William Binney, Ray McGovern and Other Intel Experts Calls Russia Hacking Allegations ‘Baseless’

In a letter published on Consortium News regarding claims circulating that Russia interfered in the recent U.S. elections, the group Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) penned a powerful rebuke of the narrative being spread. Signed by retired intelligence officials William Binney, Mike Gravel, Larry Johnson, Ray McGovern, Elizabeth Murray and Kirk Wiebe, the memorandum offered a bold rethinking of the alleged “hack” as a leak since, “given what we know of NSA’s existing capabilities, it beggars belief that NSA would be unable to identify anyone – Russian or not – attempting to interfere in a U.S. election by hacking.”

Here’s an excerpt:

In what follows, we draw on decades of senior-level experience – with emphasis on cyber-intelligence and security – to cut through uninformed, largely partisan fog. Far from hiding behind anonymity, we are proud to speak out with the hope of gaining an audience appropriate to what we merit – given our long labors in government and other areas of technology. And corny though it may sound these days, our ethos as intelligence professionals remains, simply, to tell it like it is – without fear or favor.

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. … The bottom line is that the NSA would know where and how any “hacked” emails from the DNC, HRC or any other servers were routed through the network. This process can sometimes require a closer look into the routing to sort out intermediate clients, but in the end sender and recipient can be traced across the network.

The various ways in which usually anonymous spokespeople for U.S. intelligence agencies are equivocating – saying things like “our best guess” or “our opinion” or “our estimate” etc. – shows that the emails alleged to have been “hacked” cannot be traced across the network. Given NSA’s extensive trace capability, we conclude that DNC and HRC servers alleged to have been hacked were, in fact, not hacked.

The evidence that should be there is absent; otherwise, it would surely be brought forward, since this could be done without any danger to sources and methods. Thus, we conclude that the emails were leaked by an insider – as was the case with Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. Such an insider could be anyone in a government department or agency with access to NSA databases, or perhaps someone within the DNC.

Read the full statement on Consortium News.

— Posted by Natasha Hakimi Zapata

Related Entries

• December 13, 2016 Samantha Bee: Democrats, Don’t Let Panic Make You Abandon Principles or the People Who Voted for You
• December 10, 2016 No, America, It Wasn’t Russia: You Did This to Yourself