Obama’s Russia Narrative: “Inside Leak, Russia Not Hacking”

A group of retired senior intelligence officials, including the NSA whistleblower William Binney (former Technical Director, World Geopolitical & Military Analysis, NSA), have posted an open letter on consortiumnews.com that destroys the Obama administration’s “Russian hacking” narrative.  

Within the letter, Binney argues that, thanks to the NSA’s “extensive domestic data-collection network,” any data removed remotely from Hillary Clinton or DNC servers would have passed over fiber networks and therefore would have been captured by the NSA who could have then analyzed packet data to determine the origination point and destination address of those packets.  

As Binney further notes, the only way the leaks could have avoided NSA detection is if they were never passed over fiber networks but rather downloaded to a thumb drive by someone with internal access to servers.

We have gone through the various claims about hacking. For us, it is child’s play to dismiss them. The email disclosures in question are the result of a leak, not a hack. Here’s the difference between leaking and hacking:

Leak: When someone physically takes data out of an organization and gives it to some other person or organization, as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning did.

Hack: When someone in a remote location electronically penetrates operating systems, firewalls or any other cyber-protection system and then extracts data.

All signs point to leaking, not hacking. If hacking were involved, the National Security Agency would know it – and know both sender and recipient.

In short, since leaking requires physically removing data – on a thumb drive, for example – the only way such data can be copied and removed, with no electronic trace of what has left the server, is via a physical storage device.

Again, NSA is able to identify both the sender and recipient when hacking is involved.

Thanks largely to the material released by Edward Snowden, we can provide a full picture of NSA’s extensive domestic data-collection network including Upstream programs like Fairview, Stormbrew and Blarney.

These include at least 30 companies in the U.S. operating the fiber networks that carry the Public Switched Telephone Network as well as the World Wide Web.

This gives NSA unparalleled access to data flowing within the U.S. and data going out to the rest of the world, as well as data transiting the U.S.

In other words, any data that is passed from the servers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) or of Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC) – or any other server in the U.S. – is collected by the NSA. 

These data transfers carry destination addresses in what are called packets, which enable the transfer to be traced and followed through the network.

Binney further notes that the manner in which the media’s “sources” are equivocating by using phrases like “our best guess” implies that the NSA has not been able to trace the Hillary or DNC “hacks” across fiber networks.  

And, since the NSA tracks basically every packet that travels across U.S. networks, Binney concludes that it’s effectively impossible that the WikiLeaks data came from a “hack.”