Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[iam416]

In the weeks following the Parkland shooting, media of all types ran stories/posts advancing various theories about the shooting and the shooter. A study of these stories by WAPO revealed that many of them originated from groups advancing their own agendas

I assume the WAPO is counting the media's utterly shameless parading around of kids as policy experts and their own mouthpieces as such total nonsense.

[Kapture1]

[Dr. Strangelove]

It's remarkable, IMO, that #GentryProgs attribute absolutely zero competence to PDJT and his team (close to the truth, IMO) yet somehow think he's competent enough to actively and secretly collude with a foreign power to fix the US election. What's more, in an administration rife with leaks of all sorts from all corners, they've managed to keep the smoking gun secret.



SLF was more responding to the specific Federalist Paper cited.

Well FWIW, Don Jr. arranged a meeting in Trump Tower with someone he thought was a Russian govt representative that had dirt on Hillary. They managed to keep that meeting a secret for over a year I think. New stuff comes out pretty steadily. So I'm not a believer in "if there was anything bad going on, it would've leaked by now". But I'm pretty skeptical about direct collusion, yeah. But not that they wouldn't try, because they clearly did.

[Dr. Strangelove]

Sessions responds to Trump. This latest public shaming does feel different. Sessions might be read to be saying "If you don't value honesty and integrity, fire me".

Trump's a true moron if he thinks the Senate will confirm some knuckle-dragging sycophant for that position. He'll be stuck with Rosenstein running the Department till 2019 at least.

[ame]https://twitter.com/kyledcheney/status/968915286840791041[/ame]

[iam416]

Well FWIW, Don Jr. arranged a meeting in Trump Tower with someone he thought was a Russian govt representative that had dirt on Hillary. They managed to keep that meeting a secret for over a year I think. New stuff comes out pretty steadily. So I'm not a believer in "if there was anything bad going on, it would've leaked by now". But I'm pretty skeptical about direct collusion, yeah. But not that they wouldn't try, because they clearly did.

To be clear, PDJT and his team were not impeded by ethical obligations in the least. But, I continue to find it remarkably odd that there is nothing of actual collusion leaked and that PDJT was brilliant enough to execute the plan. Mostly I just think the Russians didn't need any help. All they had to do was leak emails. Once they became public, then PDJT could go to town. Moreover, if they didn't have to involve that carnival of shame why would they? They would have fucked it up. Heh.

You have to admit, DSL, that's a powerful argument!

[Whitley]

To be clear, PDJT and his team were not impeded by ethical obligations in the least. But, I continue to find it remarkably odd that there is nothing of actual collusion leaked and that PDJT was brilliant enough to execute the plan. Mostly I just think the Russians didn't need any help. All they had to do was leak emails. Once they became public, then PDJT could go to town. Moreover, if they didn't have to involve that carnival of shame why would they? They would have fucked it up. Heh.

You have to admit, DSL, that's a powerful argument!

I don't think there was direct collusion BUT I think that Mueller is going to find that the Trump companies were laundering money for a lot of the Russian oligarchy and other governments. Given the staggering arrogance and incompetence (to a large degree) of Trump people it would not surprise me in the least that PDJT thinks he can outwit Mueller.

[hack]

Were it brilliantly done, none of them would be facing jail time. Some of them are, including at rather high levels, so it's hard to argue for brilliance.

[Kapture1]

I don't think there was direct collusion BUT I think that Mueller is going to find that the Trump companies were laundering money for a lot of the Russian oligarchy and other governments.

based on what other than your predisposition to hate Trump?

[iam416]

Were it brilliantly done, none of them would be facing jail time. Some of them are, including at rather high levels, so it's hard to argue for brilliance.

That's a fair counterpoint if it they're facing jail time for colluding with the Russians re the election. If they are facing jail time for other charges then it sort of goes to the "it hasn't been leaked yet/come out yet" argument.

[Whitley]

based on what other than your predisposition to hate Trump?

1) Mueller's team has a lot of money laundering experts on it
2) Mueller's investigators are asking people they interview about Trump business dealings with Russia prior to 2016 campaign
3) There has been a few times where numerous people have said (via interviews) a lot of Trump money to build things came from the Russians and other governments in recent years.
4) You have a Trump server that 98% of its pings, during the election season, came from two sources. 1) Alfa Bank (which is tightly connected to Putin and Russia) and 2) Sparrow Health (a health system owned by the DeVos family <and it should be mentioned that Erik Prince the founder of Blackwater is Betsy DeVos' brother>)

5) Real Estate is a great way to launder money.
6) Not directly related to Trump but you have 4 countries that believed that they could use SIL's debt and business connections to influence him (and by extension Trump) for things that would be favorable to their country.

[Kapture1]

1) Mueller's team has a lot of money laundering experts on it
2) Mueller's investigators are asking people they interview about Trump business dealings with Russia prior to 2016 campaign
3) There has been a few times where numerous people have said (via interviews) a lot of Trump money to build things came from the Russians and other governments in recent years.
4) You have a Trump server that 98% of its pings, during the election season, came from two sources. 1) Alfa Bank (which is tightly connected to Putin and Russia) and 2) Sparrow Health (a health system owned by the DeVos family <and it should be mentioned that Erik Prince the founder of Blackwater is Betsy DeVos' brother>)

5) Real Estate is a great way to launder money.
6) Not directly related to Trump but you have 4 countries that believed that they could use SIL's debt and business connections to influence him (and by extension Trump) for things that would be favorable to their country.

none of that is evidence of anything

and the Alfa bank and sparrow health server conspiracy?

https://theintercept.com/2016/11/01/heres-the-problem-with-the-story-connecting-russia-to-donald-trumps-email-server/

HERE’S THE PROBLEM WITH THE STORY CONNECTING RUSSIA TO DONALD TRUMP’S EMAIL SERVER


ON MONDAY NIGHT, Slate’s Franklin Foer published a story that’s been circulating through the dark web and various newsrooms since summertime, an enormous, eyebrow-raising claim that Donald Trump uses a secret server to communicate with Russia. That claim resulted in an explosive night of Twitter confusion and misinformation.

The gist of the Slate article is dramatic — incredible, even: Cybersecurity researchers found that the Trump Organization used a secret box configured to communicate exclusively with Alfa Bank, Russia’s largest privately-held commercial bank. This is a story that any reporter in our election cycle would drool over, and drool Foer did:

The researchers quickly dismissed their initial fear that the logs represented a malware attack. The communication wasn’t the work of bots. The irregular pattern of server look-ups actually resembled the pattern of human conversation — conversations that began during office hours in New York and continued during office hours in Moscow. It dawned on the researchers that this wasn’t an attack, but a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank.

These claims are based entirely on “DNS logs,” digital records of when one server looks up how to contact another across the internet. The logs, first gathered by an anonymous researcher going by the moniker “Tea Leaves” (an irony that should be lost on no one) and shared with a small group of academics, were provided to The Intercept and a handful of other news organizations. The New York Times, the Washington Post, Reuters, the Daily Beast, and Vice all examined these materials to at least some extent and did not publish the claims.

You can think of DNS like a phone book that maps people’s names to their phone numbers. For example, every time Alice wants to call Bob, she first looks up Bob’s phone number in the phone book, and then she dials the number into her phone. However, it’s possible that Alice might look up Bob’s phone number and not call him on the phone. It’s even possible that she might look up Bob’s phone number over and over on a regular basis, over the course of months, without actually calling him. The DNS look-ups that The Intercept and others (including Slate) reviewed are similar to records of Alice looking up Bob’s phone number in the phone book, but to call that evidence of sinister collusion between the two is, politely, a stretch. These DNS records alone simply cannot prove that any specific messages were sent at those times. In fact, they can’t really prove anything at all, and certainly not “communication” between Trump and Alfa. This cannot be overstated: No one, not Tea Leaves, not his academic peers, and not Franklin Foer, can show that a single message was exchanged between Trump and Alfa.

Inconsistencies
Putting aside how little there actually is to read in these tea leaves, the information we reviewed was filled with inconsistencies and vagaries. The Intercept (and other outlets) were presented with three documents: an academia-style white paper about the server, an analysis of that white paper, and a sprawling dossier on Alfa Bank. The author of the analysis paper refused to comment on the record or allow his name to be published. Both Tea Leaves and the analysis author said they did not know who wrote the other documents, and would not say how they obtained them. Professor L. Jean Camp, an esteemed computer scientist quoted at length in the Slate piece and also interviewed by The Intercept, said she knew the author of the Alfa Bank document — compiled with the exhaustive detail of a political oppo team, not a university researcher — but would not reveal who it was. Tea Leaves himself told The Intercept that he had to keep his identity and methods secret because “I run a cybersecurity company and I do not want DDOS and never have we been DDOS, nor do I want other attention.”

Looking at the documents themselves provided further oddities and errors. The white paper contends the following:

The Spectrum Health IP address is a TOR exit node used exclusively by Alfa Bank, i.e., Alfa Bank communications enter a Tor node somewhere in the world and those communications exit, presumably untraceable, at Spectrum Health. There is absolutely no reason why Spectrum would want a Tor exit node on its system.

This is simply untrue and easy to disprove using publicly available information: The Intercept confirmed that the IP address in question, and all other IP addresses on Spectrum Health’s network, did not host a Tor node during the time period.

On Tea Leaves’ WordPress site, he claimed that “only two networks resolved the mail1.trump-email.com host.” This is contradicted by the very works of analysis furnished by Tea Leaves’ collaborators: The author of the white paper found that at least 19 IP addresses, all belonging to different networks except for the two that belong to Alfa Bank, had looked up Trump’s server. And these are only the 19 the author was able to observe in a short time period — it can’t be ruled out that there were many more, which quickly deflates the portrait of a shady Russian backchannel.

The white paper included DNS look-up data, but not nearly enough to reproduce the results. Rather than the 19 IP addresses we expected to see, the data only included three, and the DNS look-ups were not for the same time period that the paper described. Tea Leaves published a different set of data on the dark web, which we also looked at, but this set of data only included a total of four IP addresses. When we pressed Tea Leaves for the complete set of data so we could attempt to reproduce the analysis, he gave us a new, more comprehensive set of data, but still that included a total of only eight IP addresses, and it was missing an IP address belonging to a VPN service in Utah that accounted for a significant portion of the DNS look-ups described in the paper.

What percentage of DNS look-ups for Trump’s email server could Tea Leaves and his colleagues observe, out of all DNS look-ups for that server on the whole internet? How can they be sure that the majority of DNS look-ups for Trump’s email server originated from Alfa Bank, when much of the data they collected didn’t even include DNS look-ups from IPs described in their own paper? What’s their margin of error? None of the analysis that we (and other journalists) obtained answered these questions.

The Simplest Explanation
Although the Slate article mentions Occam’s Razor, Foer never actually takes seriously the simplest plausible explanation for all of this: The Trump Organization owns a bunch of expensive, obnoxious spam servers that churn out marketing emails for its expensive, obnoxious hotels. Spectrum Health, an entity in this story whose presence never made any sense, provided the following statement:

Our experts have conducted a detailed analysis of the alleged internet traffic and did not find any evidence that it included any actual communications (no emails, chat, text, etc.) between Spectrum Health and Alfa Bank or any of the Trump organizations. While we did find a small number of incoming spam marketing emails, they originated from a digital marketing company, Cendyn, advertising Trump Hotels.

Spectrum also provided us with something not even Tea Leaves could: a copy of an email sent from the mail1.trump-email.com server. Did it contain a Cyrillic cipher? Not quite:




Spectrum was kind enough to include the email’s header data, which shows its origin:




Alfa Bank provided the same:



Now, these emails are from outside the time period observed by Tea Leaves et al. and only represents one data point. On the other hand, we now have one checkmark in the “this is just some dumb spam server” column, and zero in the “this is a hotline to Putin’s bedroom” column. Mandiant, a cybersecurity firm Alfa Bank hired to investigate the DNS logs once reporters came knocking, provided another deeply plausible explanation: All of the look-ups were the result of Alfa’s mail servers trying to figure out who was spamming them so much.

The information presented is inconclusive and is not evidence of substantive contact or a direct email or financial link between Alfa Bank and the Trump Campaign or Organization. The list presented does not contain enough information to show that there has been any actual activity opposed to simple DNS look-ups which can come from a variety of sources including anti-spam and other security software.

Security researcher Rob Graham points out that it’s a stretch to even claim that this server is truly “Trump’s”:

The evidence available on the internet is that Trump neither (directly) controls the domain “trump-email.com,” nor has access to the server. Instead, the domain was setup and controlled by Cendyn, a company that does marketing/promotions for hotels, including many of Trump’s hotels. Cendyn outsources the email portions of its campaigns to a company called Listrak, which actually owns/operates the physical server in a data center in Philadelphia. …

… When you view this “secret” server in context, surrounded by the other email servers operated by Listrak on behalf of Cendyn, it becomes more obvious what’s going on. In the same internet address range of Trump’s servers you see a bunch of similar servers, many named [client]-email.com. In other words, trump-email.com is not intended as a normal email server you and I are familiar with, but as a server used for marketing/promotional campaigns.

Paul Vixie, quoted throughout the Slate story, is a legendary figure in the history of the internet whose expertise is near unparalleled when it comes to DNS. But even Vixie conceded to The Intercept that Tea Leaves’ evidence was conclusive of nothing: “It’s a perfect he-said, she-said situation. … Mandiant is guessing no. I am guessing yes. Neither of us has direct evidence.”

There are other, non-technical issues with the Foer piece. For one, the political connections between Trump and Alfa Bank are presented to the reader by highlighting the relationship between Trump and Richard Burt, a consultant who drafted a Trump campaign speech. Burt, Foer charges, “serves on Alfa’s senior advisory board.” Burt has indeed worked for years as an adviser to Alfa Bank and its founder, Mikhail Fridman. But he no longer serves on the board of Alfa Capital Partners, the Moscow-based fund associated with Alfa Bank. That company closed shop over a year ago. Foer made the same allegation in another piece published by Slate in July.

Could it be that Donald Trump used one of his shoddy empire’s spam marketing machines, one with his last name built right into the domain name, to secretly collaborate with a Moscow bank? Sure. At this moment, there’s literally no way to disprove that. But there’s also literally no way to prove it, and such a grand claim carries a high burden of proof.

Without more evidence it would be safer (and saner) to assume that this is exactly what it looks like: A company that Trump has used since 2007 to outsource his hotel spam is doing exactly that. Otherwise, we’re all making the exact same speculation about the unknown that’s caused untold millions of voters to believe Hillary’s deleted emails might have contained Benghazi cover-up PDFs.

Given equal evidence for both, go with the less wacky story.

Top photo: The logo of Alfa Bank is visible on a building in Minsk, Belarus, on June 19, 2016.

Update: November 1, 2016 This article has been updated to clarify Alfa Bank’s status as the largest private commercial bank.

[Kapture1]

here's another problem for the control freaks... how do you stop the 3D printing of AR lowers?

[millenwasmyfavorite]

Meh.

Kapture more or less answers nothing.

Unsure why Trump needs to demonstrate competence to be used as an asset in some fashion -- he has demonstrated a clear capacity to be moved off-kilter over meaningless actions/tweets/opinions -- doesn't strike me as a guy of great resilience.

Lol, ya, our anti domestic terrorism agencies are real concerned with whiny liberal college students and an extreme left that can't figure out how to argue for or against meta-pronouns.

Every state is rife with pseudomilitias: some more legit than others, but most all monitored in some way. Obviously possessing various degrees of maneuverable agency, and paranoid enough to not spout off about it on some random forum for no purpose. Those that do are nobodies that only reference that sort of action for the purpose of.... well, not sure... but, clearly not a part of any sort of galvanizing force. No matter how rawdog Kapture wants to sound when evading questions he can't answer, he is just some dude clinging to a dutiful cause through, maybe acquaintance, acquired knowledge.

[crashcourse]

Well FWIW, Don Jr. arranged a meeting in Trump Tower with someone he thought was a Russian govt representative that had dirt on Hillary.

then they could have started a dossier
which would have led to a FISA warrant
which would have led to Special prosecuter
which would have led to a bunch of federal indictments from years ago having nothing to do with collusion or obstruction
but cpould have brought the Clinton foundation down a few steps

if only Hillary hadn't beaten DJT to the punch and got her dossier out first

[Kapture1]

Meh.

Kapture more or less answers nothing.

No matter how rawdog Kapture wants to sound when evading questions he can't answer, he is just some dude clinging to a dutiful cause through, maybe acquaintance, acquired knowledge.

I answer questions, sorry you are so unsatisfied with the answers.