Dukemont posted:

do you support the military action taken against southern slave owners?

Caros posted:

I'm going to break it down in a few hours when I get home, but I just want to point out the obvious.

Hillary Clinton's emails didn't get stolen you dumb gently caress. The emails that were stolen belonged to the DNC and John Podesta. You are so ill informed you don't even know that.

RealTalk posted:

You're right. I meant to write "John Podesta's emails" but I conflated the effect the stolen emails had on Hillary's campaign with the actual person who they belonged to.

I didn't type what I intended to. I'm not ill informed, I'm human and mistakes happen.

RealTalk posted:

They know this because the speed with which the data was downloaded exceeded the capacity of any known internet connection. The data was downloaded onto a thumb drive by someone who had physical access to the servers that the data was stored on.

Dukemont posted:

do you support the military action taken against southern slave owners?

quote:

We present to you herewith “A Plan for the Abolition of Slavery,” and solicit your aid to carry it into execution.

PAS.2 Your numbers, combined with those of the Slaves, will give you all power. You have but to use it, and the work is done.

PAS.3 The following self-evident principles of justice and humanity will serve as guides to the measures proper to be adopted. These principles are –

PAS.4 1. That the Slaves have a natural right to their liberty.

PAS.5 2. That they have a natural right to compensation (so far as the property of the Slaveholders and their abettors can compensate them) for the wrongs they have suffered.

PAS.6 3. That so long as the governments, under which they live, refuse to give them liberty or compensation, they have the right to take it by stratagem or force.

PAS.7 4. That it is the duty of all, who can, to assist them in such an enterprise.

PAS.8 In rendering this assistance, you will naturally adopt these measures.

PAS.9 1. To ignore and spurn the authority of all the corrupt and tyrannical political institutions, which the Slaveholders have established for the security of their crimes.

PAS.10 2. Soon as may be, to take the political Power of your States into your own hands, and establish governments that shall punish slaveholding as a crime, and also give to the Slaves civil actions for damages for the wrongs that have already been committed against them.

PAS.11 3. Until such new governments shall be instituted, to recognize the Slaves as free men, and as being the rightful owners of the property, which is now held by their masters, but which would pass to them, if justice were done; to justify and assist them in every effort to acquire their liberty, and obtain possession, of such property, by stratagem or force; to hire them as laborers, pay them their wages, and defend them meanwhile against their tyrants; to sell them fire-arms and teach them the use of them; to trade with them, buying the property they may have taken from their oppressors, and paying them for it; to encourage and assist them to take possession of the lands they cultivate, and the crops they produce, and appropriate them to their own use; and in every way possible to recognize them as being now the rightful owners of the property, which justice, if administered, would give them, in compensation for the injuries they have received.

PAS.12 4. To form Vigilance Committees, or Leagues of Freedom, in every neighborhood or township, whose duty it shall be to stand in the stead of the government, and do that justice for the slaves, which government refuses to do; and especially to arrest, try, and chastise (with their own whips) all Slaveholders who shall beat their slaves, or restrain them of their liberty; and compel them to give deeds of emancipation, and conveyances of their property, to their slaves

PAS.13 5. To treat, and teach the negroes to treat, all active abettors of the Slaveholders, as you and they treat the Slaveholders themselves, both in person and property.

PAS.14 Perhaps some may say that this taking of property, by the Slaves, would be stealing, and should not be encouraged. The answer is, that it would not be stealing; it would be simply taking justice into their own hands, and redressing their own wrongs. The state of Slavery is a state of war. In this case it is a just war, on the part of the negroes – a war for liberty, and the recompense of injuries; and necessity justifies them in carrying it on by the only means their oppressors have left to them. In war, the plunder of enemies is as legitimate as the killing of them; and stratagem is as legitimate as open force. The right of the Slaves, therefore, in this war, to take property, is as clear as their right to take life; and their right to do it secretly, is as clear as their right to do it openly. And as this will probably be their most effective mode of operation for the present, they ought to be taught, encouraged, and assisted to do it to the utmost, so long as they are unable to meet their enemies in the open field. And to call this taking of property stealing, is as false and unjust as it would be to call the taking of life, in just war, murder.

PAS.15 It is only those who have a false and superstitious reverence for the authority of governments, and have contracted the habit of thinking that the most tyrannical and iniquitous laws have the power to make that right which is naturally wrong, or that wrong which is naturally right, who will have any doubt as to the right of the Slaves (and those who would assist them) to make war, to all possible extent, upon the property of the Slaveholders and their abettors.

paragon1 posted:

If we had internet forums in the 1850s RealTalk would be posting threads about the dangers of those extremist abolitionists,

RealTalk posted:

Personally, I support the plan drafted by the abolitionist (and individualist anarchist) Lysander Spooner.

A snippet:


The entire thing is worth reading:

http://praxeology.net/LS-PAS.htm


Lysander Spooner opposed Abraham Lincoln's waging of the Civil War. He saw the Republican Party as being hypocritical on the slavery issue. He understood that Lincoln did not fight the war to end slavery, he fought the war to preserve the Union.

Therefore abolitionists like Spooner simultaneously defended the right of the States to secede from the Union while advocating an immediate end to the institution of slavery.

Given the horrendous violence that was inflicted upon blacks after nominal emancipation, during Reconstruction and through the early part of the 20th century, it is dubious that a Civil War was the best method of emancipation.

The late, great Lincoln historian Lerone Bennett Jr. did some tremendous historical work on Abraham Lincoln.

He was interviewed on C-SPAN to discuss his book "Forced Into Glory". It's well worth watching:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?158187-1/forced-glory

Polygynous posted:

praxeology.net

are you fuckin kidding me

RealTalk posted:

I would suspect that you would never overlook such rank "bigotry", regardless of the other merits of the person, or the fact that they would never impose their personal views on others. Further, you'd probably excoriate me for even associating with such a person even if I was only associating with them based on other areas where we agree.

Babylon Astronaut posted:

I looked this up, because it sounded dumb as hell. They said it was uploaded at 20mbps, a speed unheard of in these modern times. Then I went ahead and checked my own internet speed:

Oh. It is dumb as hell.

RealTalk posted:

After all this time, there has been no actual evidence produced to verify the core claims about collusion.

Doctor Spaceman posted:

https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/884789418455953413

treasured8elief posted:

my favorite part was page 4 https://twitter.com/donaldjtrumpjr/status/884789839522140166

RealTalk posted:

Sorry, you're the dumb one.

Citing an article in The Nation:

"On the evening of July 5, 2016, 1,976 megabytes of data were downloaded from the DNC’s server. The operation took 87 seconds. This yields a transfer rate of 22.7 megabytes per second.

These statistics are matters of record and essential to disproving the hack theory. No Internet service provider, such as a hacker would have had to use in mid-2016, was capable of downloading data at this speed."

https://www.thenation.com/article/a-new-report-raises-big-questions-about-last-years-dnc-hack/

MegaBYTES are not the same as megaBITS.

Your 100 mbps download speed is at the very high end of what's available in 2018, but you'd still only be able to download 11.92 megabytes in a second.

The hack allegedly took place in 2016. And the hackers were in Russia. The internet speed that the Russian hackers would need to have to download the data in the time reported would be between 200 and 300 mbps. And this is a best case scenario. Hacking a computer system halfway around the globe, you are highly unlikely to be able to download the contents at your maximum potential speed.

No Russian hacker would have been able to remotely hack the DNC server and download the contents at this speed in 2016.

Polygynous posted:

did jrod gently caress a watermelon? we may never know.

Caros posted:

Lol, he got perma'd while I was in the movie? The gently caress did you guys do?

R. Guyovich posted:

i think the first day he started posting his identity was confirmed

figured it would be fun to watch him dig his own grave

Polygynous posted:

did jrod gently caress a watermelon? we may never know.

WampaLord posted:

Good night, sweet prince

Ratoslov posted:

RIP. Rest In Permaban.

Grace Baiting posted:

I am glad I was here with all of you, thread. Here at the end of Jrodefeld 2: RealTalk Harder.

jrodefeld will return in...
Live and Let Die

2020

WampaLord posted:

Caros posted:

Could we let him keep posting under condition that he remains in the quarantine zone? He is like a fun retarded puppy.

Weatherman posted:

Apparently the string and bubblegum that these dead gay forums run on no longer supports training people to specific threads. It's why idiot pissbabby zaurg still has free run of BFC instead of being confined to his trainwreck () of a thread.

R. Guyovich posted:

i think the first day he started posting his identity was confirmed

figured it would be fun to watch him dig his own grave

Babylon Astronaut posted:

I can't be the only one comforted by there only being one jrod. Well, 2, counting the cybernetic one.

RealTalk posted:

Are you familiar with the work of Ray McGovern and Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity? Forensic evidence of the big event (theft of Hillary Clinton's emails) prove that it wasn't a hack, it was a leak by an insider. They know this because the speed with which the data was downloaded exceeded the capacity of any known internet connection. The data was downloaded onto a thumb drive by someone who had physical access to the servers that the data was stored on.

After all this time, there has been no actual evidence produced to verify the core claims about collusion. The goalposts keep moving.

These two articles by Daniel Lazare sum up the situation quite well:

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/05/18/making-excuses-for-russiagate/

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/05/31/spooks-spooking-themselves/


I also think Glenn Greenwald has been excellent on this issue for a couple of years now.

https://theintercept.com/greenwald/

There really is nothing to this story. It's extremely dangerous on multiple levels. We don't need to create a new Cold War and torpedo any possibility of rapprochement with Russia over some bullshit accusations that are fictitious.

If you had asked me before the election to tell you the best thing about Trump's platform, I'd say it was his stated intention to get along with Putin and ease tensions over Syria.

This was the single issue that prompted me to vote for Jill Stein.

Stein said this right before the election:

"“Under Hillary Clinton, we could slide into nuclear war very quickly from her declared policy in Syria. So I won’t sleep well at night if Donald Trump is elected, but I sure won’t sleep well at night if Hillary Clinton is elected. Fortunately, we have another choice other than these two candidates, who are both promoting lethal policies. But on the issue of war and nuclear weapons, and the potential for nuclear war, it is actually Hillary’s policies which are much scarier than Donald Trump …”

Since avoiding a nuclear conflict with Russia trumps (no pun intended) all other considerations, I thought Jill Stein was the only candidate who understood the grave seriousness of the situation and the danger of escalating conflict with Russia.

quote:

Editor’s note, 9/1/2017: For more than 150 years, The Nation has been committed to fearless, independent journalism. We have a long history of seeking alternative views and taking unpopular stances. We believe it is important to challenge questionable conventional wisdom and to foster debate—not police it. Focusing on unreported or inadequately reported issues of major importance and raising questions that are not being asked have always been a central part of our work.

This journalistic mission led The Nation to be troubled by the paucity of serious public scrutiny of the January 2017 intelligence-community assessment (ICA) on purported Russian interference in our 2016 presidential election, which reflects the judgment of the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA. That report concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally ordered the hacking of the DNC and the dissemination of e-mails from key staffers via WikiLeaks, in order to damage Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. This official intelligence assessment has since led to what some call “Russiagate,” with charges and investigations of alleged collusion with the Kremlin, and, in turn, to what is now a major American domestic political crisis and an increasingly perilous state of US-Russia relations. To this day, however, the intelligence agencies that released this assessment have failed to provide the American people with any actual evidence substantiating their claims about how the DNC material was obtained or by whom. Astonishingly and often overlooked, the authors of the declassified ICA themselves admit that their “judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.”

That is why The Nation published Patrick Lawrence’s article “A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year’s DNC Hack.” The article largely reported on a recently published memo prepared by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), which argued, based on their own investigation, that the theft of the DNC e-mails was not a hack, but some kind of inside leak that did not involve Russia.

VIPS, formed in 2003 by a group of former US intelligence officers with decades of experience working within the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and other agencies, previously produced some of the most credible—and critical—analyses of the Bush administration’s mishandling of intelligence data in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The most recent VIPS memo, released on July 24, whatever its technical merits, contributes to a much-needed critical discussion. Despite all the media coverage taking the veracity of the ICA assessment for granted, even now we have only the uncorroborated assertion of intelligence officials to go on. Indeed, this was noticed by The New York Times’s Scott Shane, who wrote the day the report appeared: “What is missing from the public report is…hard evidence to back up the agencies’ claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack…. Instead, the message from the agencies essentially amounts to ‘trust us.’”

As editor of The Nation, my purpose in publishing Patrick Lawrence’s article was to make more widely known the VIPS critique of the January ICA assertions, the questions VIPS raised, and their counter-thesis that the disseminated DNC e-mails resulted from a leak, not a hack. Those questions remain vital.

Subsequently, Nation editors themselves raised questions about the editorial process that preceded the publication of the article. The article was indeed fact-checked to ensure that Patrick Lawrence, a regular Nation contributor, accurately reported the VIPS analysis and conclusions, which he did. As part of the editing process, however, we should have made certain that several of the article’s conclusions were presented as possibilities, not as certainties. And given the technical complexity of the material, we would have benefited from bringing on an independent expert to conduct a rigorous review of the VIPS technical claims.

We have obtained such a review in the last week from Nathan Freitas of the Guardian Project. He has evaluated both the VIPS memo and Lawrence’s article. Freitas lays out several scenarios in which the DNC could have been hacked from the outside, although he does not rule out a leak. Freitas concludes that all parties “must exercise much greater care in separating out statements backed by available digital metadata from thoughtful insights and educated guesses.” His findings are published here.

We have also learned since publication, from longtime VIPS member Thomas Drake, that there is a dispute among VIPS members themselves about the July 24 memo. This is not the first time a VIPS report has been internally disputed, but it is the first time one has been released over the substantive objections of several VIPS members. With that in mind, we asked Drake and those VIPS members who agree with him to present their dissenting view. We also asked VIPS members who stand by their report to respond.

In presenting this follow-up, The Nation hopes to encourage further inquiry into the crucial questions of how, why, and by whom the DNC e-mails were made public—a matter that continues to roil our politics. We especially hope that other people with special expertise or knowledge will come forward.

—Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher

quote:

Background: This document provides an independent technical review of statements made in Patrick Lawrence’s article “A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year’s DNC Hack” that appeared on The Nation on August 9, 2017. Claims made in the article were built upon a digital forensic analysis published by a pseudonymous researcher named “the Forensicator” and a memo published by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). In addition, related to documents provided by “Guccifer 2.0,” there was also a review of information provided by Adam Carter. The focus of the Forensicator’s analysis was on the NGP/VAN file archive, distributed by WikiLeaks, in relation to security compromises of computing resources managed by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 2016.

This independent review was done at the request of The Nation and was undertaken without compensation of any kind.

Relevant Experience: I have developed security and privacy-focused software for enterprise and mobile communications platforms and services for nearly 20 years. I have also acted as a technical resource for a variety of targeted nonprofit activist organizations and communities for 15 years. These groups have faced some of the most sophisticated adversaries in the world, who have, on many occasions, successfully executed attacks against them. Through malicious software, remote-access trojans, and e-mail-link phishing attacks, the private data and communications of these communities have been compromised. The most well-known of these incidents are GhostNet, the targeted attacks on Google originating from China, and the use of Android malware against Tibetan activists.

Summary Findings: The work of the Forensicator is detailed and accurate. There are no significant errors in the specific findings, relating to the analysis of time stamps and calculations related to digital-transfer speeds (also known as “throughput”) between storage drives or over a network connection. The Forensicator has worked carefully with the limited set of data available, providing the means necessary for anyone to reproduce the work and analysis.

It is very important to note the set of evidence considered within the Forensicator’s analysis and the subsequent memo and articles based on his work. There are only documents and file archives that purport to have been extracted from DNC storage in 2016 along with the metadata contained within them. The metadata includes “Last Modified” timestamps at various levels of time resolutions (milliseconds, nanoseconds) that also include time-zone information.

Otherwise, there are no logs available that would provide an audit trail of network or system activity. There is no public copy of malicious software found on a targeted system that can be decompiled, reverse engineered, and analyzed. There is no information about where or how the extracted files were stored, what the operating systems involved were, or what the local, co-located, or hosted network configuration and speed might have been.

Most of this document focuses on the findings related to throughput. It also includes a brief set of findings related to the issue of revision save identifiers (RSIDs) and their role in tracking the edit history of word-processing documents.

Time Gaps and Throughput: The Forensicator proposes that all the files in the archive were copied in a single batch operation, and that time gaps in the file and archive metadata indicate that some copied files were not included in the final public archive. By removing the time those missing files would have taken to be copied from the total difference of time from newest to oldest in the archive, the Forensicator arrives at a specific total transfer time of 87 seconds. By then dividing the total size of the archive by that time, he arrives at the calculation of 23 megabytes per second (the amount of megabytes of data that could be transferred over a network or between storage drives per second).

In a recent comment, the Forensicator simplified his throughput theory by reducing the set of files the time estimate is generated from: “There is a series of files and directories that have no time gaps: it includes some top-level files and the FEC directory. The total size is 869 MB, which is 40% of the total. Using only the earliest last mod time and the latest in that series of files, the total elapsed time is 31 seconds. The transfer rate for those files works out to 28 MB/s.”

Nontechnical readers can be forgiven for not firmly grasping the difference between megabytes per second and megabits per second. The overall point of this portion of the analysis was to understand the kind of digital transfer speeds that were utilized by the adversary when extracting the files from the DNC computing resources. The Forensicator ultimately only provides a “right ballpark” number of 23 megabytes per second; that is enough to simply state that a high amount of sustained throughput was utilized during the copying of the files provided. Twenty-three megabytes per second (MB/s) translates to roughly 184 megabits per second (Mb/s).

While most home-network Internet service providers in the United States theoretically offer 100-megabits-per-second download speeds (and some such as Google Fiber offer higher), they rarely reach that full speed and definitely not speeds of up to 184Mb/s. However, that throughput could be achieved by a variety of other digital-communication configurations: a high-speed business-grade Internet service provider, an intra-office local area network, communication between servers within a commercial cloud provider or between high-availability data centers, or over a universal serial bus (USB) connection to an external storage device.

Claims Without Data: Lawrence’s article makes the following statement: “On the evening of July 5, 2016, 1,976 megabytes of data were downloaded from the DNC’s server. The operation took 87 seconds. This yields a transfer rate of 22.7 megabytes per second. These statistics are matters of record and essential to disproving the hack theory.”

The VIPS memo makes the following statement: “July 5, 2016: In the early evening, Eastern Daylight Time, someone working in the EDT time zone with a computer directly connected to the DNC server or DNC Local Area Network, copied 1,976 MegaBytes of data in 87 seconds onto an external storage device. That speed is much faster than what is physically possible with a hack.”

The only accurate portion of these statements, backed by metadata from the files and archive, is the total size of 1,976 megabytes. As stated before, the transfer time of 87 seconds is an informed theory by the Forensicator, and the 22.7-megabytes-per-second transfer rate is built upon that theory, along with some other educated guesses. While the “Last Modified” value of the files do indicate a copy operation occurred on July 5, 2016, and while the time zone does indicate the computing resources participating in the copy were set to Eastern Standard Time, there is no metadata showing they were downloaded from any specific server, on any specific network, or in any specific geographic location. Finally, the claim that 22.7 megabytes per second is “much faster than what is physically possible with a hack” needs to be addressed in greater depth.

Many Ways to 23 Megabytes per Second: Let us consider the “remote hacker” in this situation. The adversary in a remote intrusion can be physically located nearly anywhere in the world. They can be multiple people working in coordination, in control of a vast amount of physically diverse computing resources through vast networks of compromised machines (also known as “botnets”). They can also utilize a wide variety of network communication tunnels, proxies, and virtual private networks to mask their traffic and true network address. If this remote adversary was attempting to directly copy data from the compromised target server to their actual physical location, a very difficult-to-achieve high sustained throughput would be required to match the time-stamp metadata in the files.

But if the remote adversary was directly downloading the files from the target server to a temporary cloud server or otherwise compromised third-party server within close network proximity, that throughput speed would be possible to achieve. The cloud server could have been provided by a system like Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services (AWS), which provide computing resources in the Eastern United States. Creating disposable server instances on cloud services like AWS is easy, cheap, and achievable with relative anonymity. The adversary’s remote-control connection to the cloud could have been slowed by multiple hops through tunnels and VPNs, but the connection between the cloud server itself and the target server need not be.

Another scenario that would more precisely match the 23-megabytes-per-second transfer rate is that of an end-user workstation on the local area network being compromised by a remote-access Trojan (RAT). This scenario has also been called “the local pivot.” The compromise would occur through an e-mail-phishing or document-attachment malware attack on a staff member operating the workstation. These attacks are extremely common and easy to execute. RATs provide full “remote control” over an infected target system. Data exfiltration via phished malware is something that has been happening for at least a decade, as proven by the 2009 GhostNet attack against the Tibetan government in exile and others.

If the attack is successful, the RAT would run on the internal workstation, which was likely running Windows 7, with a primary disk formatted as NTFS and another local storage disk formatted in FAT32. The specifics of the file-system formats matter when it comes to matching the format of time stamps analyzed by the Forensicator. This machine would have been connected to the local area network and would have had access to a file-sharing server (likely “Samba” or Windows SMB-based) from which the documents were copied. The RAT would utilize the authenticated user it compromised to invisibly access the files over the local area network, copy them in bulk to the local machine at 23 megabytes per second, and package them into an archive for remote transfer. The metadata matching the Forensicator’s analysis would have been fully generated at this point. The final copy to the remote adversary’s source machine could happen at any speed.

These are just two scenarios that could generate the file archive necessary to match the Forensicator’s findings. They are as much based on informed theories and educated guesses as the scenarios proposed by the Forensicator, the VIPS memo, and Lawrence’s article. While some may feel the simplest answer is always the most likely, the two alternate scenarios described above are common enough that they should be considered plausible. In either scenario, the adversary need neither be a state actor nor require an unusual amount of resources.

The Forensicator’s Leaker Boot-Drive Theory: Another way to reach the 23-megabytes-per-second speed is through a mass copy of files either from a local machine’s hard drive or a connected local network file server, such as in the RAT scenario, to an attached USB thumb or “flash” drive. This is the method proposed by the Forensicator in his analysis: “A Linux OS may have been booted from a USB flash drive and the data may have been copied back to the same flash drive, which will likely have been formatted with the Linux (ext4) file system.”

This last step is necessary to the leaker boot-drive theory—rather than just a standard drag-and-drop of files into an attached USB—because the Forensicator’s analysis of the metadata time-stamp changes shows that the copy operation was done by a “cp” command-line call typical of a Linux system. It is important to note that it is unclear why the alleged internal leaker would need to reboot into Linux in this manner if the leaker already had authorized access to the system and files in question. Additionally, necessitating the leaker to reboot into Linux raises other difficulties. If the documents were stored on a network file share, access to it would be secured and require authorized credentials. If the machine is rebooted out of Windows and into Linux, then there is no authenticated user on the machine. The alleged leaker’s Linux OS would need authenticated credentials in order to access the server file share. This means that there would be a record of the authenticated access on the target server, or of a compromised access from an internal network source.

The final complexity with the local-leaker theory is that the 23-megabytes-per-second rate is based on an assumption that the files are on the local machine or on a server in the local area network. If the argument that 23 megabytes per second would not be possible by a remote adversary is the key finding, then the local leaker would also have to have that level of throughput available. The target server, then, would need to be physically on site in the building—and not hosted in a remote data center. If the files were stored remotely “in the cloud,” then the same criticism of “it is not possible to get those speeds” would come into play, as the local desktop with the booted Linux OS would now essentially be a remote hacker’s PC.

Unfortunately, as stated at the beginning of this review, there has been little information shared about the location and configuration of networks, servers, and other DNC infrastructure.

On “Russian Fingerprints”: In a timeline on the g-2.space site, Adam Carter provides this entry for June 15, 2016:š
“Someone choosing to adopt the name of hacker recently in the news (‘Guccifer’, whom [sic] was in court the previous month), steps forward, calling himself Guccifer2.0 and claiming responsibility for the hack. He affirms the DNC statement and claims to be a source for Wikileaks. The first 5 documents he posts are purposefully tainted with ‘Russian Fingerprints’ and the first of those documents just so happens to be the ‘Trump Opposition Research’ the DNC announce on the previous day.”

The claim regarding “Russian Fingerprints” concerns a number of things, including the name the document author was set to, the type of keyboard used to edit the comments, and the existence of shared language style settings in multiple documents. It is accurate that the documents provided by “Guccifer 2.0” all contain the same revision-save identifier (RSID) related to a Russian-language style change.

The existence of identical revision-save identifiers within a Microsoft Word or Rich Text Format document indicates that the set of documents was created from a shared source. This shared lineage can occur when starting with a single formatted document template, or it can occur when copying and pasting a piece of content into multiple files. As discussed in this article [PDF], RSIDs can be used to detect plagiarized academic papers. Inspecting RSIDs can detect if students copy from each other, or from a previously submitted paper from an earlier year, for example. If multiple documents contain the same RSID, it means they have a shared lineage. It could mean they all came from one document that was copied and pasted into three documents. It could also mean that a small piece, say a header or appendage text, was copied from one document into the others. There are many ways RSIDs can end up being shared between multiple documents.

As in the case of the Forensicator’s throughput analysis, there is a kernel of accuracy in the “Russian Fingerprints” theory backed by the metadata in the documents. The documents provided by “Guccifer 2.0” show that they were created or edited through a process that caused them to have, in some small part, a shared document lineage. This lineage included markers related to encoding of data in the Russian language.

There is nothing in the metadata, however, to indicate the motivations of “Guccifer 2.0” or whoever created these modified documents. The fact that the documents provided were named with simple numbers in a sequential order (1.doc, 2.doc, etc.) could indicate that “Guccifer 2.0” was attempting to curate and edit content and not simply dumping exact copies of the same documents provided elsewhere. The fact that the documents were also saved as Rich Text Format shows that there was an attempt to format files in a “clean” state, and not simply share the original source files.

Conclusion: Good-faith efforts to parse the available data to provide insight into the unlawful extraction of documents from the DNC in 2016 are admirable and necessary. All parties, however, must exercise much greater care in separating out statements backed by available digital metadata from thoughtful insights and educated guesses. Walking nontechnical readers down any narrative path that cannot be directly supported by evidence must be avoided. At this point, given the limited available data, certainty about only a very small number of things can be achieved.