Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing the great Gareth Porter.
He wrote the book, Perils of Dominance, all about the Vietnam War and also Manufactured Crisis, the truth behind the Iran nuclear scare, which is the book on the Iranian nuclear program.
Forget about it.
That's it.
Manufactured Crisis, Gareth Porter.
And here he is writing for ConsortiumNews.com.
And we've reprinted it also in his archive at AntiWar.com as well.
And in fact, it's on the Libertarian Institute site.
So I put it there.
How the Department of Homeland Security Created a Deceptive Tale of Russia Hacking U.S. Voter Sites.
Welcome to the show, Gareth.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine.
Thanks for having me back again, Scott.
Very happy to have you here.
And I don't want to brag or anything.
But as soon as I heard Homeland Security says, I thought, yeah, right.
You know, if there was anything to whatever this story is, they wouldn't be the ones behind it.
It would have come from higher pay grades than them.
So that's very astute.
I just don't believe in government good enough, I guess.
But anyway, so but you got your act together.
So what's your story?
Well, of course, the storyline begins with the fact that we had this news piece that was published by NBC News in September 2016, which told the world that that the Russians had hacked into as many as 21.
I think the phrase was more than 20 state electoral sites, websites, and that four of them had actually been penetrated, compromised.
I think the language was.
And so it was a spectacular, sensational story, which really kicked off the whole narrative about the threat that Russia was posing to the the integrity of U.S. national elections.
And so it really turned into, as I'm sure your your listeners know very well, a whole universe of stories that followed over the next couple of years to sort of dramatize this threat that supposedly the Russians were were opposing to the ability of the United States to have an election that people could could believe in.
And, you know, part of the part of the storyline was, well, you know, it may be that the Russians were simply trying to cause Americans to doubt the integrity of the election system.
And if they did that, they would be highly successful.
And, you know, I think that the the problem that I have more than anything else with this whole story, I mean, perhaps the one liner that I would give in response to that is it wasn't the Russians who have tried to suggest that that the election was compromised somehow, that that people should have doubt in it.
It was the intelligence community, the United States, because James Clapper, who was then in 2016, the director of national national intelligence, actually after he left his post, gave an interview in which he he acknowledged or maybe even bragged that the intelligence community had caused the election of Donald Trump to be in question because of their pushing the idea that.
That the Russians intervened, that the people of the United States may not may not believe that it was valid.
So and there's a lot of other evidence from from various newspaper and and and print print and electronic stories that were where intelligence people and others suggest that that that the election might be compromised.
This was not coming from the Russians.
It was coming from ourselves.
So so that's that's sort of the beginning point for my wading into this story.
And of course, what I found was that there is really no evidence, whatever, that there was any such effort by the Russians to compromise any website that had to do with the elections.
And on the contrary, everything that we know about this storyline really shows that that what actually happened was that there were criminal hackers who were trying to get personal information from public websites, which which, of course, hold, you know, various state websites hold tons of personal information.
And that's worth money to criminal hackers who can get into the websites and get a hold of that information because that they they can then sell that on the dark web to people who will then either resell it or use it for their own criminal or other purposes.
And and so the evidence is very clear that that that that that when there was any compromise of a state election website, as in the case of Illinois, that that's the only case that has come to light.
It was clearly criminal hackers who were responsible for it.
And that that what the DHS did was to create really a phony storyline that was misleading.
And they knew it was misleading because they leaked their own intelligence assessment to NBC.
And then, you know, FBI later came out the following year, came out and suggested, well, it looks like maybe the Russians might have done something to electoral websites, but never said outright that they did.
And we now know that, in fact, they never had any evidence that Russians did anything and that even in their own public testimony, excuse me, their own public testimony, the DHS officials in 2017 said that that their intelligence assessment had said it's possible that Russians might have tried to get into websites.
Electoral related websites, but but they didn't actually have evidence that they had that the Russians had done any of that.
So so that's the basic outline of it.
And there's a lot more information about exactly how they assembled this this list of alleged cases of of possible Russian hacking and peddled it to the media.
To the public as indication that that the Russians were threatening the the electoral integrity of the election.
Well, who says any of this hacking had anything to do with Russia at all?
Well, I mean, this is basically what I'm suggesting is that DHS was the initial source of all this and that it was then just sort of picked up by various news outlets without without anything more than simply the fact that NBC News had come out with the original story and that it was then passed around to to various.
Various news outlets by officials of Lord knows what agencies, whether it was FBI, the intelligence or all of the above, you know, because most of these stories did not source did not source that this to any specific institution.
It was always much more vague and general than that.
So, you know, it was ultimately something that simply became something that people knew without having to source it at all and much less providing any detailed evidence that what they did.
Let me just say a few things, a few sentences about how they did this in their in their so-called intelligence analysis.
What they did was to take the eight IP addresses that the FBI had found associated with the hacks on the Illinois state election database website and a website in Arizona.
It was not a state website, but a locality where somebody had done had had fallen for a phishing email and had they obtained the login information from this for this individual.
And that then turned up on the dark web for sale.
So, you know, both Illinois and Arizona were clear cases of criminal hacking because it was clearly personal information they were after and it was for sale on the dark web.
But but what the DHS did was to take those eight IP addresses and say, OK, any incident which involves any of those eight IP addresses that we can find, which we can somehow link to the idea of election website or election electoral related issues.
We will make that part of the list of alleged cases of possible Russian efforts to target the election websites.
And in fact, what they did was to consider any public facing what they call public facing state website that that was scanned or compromised, even even the usual scanning that takes place tens of thousands of times every day across state websites was considered to be sufficient evidence of an effort to affect the election.
OK.
And the ultimate sort of ridiculous case study that the DHS put forward included on its list was Arizona, where it finally turned out after the state of Arizona refused to take the word of DHS when they informed them in September 2017 that Arizona had been targeted by the Russians.
That their their election websites had been targeted by the Russians and Arizona officials said, no, we know that's not true.
And finally, DHS then confessed to them that, well, OK.
In fact, what did happen was that the Phoenix Public Library was scanned by hackers.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I like the obvious weasel words affect the election as, you know, like George Bush speak.
You're just supposed to finish the sentence in your own head and go, I guess what they mean by that is somehow flipping the votes to Trump or something.
It sounds like is what they're implying, even though they're not really saying anything.
They didn't have to explain.
They didn't have to give any, you know, you know, demonstrate any link whatsoever to an outcome of the election.
People think APT sounds like or, you know, I don't know.
I once thought that that was what they were trying to say was Apartment 28.
Like this is a desk at the GRU somewhere.
This is a group of people rather than this is a brand of malware that malware user people can get and use.
Well, APT, you know, is a designation that has been adopted by various cybersecurity outfits and thus, you know, become became a kind of fact, as it were, to to represent a group of hackers, ultimately.
I mean, it was essentially, as you are, you correctly stated, it was based on the kind of malware that had been used, but also on a pattern of targets supposedly associated with this group.
But, you know, I mean, once you look into the use of of APT 28, APT 29, you find that it's been abused by just about everybody involved in the whole politics of cybersecurity, because there's no consistent pattern that you can attribute to to a government outfit, a Russian government outfit that's associated with those two.
Some of the targets clearly are targets that would be appropriate to criminal hackers, not not to, you know, sort of government intelligence agencies.
So that that's just an important point to bear in mind.
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All right.
Now you talk about the reality winner chart.
She linked to the intercept in her story here.
What's up with that?
Yeah.
Well, you know, I thought it was important to deal with two things.
Not just a reality winner, which is the character who is a real person, apparently, who who leaked the NSA report of I guess it was May of 2017 to the intercept.
And this is a report that concluded that, in fact, the GRU had launched a fishing expedition in October, November of 2016 that was targeting an outfit, a commercial outfit in Florida that was involved in election related technology.
And they concluded that ultimately this had to do with a broader scheme that involved trying to reach various government offices that were involved in the election in Florida and other states.
But but as I point out in my story, there were serious problems with the intercept story.
They failed to inform the readers that the document that the NSA had issued that was they leaked that was leaked to them has a pictorial graph, a graphic that depicts the the various elements that they were piecing together to to make this case, which included both those facts or those findings that were based on.
Hard evidence, as well as those findings or conclusions that were simply the judgment of the analyst and the key link here that they make to the GRU is the judgment of an analyst.
It's not something that has any hard evidentiary basis.
They simply believe that it's likely that that the some unidentified organization of some sort that they hold to be linked to the GRU was the actual agent that carried out this set of fishing, fishing expeditions, as you as you might call it, efforts to get people to bite on fish.
Fishing emails, spear phishing emails, I should say.
And in fact, they did not have the real evidence to to back that up.
Furthermore, you know, there were inconsistencies as admitted by the NSA.
And in in that same chart, they they said that that there were other targets that the same that were associated with the same IP address that did not have the same M.O. that did not use the same techniques.
And so that's a pretty serious admission for them to make that that brings their judgment into further question.
And then there's finally the rather laughable point that the NSA admitted that the outfit that had carried out this spear phishing expedition had tried to send an email to the Samoan election office, the office of the elections in Samoa, which is not even a state.
It's they don't the people of Samoa.
I think it's 58000 people or potential voters can't even vote in national elections.
And there's absolutely no reason why anybody would be interested in trying to send a spear phishing letter to to the election office of Samoa.
So it doesn't make any sense whatsoever as a political election related effort.
It's it's clearly criminal criminal hackers.
And now you have a specific reference to the Mueller indictment of the GRU officers in here, too.
Right.
That's the other the other thing that I felt that I had to deal with, because the Mueller indictment, of course, is invested with with all kinds of authority and credibility now.
And and what the Mueller indictment did was to argue that they had the evidence linking the GRU to the to the hacking of elections because the because the what they called the GRU individuals, they named these two individuals.
And what they called the co-conspirators had erased.
Well, they had they had made some some inquiries on the Internet for certain information and then they had erased it.
And what what I found, you know, if you look carefully at the language of the of that part of the Mueller indictment, what they did was to conflate two very different things.
The co-conspirators, who they don't they don't name, they don't identify, which means the people who actually did the hacking did one thing.
They they undertook some some effort to erase something.
And the the people who they identify as the GRU people are said to have erased their efforts to get information on Republican organizations in the United States.
Now, that's something, of course, that the GRU would do.
They would, for intelligence purposes, want to, you know, look on the Web about Republican organizations in the United States.
But it doesn't give any evidence that they were involved in hacking election sites at all.
Those are two completely different things.
So it's a very clever use of language that's totally misleading.
You know, the the readers expected to think that that this shows that the two things were one and that they were working together, whereas, in fact, it's two very separate things.
So this is a tip off that they're trying to mislead the readers into believing that they had evidence of GRU involvement in this hacking of or or even targeting of election websites that they didn't really have.
Yeah, well, and then, OK, so you end your article with the bogus Washington Post story about the Russian attack on our electric grid.
You know, it's funny.
It is just like the case against Saddam Hussein, where it's like there's 25 stories and none of them add up to anything.
But there's 25 of them.
And so it sounds like maybe it's a lot.
So because the DHS has been extremely active over the last year, roughly, particularly 2018, in pushing a whole series of case studies where they claim they have reason to believe they have evidence or reason to believe that the Russian intelligence agencies are trying to compromise.
Somehow, various parts of the U.S. infrastructural collection of infrastructural supplies.
So this is this is their next bid for more power, essentially.
And that's what I'm suggesting here, that the DHS really needs to be viewed with much more skepticism, much more care than, of course, the media that we're subjected to in this country are are giving them.
I mean, the media are giving them a free pass to say whatever they want, essentially.
There's no questioning.
There's no investigation.
There's no nothing.
And I'm really seriously thinking about spending a lot of time doing my own investigation of these various case studies.
Yeah, well, you should.
You know, especially because, you know, this is just another one on the list.
This becomes part of this major rap against Russia.
And look at how ruthless these people are messing with our state election bureaus and whatever.
And then messing with can be vague.
Doesn't have to really mean anything.
But it's a pretty powerful talking point, I guess, if you're a Democrat.
Yeah, I mean, I think that, again, the the conflation process goes on constantly by DHS, as well as other people in the intelligence community.
And in this case, I have no doubt that, you know, there are efforts by intelligence agencies in Russia to to look into what's going on in the U.S.
In the U.S. infrastructure sectors, various sectors, as the United States does all over the world.
We do the same thing.
We use intelligence means of getting into the websites of various various infrastructures of major countries around the world, including China.
I mean, this is one of the things that we learned from the revelations that have been we've we've gotten over the past few years.
So, I mean, this is there's there's every reason to believe that that they're playing the same kinds of games in all of these cases that they did with the the so-called election hacks.
Hey, when they say that the Russians are doing this to disrupt our democracy or disrupt our faith in the system and the stability in the democracy in the way the thing.
Do you buy that at all?
That sounds just kind of made up to me like it's in place of a real motive.
But then again, that sounds like the kind of thing America would do to somebody else's country.
So maybe they're just projecting or maybe that really is accurate in some fashion.
Well, they didn't do enough, certainly in terms of this whole election website thing.
There is simply no evidence that the Russians tried to get into any websites that have to do with elections.
And, you know, if if they had done so, we would have a different set of we'd have a different kind of evidence.
Well, I was lumping in all the accusations against them.
But do you buy any of them about this whole 2016 scandal here?
Look, I mean, I have no doubt that Russian intelligence did, in fact, penetrate the DNC.
I mean, you know, that that would be standard operating procedure.
And as as Clapper himself said in whether it was late 2016, early 2017, he said, yeah, they did that.
That's the same thing we do every day.
In other words, wait a minute.
In other words, you don't have real strong reason to doubt that they would.
But you're not saying that based on any evidence that's been produced thus far.
Well, I mean, I think that the the the evidence presented that that they did, in fact, hack into the DNC is perfectly credible.
And I have no doubt that that they did do so.
And the question is, You mean the claims in the indictment or something else?
I'm talking about I'm talking about because the indictment itself really focuses primarily on the the transfer of the documents from the DNC to WikiLeaks.
And there, I think the path is much more complicated and more difficult to track.
And there are far more questions about that.
And and I'm not certain that that, you know, I don't think they've proven it.
I think that there's still questions that that have to be answered.
Whether we'll ever be able to answer them, I'm not sure.
So so I just say I'm sure that they did.
They did hack into the DNC.
They had a motive to to do what they're accused of doing in terms of of the the emails being sent on to to to WikiLeaks.
But there were others who had motivation as well and the opportunity to do it.
And the whole the question of who Guccifer 2 was is is not absolutely clear.
I think that there are still questions that can be asked about the Mueller indictment in that regard.
All right.
Well, I mean, that's kind of everything, isn't it?
Yes.
Well, it is.
Yes.
I mean, but in other words, when you say you don't doubt that the GRU had access to the DNC server in the way that Mueller describes, but you're saying, yeah, but so would have the British and the Chinese and the Israelis and anybody else who was there.
Governments, intelligence agencies and anyone else who is doing their job, basically private hackers who, you know, came out, came on very interesting documents that they could then have shopped around, contacted various people, let them know that they had them, including Republicans, for example.
And, you know, I just think even Clapper himself admitted in testimony before Congress that, you know, once you start talking about the path that was taken by the documents from the DNC to WikiLeaks, it's they had much less clear cut evidence about that.
And that's one of the reasons why I'm not so certain that the Mueller indictment can be relied upon to tell us what actually happened.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, it's no surprise, but I'm good to see you nailing it down.
The great debunker.
You have a new one coming out about North Korea sometime, don't you?
Well, I'm not working on North Korea actively at the moment.
I'm now working on a piece on the the permanent war complex, as I call it, and how it's evolved from the the old military industrial complex and how it's a danger to American security and how it all has to do with privatization and attendant ills.
In Israel.
Well, Israel is not a direct part of this piece, but, you know, that's another storyline.
All right.
I hear you.
All right, man.
Well, thanks very much, Gareth.
Appreciate it.
My pleasure.
Thanks, Scott.
That's the great Gareth Porter, everybody.
Manufactured Crisis.
The untold story.
I guess they changed that.
They updated it.
I've been saying it wrong all along for some period of time, apparently.
The untold story of the Iran nuclear scare.
How do you like that?
Manufactured Crisis by the great Gareth Porter.
And find what he writes at different places, truthout.org, consortiumnews.com, and of course, always at antiwar.com as well.
Original.antiwar.com slash Porter.
And we got the full archive going back at least 11 years.
I think, yeah, there would have been some stuff from 06, maybe before that, too.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
