Octopus Overlords

hepcat wrote:So all he has in his defense is "I am rubber, you are glue..."?

Several companies have pulled adverts from Fox News host Sean Hannity's show after his coverage of a debunked election murder conspiracy.

At least five firms have cancelled commercials, despite Mr Hannity's pledge to drop the topic on-air.

Fox has retracted their story, which claimed a Democratic National Committee employee was shot because he passed emails to Wikileaks.

Washington DC police suspect Seth Rich was gunned down in a botched robbery.

Companies that have ditched the Sean Hannity Show are Cars.com, the United Services Automobile Association, home-security company Ring, Crowne Plaza Hotels, Peloton bicycles, and mattress companies Leesa Sleep and Casper.

[...]

On Wednesday Fox host Kimberly Guilfoyle announced Mr Hannity was going on holiday and that she would replace him on-air for the rest of the week.

"Like the rest of the country, Sean Hannity is taking a vacation for Memorial Day weekend and will be back on Tuesday," a Fox News spokesperson said in a statement.

"Those who suggest otherwise are going to look foolish."

Former Fox host Bill O'Reilly was also targeted in an advertising boycott over several sexual harassment claims, shortly before he went on holiday never to return.

There was no hack of the Democratic National Committee’s system on July 5 last year—not by the Russians, not by anyone else. Hard science now demonstrates it was a leak—a download executed locally with a memory key or a similarly portable data-storage device. In short, it was an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system. This casts serious doubt on the initial “hack,” as alleged, that led to the very consequential publication of a large store of documents on WikiLeaks last summer.

Forensic investigations of documents made public two weeks prior to the July 5 leak by the person or entity known as Guccifer 2.0 show that they were fraudulent: Before Guccifer posted them they were adulterated by cutting and pasting them into a blank template that had Russian as its default language.
Guccifer took responsibility on June 15 for an intrusion the DNC reported on June 14 and professed to be a WikiLeaks source—claims essential to the official narrative implicating Russia in what was soon cast as an extensive hacking operation. To put the point simply, forensic science now devastates this narrative.

The customary VIPS format is an open letter, typically addressed to the president. The group has written three such letters on the DNC incident, all of which were first published by Robert Parry at Here is the latest, dated July 24; it blueprints the forensic work this article explores in detail. They have all argued that the hack theory is wrong and that a locally executed leak is the far more likely explanation. In a letter to Barack Obama dated January 17, three days before he left office, the group explained that the NSA’s known programs are fully capable of capturing all electronic transfers of data. “We strongly suggest that you ask NSA for any evidence it may have indicating that the results of Russian hacking were given to WikiLeaks,” the letter said. “If NSA cannot produce such evidence—and quickly—this would probably mean it does not have any.”

What is the maximum achievable speed? Forensicator recently ran a test download of a comparable data volume (and using a server speed not available in 2016) 40 miles from his computer via a server 20 miles away and came up with a speed of 11.8 megabytes per second—half what the DNC operation would need were it a hack. Other investigators have built on this finding. Folden and Edward Loomis say a survey published August 3, 2016, by is highly reliable and use it as their thumbnail index. It indicated that the highest average ISP speeds of first-half 2016 were achieved by Xfinity and Cox Communications. These speeds averaged 15.6 megabytes per second and 14.7 megabytes per second, respectively. Peak speeds at higher rates were recorded intermittently but still did not reach the required 22.7 megabytes per second.

The typical fixed broadband consumer in the U.S. saw average download speeds greater than 50 Mbps for the first time ever during the first six months of 2016, topping out at 54.97 Mbps in June.

El Guapo wrote:Honestly I doubt that that really is connected to it.

It's more than anti-anti-Trumpism is rampant among that stripe of the left. They hate the U.S. political and national security establishment so much (to be fair, not without some reason) that it's extraordinarily difficult for them to see any other force as worse, or even to see establishment people or groups as right about something.

Jonathan Chait had a good column the other day about .Glenn Greenwald and this effect.

El Guapo wrote:They hate the Clintons and liberalism so much that it's extraordinarily difficult for them to see any other force as worse

Carpet_pissr wrote:

El Guapo wrote:They hate the Clintons and liberalism so much that it's extraordinarily difficult for them to see any other force as worse

Just for kicks...you could end that sentence with "even one as obviously terrible as Donald Trump."

I think that goes a long way to explaining why here, in the heart of red country, I didn't see any MAGA hat wearers (maybe ONE), or Trump bumper stickers or yard signs, before the election. If any, VERY few.

YellowKing wrote:"Your honor, the average speed of a car traveling on an interstate is 65 miles per hour. Therefore it is impossible that my client was going 80."

LOL. I had a 50MB connection in 2015.

From a 5 second Google look up of a Speedtest.net report:

The typical fixed broadband consumer in the U.S. saw average download speeds greater than 50 Mbps for the first time ever during the first six months of 2016, topping out at 54.97 Mbps in June.

How did the group come to the conclusion that it was a leak, not a hack?

Investigators found that 1,976 megabytes of data were downloaded locally on July 5, 2016. The information was downloaded with a memory key or some other portable storage device. The download operation took 87 seconds — meaning the speed of transfer was 22.7 megabytes per second — “a speed that far exceeds an internet capability for a remote hack,” as Lawrence puts it. What’s more, they say, a transoceanic transfer would have been even slower (Guccifer claimed to be working from Romania).

“Based on the data we now have, what we’ve been calling a hack is impossible,” Folden told The Nation.

Further casting doubt on the official narrative is the fact the the DNC’s computer servers were never examined by the FBI. Instead, the agency relied on a report compiled by Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity firm compromised by serious conflicts of interest — the major one being that the firm was paid by the DNC itself to conduct its work. Another is that the firm’s owner is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a think tank known for its hostility toward Russia.

The Intelligence Community Assessment published in January of this year, which claims “high confidence” in the Russian hacking theory, presented no hard evidence. Yet many in the media have relied on it as proof ever since. Ray McGovern, another VIPS member and formerly the chief of the CIA’s Soviet Foreign Policy Branch, called that intelligence assessment a “disgrace” to the profession.

The VIPS report also notes that the timing of events is strangely favorable to Hillary Clinton. It is hard to disagree.

On June 12, 2016, Julian Assange announced that he would publish documents related to Clinton’s campaign on WikiLeaks. Two days later, Crowdstrike, the firm paid by the DNC, suddenly announced the discovery of malware on DNC servers and claimed it had evidence that the Russians were responsible for it. This set in motion the narrative for Russian hacking.

A day after that, Guccifer appeared, took responsibility for the purported June 14 hack and announced that he was a WikiLeaks source, working on behalf of Russia. He then posted the documents which VIPS now claims were altered to make them appear more “Russian.”

On July 5, two weeks later, Guccifer claimed responsibility for another hack — which the VIPS report categorically states can only have been a leak, based on the speed of data transfer.

As Lawrence suggests, this timing was convenient for the Clinton campaign, which could avoid dealing with the contents of the leaks by instead focusing on the sensational story of Russian hacking.

For the media and mainstream liberals to dismiss the information presented in Lawrence’s article as lacking in evidence would be breathtakingly ironic, given how little evidence they required to build a narrative to suit themselves and absolve Clinton of any responsibility for losing the election.

The authors of this report are highly experienced and well-regarded professionals. That they can be dismissed out of hand or ignored entirely is a sad commentary on the state of the media, which purports to be concerned by the plague of “fake news.”

If these new findings are accurate, those who pushed the Russia hacking narrative with little evidence have a lot to answer for. The Clinton campaign promoted a narrative that has pushed U.S.-Russia relations to the brink at an incredibly dangerous time.

Unlike the cacophony of anonymous sources cited by the media over the past year, these experts are ready to put their names to their assertions. They expect that pundits, politicians and the media will cast doubt on their findings, but say they are “prepared to answer any substantive challenges on their merits.” That is more than any other investigators or intelligence agencies have offered to this point.

Given the seriousness of this new information, the DNC’s official response to The Nation’s story is so lackluster it is almost laughable:

U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded the Russian government hacked the DNC in an attempt to interfere in the election. Any suggestion otherwise is false and is just another conspiracy theory like those pushed by Trump and his administration. It’s unfortunate that The Nation has decided to join the conspiracy theorists to push this narrative.

The clear implication here is that anyone who questions what U.S. intelligence agencies “have concluded” is a conspiracy theorist pushing lies on behalf of Trump or Vladimir Putin. It is clear that the DNC expect the matter to be left at that, with no further inquiry from the media or anyone else.

By the looks of things, that’s exactly what will happen.

Isgrimnur wrote:Seems like a trustworthy, nonpartisan source.

Isgrimnur wrote:...

Seems like a trustworthy, nonpartisan source.

malchior wrote:I see how this is going. The original garbage theory about Internet speed didn't stick so they pivoted to the lack of public evidence canard. Puhlease. It should amaze me how desperate decent chunks of right and the extreme left are to let Russia off the hook. Mostly so they can go after their local demon(s) of choice. But unfortunately it is all too common and it works all too well.

For the media and mainstream liberals to dismiss the information presented in Lawrence’s article as lacking in evidence would be breathtakingly ironic, given how little evidence they required to build a narrative to suit themselves and absolve Clinton of any responsibility for losing the election.

Rip wrote:The internet speed did stick it still would have required a connection speed of 178 mbps to have xferred the data in that amount of time.

You are still neglecting the crux of the matter, while the report doesn't PROVE it was a leak and not a hack, it casts serious doubt on it.

For the media and mainstream liberals to dismiss the information presented in Lawrence’s article as lacking in evidence would be breathtakingly ironic, given how little evidence they required to build a narrative to suit themselves and absolve Clinton of any responsibility for losing the election.

hepcat wrote:Why the latest theory about the dnc not being hacked is probably wrong.

malchior wrote:No it didn't. You know that was a commercially available speed for *years* at this point. It is a ridiculous assertion. I suspect you know that too.

The congressman told TheDC that “if [Assange] is going to give us a big favor, he would obviously have to be pardoned to leave the Ecuadorian embassy.” Assange took asylum in the embassy in August 2012 after facing sexual assault charges in Sweden. The Justice Department also reportedly wants to charge Assange for helping Edward Snowden, a former NSA analyst, leak thousands of classified documents.

“He has information that will be of dramatic importance to the United States and the people of our country as well as to our government,” Rohrabacher said. “Thus if he comes up with that, you know he’s going to expect something in return. He can’t even leave the embassy to get out to Washington to talk to anybody if he doesn’t have a pardon. Obviously there is an issue there that needs to be dealt with, but we haven’t come to any conclusion yet.”

Max Peck wrote:So, Putin's bought-and-paid-for Congresscritter and Putin's propoganda distributor are going to crack this case wide open, exonerating Russia? Sounds legit.

YellowKing wrote:LOL. I had a 50MB connection in 2015.