believed that Trump would be a push-over, for example.

Re: Critiques of the DHS and FBI’s Grizzly Steppe Report

#44
post #10

This is theatre. Were Congress to expand tort law to mandate standards and consequences similar to products liability regulations for other products, then the attack surface available to state and non-state actors would meaningfully shrink. If there is one thing the plaintiff's lawyers excel at, it is inflicting extensive expenses and pain on parties who negligently or fraudulently create, fund creation, or use produ…

I don't really see it as a primarily driven by liability. I see various federal agencies as strongly discouraging increased private investment in security infrastructure via very public demands vs Apple to decrypt their devices, and very secret national security letters also requiring decryption. Any company has to see that as a potential risk - after putting in R&D funding to secure their products, they could be then required to break their own encryption or face legal jeopardy.

Several small businesses have been driven out of business by such behavior, and large business have mostly capitulated.

Re: Critiques of the DHS and FBI’s Grizzly Steppe Report

#45
post #33

Still lacking any evidence that voting machines were hacked or any part of the electoral process was hijacked. The worst damage? Emails related to the actual rigging of the Democrat Party primaries and the collusion of the media with the Democrat party. Its very hard for me to believe that a state actor is behind such seemingly altruistic actions. Voters saw the worst of Trump and Clinton and choose the lessor of two…

First off, while there was an irrefutable bias in the DNC during the primaries, and shitty moves made against Sanders as a result of that bias, that is not the same thing in any way to rigging the primaries. That's a much stronger allegation with no evidence I've yet seen provided. The DNC was deplorable and idiotic in its rejection of Sanders and active working against his campaign. But the primaries were not rigged.

Second, how exactly was a level playing field created by leaks that targeted a single party and candidate? Was there some demonstrable advantage HRC and the DNC possessed versus GOP candidates and the RNC, which was neutralized in a fair fashion by the leaks, thus creating an equitable and balanced standing among all the parties and candidates? That seems to require quite a lot of evidence and explaining.

Third, I don't think there has been any stated allegations from the Obama administration or intelligence services regarding hacking voting machines and tallies. I realize some people are suggesting it without any evidence being out there. But the administration doesn't appear to be making those claims from all I've read so far. That's a wholly different issue that would require an incredible amount of organization, effort, and evidence proving it occurred. "Hacking the election" seems to almost be used as a bit of a colloquialism, more akin to "life-hacking", and where administration officials are concerned, specifically focused on the data breaches and leaks in an effort to "life-hack" the election through creative social and political engineering, not manipulating voting tabulations. However, voting machines != electoral process. They are merely the mechanism by which the process culminates in a decision. The machines can be entirely sound, while the process can be hacked and manipulated.

Also, a couple of nitpicks:

- It's the Democratic Party, not Democrat Party. It's members are called Democrats, not the party itself.

- In this instance, you wanted to use "lesser" not "lessor".

Re: Critiques of the DHS and FBI’s Grizzly Steppe Report

#46
post #12
post #3

The white house and the document itself never list attribution as the goal. Robert M Lee seems to think because it refers to the attackers as Russia, it is confusing readers. The summary at the beginning makes it clear to me that the document is presupposing the attacker is Russia as to be consistent with all future public reports. I don't think this is the best written report, but his conjecture around completely le…

I question the importance of attribution on this issue. The Office of Personnel Management hack seems far worse than this report's conclusions, but there was a fraction of the outrage. Sadly, the problem is not confined to one state actor. INFOSEC is systemically broken and although the solution is starring Congress in the face, I suspect software/hardware lobbyists will prevent meaningful legislation.

What is the solution?

Re: Critiques of the DHS and FBI’s Grizzly Steppe Report

#47
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously the pizzagate stuff is stupid and unfounded. It does a great disservice to people that were victims of real sexual abuse. But can't you see the vast amount of corruption? The DNC rigged the primary for one candidate. We need to hold our political parties accountable for their actions.

>But can't you see the vast amount of corruption? Every time I see someone write something like this my knee jerk reaction is to either assume they're lying or they are clueless. Can you point to the vast amount of corruption you claim is self evident?

1) Selling ambassdor positions to the donors (check the xlsx file which has higher paying donors getting 'better' countries) 2) Co-ordinating with Super PAC

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/807308520546848769

Re: Critiques of the DHS and FBI’s Grizzly Steppe Report

#48
post #26

The poor man's hacking technique worked great. Instead of focusing on the tools, focus on the results. I bet you're one of those people who uses microservices to run his 100 visitors/day blog just because it's the shiniest new paradigm.

The results are that someone got into Podesta's gmail for some few days. The pros use methods that allow them to keep long term access and which keep you from knowing that you have been hacked to begin with. Look at the NSA's TAO catalog for examples of how the pros work. You can wipe your servers and still be hacked. I don't seriously believe that the NSA is out there sending phishing emails. They're too busy using…

No, the results are that the United States is deep shit, having just elected a serial liar and sexual offender with a little nudge from Russia and Comey. The damage Trump can do is potentially infinite. It's incalculable. If you're Putin, there's never been a bigger payoff for such little effort.

Re: Critiques of the DHS and FBI’s Grizzly Steppe Report

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No idea why you're bringing politics into this. All I said was no evidence has been made public by the government.

> All I said was no evidence has been made public by the government Except that's _explicitly_ not what you said. You said: >still no public evidence that Russia leaked the DNC and Podesta's e-mails? Your original claim was that there was _no public evidence_. When that claim was challenged, you pretended your claim was about what evidence was provided by the government.

Sorry, my intention wasn't to move the goalposts, I actually misspoke the second time. Obviously I don't care where the evidence comes from. I did mean "no public evidence" and then the parent made it political, somehow.

I did read the RPT-APT28 report by FireEye on APT28 (all fifty-something pages, surprise!). It did convince me that APT28 has political motivations. What's the connection between that and DNC/Podesta? I don't know, because there's no public evidence on that (that I know of).

Re: Critiques of the DHS and FBI’s Grizzly Steppe Report

#50
post #33

Still lacking any evidence that voting machines were hacked or any part of the electoral process was hijacked. The worst damage? Emails related to the actual rigging of the Democrat Party primaries and the collusion of the media with the Democrat party. Its very hard for me to believe that a state actor is behind such seemingly altruistic actions. Voters saw the worst of Trump and Clinton and choose the lessor of two…

First off, while there was an irrefutable bias in the DNC during the primaries, and shitty moves made against Sanders as a result of that bias, that is not the same thing in any way to rigging the primaries. That's a much stronger allegation with no evidence I've yet seen provided. The DNC was deplorable and idiotic in its rejection of Sanders and active working against his campaign. But the primaries were not rigged…

I agree not rigged, but giving Hillary debate questions in advance comes pretty close.

In my opinion, the DNC emails and the Trump "grab 'em" tapes are similar -- you can argue that it's private material that should've stayed that way, but you can't argue that the material didn't reveal helpful truths about the candidates.

Finally, a recent poll found 50% of Democrats think that Russia tampered with the vote tallies in the election. This is insane, and the direct result of mainstream media irresponsibly using the phrase "hacked the election" to refer to the (alleged) hacking of DNC emails by Russia.

Fake news.

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