Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server (at times kept in her own basement...) has obviously been a big story during this campaign -- and for a variety of obvious, yet stupid, reasons, the discussion has become ridiculously partisan. What people should be able to admit on all sides of the debate is that Clinton's use of a private email server was incredibly stupid and, at the very least, calls into serious question the judgment of whoever told her this was okay. It also, almost certainly, put serious information at risk of being exposed through hacks. But, earlier this year, the FBI came out and said that it didn't actually break the law. There was a bit of the old "high court, low court" to this whole setup, because you could see how someone with much less fame or status would be nailed to the wall by the DOJ if they wanted to put that person away.
Either way, the surprise of today is the new announcement by James Comey that the FBI is investigating some new emails that were apparently discovered in an "unrelated case" on "a device." There were a couple of hours of speculation on this, with gradual denials -- not the Wikileaks investigation, not the Clinton Foundation investigation -- until it was revealed that it was from the investigation into Anthony Weiner's sexting. Law enforcement seized devices belonging to both Weiner and his then wife (they've since filed for divorce), Huma Abedin, who is a close Clinton aide (and who also had an email account on the private Clinton server). Other reports have noted that the emails aren't ones that were withheld from the original investigation, so it's not an issue of withholding info, but could potentially reveal issues about the motivations and setup of the private server.
In political circles this is raising eyebrows, coming just 11 days before the election, in a campaign where Clinton's opponent, Donald Trump, has repeatedly pointed to her use of an email server as a reason that she should be in jail, and even promising to appoint a special prosecutor to go after her for this (which, uh, actually isn't how the President is supposed to use that power, but...). Comey's letter doesn't go into much detail, though reporters have been getting more and more details. The letter was sent to a variety of people in Congress, on key committees, including the heads of the Intelligence, Judiciary, Oversight and Homeland Security committees.
Dear Messrs Chairmen:
In previous congressional testimony, I referred to the fact that the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) had completed its investigation of former Secretary Clinton's personal email server. Due to recent developments, I am writing to supplement my previous testimony.
In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation. I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.
Although the FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant, and I cannot predict how long it will take us to complete this additional work, I believe it is important to update your Committees about our efforts in light of my previous testimony.
In a perfect world, this kind of story should lead to open discussions on better email technologies, email etiquette, encryption, over-classification and such. Instead, everyone's going to play political hacky sack with this one, with Clinton supporters arguing it's no big deal (though it is) and Trump supporters either feeling vindicated for earlier claims or arguing that the FBI failed to do its job properly before. This campaign has been nothing if not full of surprises.
Look, it's getting ridiculous that Hillary Clinton defenders keep insisting that the John Podesta emails released by Wikileaks are full of fakes and doctored content. With most other leaks, including the one of Colin Powell's emails, the victims (and, yes, they are victims) eventually admit that the leaked content is legit. Not so with the Podesta emails. But that's dumb. As Robert Graham points out, it's
totally possible to validate many of the emails. And they do validate.
Whether you like or dislike Wikileaks, whether you think Julian Assange is a wonderful or horrible person, whether you think Wikileaks is just a propaganda tool of Russia or a powerful force for transparency -- one thing you cannot say is that the organization has been caught releasing fake or doctored information. It (and Assange) do have a history of overhyping releases, or misrepresenting their significance. And Assange does seem to be pretty quick to jump on conspiracy theories that don't hold up under much basic scrutiny. But, to date, pretty much everything that Wikileaks has actually leaked has checked out as legit.
So it's been a bit bizarre watching people try to insist that the troves of John Podesta emails that Wikileaks has been releasing are somehow fake, doctored or manipulated. We recently wrote about Newsweek reporter Kurt Eichenwald going crazy insisting that he had proved that Wikileaks and the Russians teamed up to "manipulate" an email. Of course, the reality turned out to be that a young American part-time reporter for a Russian-owned news site, had simply misread a tweet and turned it into an article. No big conspiracy. No manipulation. And, certainly, none of that has anything to do with Wikileaks (amusingly, Eichenwald then deleted all his tweets claiming proof that Wikileaks was a part of this conspiracy, and apparently tried to silence the young reporter by telling him he'd try to get him a job elsewhere).
Perhaps even more ridiculous is DNC chair Donna Brazile trying to deny any information from any email released by Wikileaks, including one specific one that she sent, apparently revealing a CNN primary debate question to the Clinton campaign prior to the debate (Brazile worked as a commentator on CNN at the time). This video is absolutely cringeworthy, starting at about five and a half minutes into this video. Brazile tries to avoid answering the question about sending debate questions to the Clinton campaign, first barely feigning ignorance of the issue, and then insisting multiple times that the emails are fake/doctored/not verified, and insisting that she did not send the email in question.
Being interviewed by Megyn Kelly, here's how Brazile tries to claim that the emails are not real, but basically comes out with a word salad of nothing, rather than simply admitting that the email is legit.
MEGYN KELLY: You're accused of receiving a debate question whether a CNN town hall where they partnered with TV One that you had this question on March 12th, that verbatim, verbatim was provided by Roland Martin to CNN the next day. How did you get that question, Donna?
DONNA BRAZILE: Well, Kelly, as I play straight up and with you, I did not receive any questions from CNN.
KELLY: Where did you get it?
BRAZILE: First of all, what information are you providing to me that will allow me to see what you're talking about? Everybody's....
KELLY: You've got the Wikileaks showing you messaging the Clinton campaign with the exact wording of a question asked at the March 13th CNN TV One Townhall debate.
BRAZILE: Kelly, Kelly, Kelly. You know, as a Christian woman, I understand persecution, but I will not sit here and be persecuted. Because your information is totally false.
KELLY: I'm getting it from Podesta's email.
BRAZILE: What you're -- well, Podesta's e-mails were stolen. You're so interested and talking about stolen material, you're like a thief that wants to bring into the night the things that you found that was in the gutter. I'm not...
KELLY: Donna. CNN's Jake Tapper came out and said this was unethical. "Someone was unethically helping the Clinton campaign." He said "I love Donna Brazile, but this is very, very upsetting. My understanding is that the email..."
BRAZILE: I love CNN
KELLY: This is Jake Tapper: 'My understanding is that the e-mails came from Roland Martin or someone around Roland Martin." He said "this is very upsetting and troubling." That's your own colleague at CNN. It's not Megyn Kelly. Who gave you that question?
BRAZILE: Megyn, once again, I said it and I said it on the record and I'll say it on the record and I'll keep saying it on the record. I am not going to try to validate falsified information. I have my documents. I have my files. Thank God I have not had my personal e-mails ripped off from me and stolen and given to some criminals to come back altered. I have my records and files. And as i said repeatedly, CNN, in the 14 years I was associated with CNN, I've never received anything. If I had a blank piece of paper, that would basically be the end of this conversation. I never get documents from CNN. Period.
KELLY (eye roll): Your email to the Clinton campaign said 'sometimes I get the questions in advance.'
BRAZILE: Uh, ma'am. Y'know. You know what...
KELLY: And CNN is saying Roland Martin gave them to you. Or someone at TV One. And they were provided to Hillary before that town hall.
BRAZILE: Well anybody who knows me... and... and... and there are a number of your colleagues as well. They know me very well. I know how I play it. I know what I do before every debate. I know what I do before every show -- even this show. I do my homework. I communicate. I talk.
KELLY: I understand.
BRAZILE: But I just, once again, let you know that... as far as I know that... that... that CNN has never provided me with questions. Absolutely. Ever. Nada. Sorry.
KELLY: Well, when you said "from time to time I get the questions in advance," what were you referring to? Because in that email you offered the exact question that one of the moderators, Roland Martin, then proposed the next day.
BRAZILE: So. So. My, my, my reference back to you, ma'am, with all respect -- and I respect you greatly --
KELLY: And I respect you too.
BRAZILE: The... the... the validity of those emails -- if I can only tell you one things, because you know, this whole episode is under criminal investigation -- but I can just tell you one thing: a lot of those emails, I would not give them the time of the day. I've seen so many doctored emails. I've seen things that come from me at two in the morning, that I don't even send. There are several email addresses that I once used, and I'm so sorry that we... these have not been verified. This is... nobody will. This is...
KELLY: I got it.
BRAZILE: This is under investigation. And let me just tell you something. If there's anything that I have, I will share. I don't have an agenda to smear anybody...
KELLY: Alright. I've got to run because we have another guest waiting...
Okay, so, here's the problem. She did send the email. And it's verified. Graham proves it in his post. The trick is DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) signatures. DKIM was a system set up a while back to try to fight spam by cryptographically proving that the account that says it sent the mail actually sent the email in question. Not all email systems use DKIM, but hillaryclinton.com does use it, which is great for transparency, but bad for Donna Brazile.
Graham looked up that email in particular and found that it validates, using a Thunderbird add-on to check these things:
Downloading the raw email from WikiLeaks and opening in Thunderbird, with the addon, I get the following verification that the email is valid. Specifically, it validates that the HillaryClinton.com sent precisely this content, with this subject, on that date.
Let's see what happens when somebody tries to doctor the email. In the following, I added "MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN" to the top of the email.
As you can see, we've proven that DKIM will indeed detect if anybody has "doctored" or "falsified" this email.
Graham also offered one whole bitcoin to anyone who can forge an email that still validates correctly under this method to show his confidence that the emails are verified as actually sent as is, despite Brazile's wacky performance.
Of course, the Clinton campaign keeps insisting that the emails are doctored, but fails to show any proof. Here's the campaign's Chief Strategist, Joel Benenson, saying many are not authentic:
BENENSON: Well, first of all, I'll tell you something, I haven't spent a lot of time reading through WikiLeaks e-mails.
But I will tell you this, what we know is that many are not authentic. We know that this is a hack, 17 of Russians -- no, because these e-mails, we have no idea whether they are authentic or not or whether they've been tampered with once the Russians, which 17 American intelligence agencies say are responsible for these hackings, have been manipulated. I have seen things -- I'm not going to go into details --
(CROSSTALK)
STEPHANOPOULOS: But you're not suggesting that those are --
BENENSON: They may well be. I don't know. I know I've seen things that aren't authentic, that we know aren't authentic. And it's not surprising. What's ridiculous about this whole conversation is that 17 intelligence agencies have said the Russians are responsible for this. Donald Trump refuses to accept it, refuses to condemn them.
Benenson is full of shit. Again, whether or not you like or dislike Wikileaks, or question Assange's motives, there's a simple fact here: the documents it's released have not been shown to be false, faked, doctored or inauthentic at all. And it's possible to verify many of them, and some have even written scripts to verify them in bulk.
The Clinton campaign, as it so often does, is making things worse for itself by being stupid. It's trying to cover up legitimate information, and the coverup always comes across worse than the original actions. Just admit that these emails are legit and move on. Lying about it is not a good look, even if that's just the way things go these days in politics.
Hillary Clinton's position on encryption -- like so much of her tech policy -- has been kind of vague and wishy-washy. Saying things that possibly sound good, but could easily turn out to be bad depending on what is really meant. It's sort of the classical politician's answer on things, trying to appease multiple sides of an issue without getting fully pinned down on something that might come back to bite you later.
It started back in November of 2015, when Clinton gave a speech, which put her firmly into the "but Silicon Valley should nerd harder to figure out a backdoor" camp. A few weeks later, she doubled down on the "nerd harder" response in an interview with George Stephanopoulos:
STEPHANOPOULOS: How about Apple? No more encryption?
CLINTON: This is something I've said for a long time, George. I have to believe that the best minds in the private sector, in the public sector could come together to help us deal with this evolving threat. And you know, I know what the argument is from our friends in the industry. I respect that. Nobody wants to be feeling like their privacy is invaded.
But I also know what the argument is on the other side from law enforcement and security professionals. So, please, let's get together and try to figure out the best way forward.
A few weeks after that, she went even further, calling for a "Manhattan Project" on backdooring encryption. As we noted at the time, that made no sense and suggested a complete cluelessness about encryption and the issues related to it.
Now, with the release of the hacked emails from Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, we get to find out that Clinton's staff basically agreed with us that her statements on encryption were ridiculous, and felt that she should not support any effort to backdoor encryption.
It started with an internal discussion in response to an inbound request from Politico, where some of her staffers sought to avoid answering the question on backdooring encryption, while admitting internally the reality. Here were the "boiled down" talking points, presented by Ben Scott (a former State Dept official who also ran Free Press for a few years):
1-The bad guys could already get crypto -- we helped the good guys get it.
2-The Internet Freedom investments in these technologies were strongly bipartisan (and remain so).
Those are good points. I wish she'd actually said that, rather than what eventually came out.
The second email comes right after that "Manhattan Project" comment at the debate in the middle of December, and there her staffers discuss what a terrible analogy it is and how they should tell the tech industry that Hillary won't support backdoors, but instead supports using hacking/malware to spy on terrorists (which is a better solution all around, though it raises some other issues).
The email thread starts off with lawyer and Clinton (and former Obama) advisor Sara Solow first highlighting the flip-floppy nature of Clinton's comments, and then followed it up by noting that the "flop" side of (supporting backdooring encryption) is "impossible":
She basically said no mandatory back doors last night ("I would not want to go to that point"). In the next paragraph she then said some not-so-great stuff -- about there having to be "some way" to "break into" encrypted content-- but then she again said "a backdoor may be the wrong door."
Please let us know what you hear from your folks. I would think they would be happy -- she's certainly NOT calling for the backdoor now -- although she does then appear to believe there is "some way" to do the impossible.
Teddy Goff, a political strategist and the digital director for Obama for America during the 2012 campaign, responds, calling it "a solid B/B+" and suggests that someone tell Clinton never to use the Manhattan Project line again. He also highlights the point that Ben Scott had raised a month earlier, and that it was clear that Clinton did not understand, that there is open source encryption out there that anyone can use already, and any attempt to backdoor proprietary encryption won't stop anyone from using those other solutions. Finally, he suggests that having "pledged not to mandate backdoors" will be useful going forward.
i think it was fine, a solid B/B+. john tells me that he has actually heard nice things from friends of ours in SV, which is rare! i do think that "i would not want to go to that point" got overshadowed in some circles by the "some way to break in" thing -- which does seem to portend some sort of mandate or other anti-encryption policy, and also reinforces the the ideological gap -- and then, more atmospherically, by the manhattan project analogy (which we truly, truly should not make ever again -- can we work on pressing that point somehow?) and the cringe-y "i don't understand all the technology" line, which i also think does not help and we should avoid saying going forward.
speaking of not understanding the technology, there is a critical technical point which our current language around encryption makes plain she isn't aware of. open-source unencrypted messaging technologies are in the public domain. there is literally no way to put that genie back in the bottle. so we can try to compel a whatsapp to unencrypt, but that may only have the effect of pushing terrorists onto emergent encrypted platforms.
i do think going forward it will be helpful to be able to refer to her having pledged not to mandate a backdoor as president. but we've got to iron out the rest of the message. i actually do believe there is a way to thread the needle here, which i am happy to discuss; it requires us to quickly pivot from encryption to the broader issue of working with tech companies to detect and stop these people, and not getting into the weeds of which app they happen to use and that sort of thing.
Finally, Solow responds to Goff agreeing that the "some way in" line implies undermining encryption, but suggests that they quietly let the tech world know that they don't mean backdoors, but just mean hacking/malware:
That she says no backdoor, which is good, but then says we need a way in, and then the bad line about not understanding technology. The latter two points make the first one seem vulnerable.
But in terms of wanting a way to break in - couldn't we tell tech off the record that she had in mind the malware/key strokes idea (insert malware into a device that you know is a target, to capture keystrokes before they are encrypted). Or that she had in mind really super code breaking by the NSA. But not the backdoor per se?
There are some obvious concerns with the hacking/malware stuff, but it's at a very different level than breaking encryption. While it's still ridiculous that Clinton won't just come out and say that backdooring encryption gives us both less security and less privacy, it does appear that she has people on her team who get the basics here. That's at least moderately encouraging. It would be better if there were some stronger indication that Clinton is actually listening to them.
Let's jump right into this, because this post is going to be a bit on the wonky side. It's presidential silly season, as we have said before, and this iteration of it is particularly bad, like a dumpster fire that suddenly has a thousand gallons of gasoline dropped onto it from a crop-duster flown by a blind zombie. Which, of course, makes it quite fascinating to watch for those of us with an independent persuasion. Chiefly interesting for myself is watching how the polls shift and change with each landmark on this sad, sad journey. It makes poll aggregating groups, such as the excellent Project FiveThirtyEight, quite useful in getting a ten-thousand foot view as to how the public is reacting to the news of the day.
But sites like that obviously rely on individual polls in order to generate their aggregate outlooks, which makes understanding, at least at a high level, just how these political polls get their results interesting as well. And, if you watch these things like I do, you have probably been curious about one particular poll, the U.S.C. Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Daybreak poll, commonly shortened to the USC/LAT poll, which has consistently put out results on the Presidential race that differ significantly from other major polls. That difference has generally amounted to wider support for Donald Trump in the race, with specific differences in support for Trump among certain demographics. To the credit of those that run the poll, they have been exceptionally transparent about how they generate their numbers, which led the New York Times to dig in and try to figure out the reason for the skewed results. It seems an answer was found and it's gloriously absurd.
There is a 19-year-old black man in Illinois who has no idea of the role he is playing in this election. He is sure he is going to vote for Donald Trump. Despite falling behind by double digits in some national surveys, Mr. Trump has generally led in the USC/LAT poll. He held the lead for a full month until Wednesday, when Hillary Clinton took the nominal lead. Our Trump-supporting friend in Illinois is a surprisingly big part of the reason. In some polls, he's weighted as much as 30 times more than the average respondent, and as much as 300 times more than the least-weighted respondent.
Alone, he has been enough to put Mr. Trump in double digits of support among black voters. He can improve Mr. Trump's margin by 1 point in the national survey, even though he is one of around 3,000 panelists.
So, how does one person manage to skew a major national political poll in favor of one candidate to the tune of entire percentage points? Well, it turns out that a confluence of factors that include who is included on the poll and how often, how the poll respondents are weighted, and how this one particular voter fits into the demographic weighting converged to pretty much mess everything up. Let's start with the weighting.
The USC/LAT poll does things a bit differently than the other national polls. All polls rate respondents by demographics to correct for voting tendencies. The math can get gory and the NYT post does a good job of going through it, but you can think of it like this, for a very imprecise example: a poll respondent from the 18-35 demographic will be weighted less than a respondent from the 36-55 demographic, because the latter demo is more likely to actually show up and vote than the former. There is indeed some subjectivity in this, but the large demographic weighting drives the error margin down for the most part. But the USC/LAT poll deviates from the large-demo weighting and instead weights at very small demographic levels.
The USC/LAT poll weights for many tiny categories: like 18-21 year old men, which the USC/LAT poll estimates make up around 3.3 percent of the adult citizen population. Weighting simply for 18-21 year olds would be pretty bold for a political survey; 18-21 year old men is really unusual...When you start considering the competing demands across multiple categories, it can quickly become necessary to give an astonishing amount of extra weight to particularly underrepresented voters -- like 18-21 year old black men.
Which is how our single friend in Illinois became the poll's most weighted voter, being a 19 year old black man. The heavy weighting on tiny demographic categories caught him several times and, since he is voting for Trump, despite his demographic generally not voting for Trump, his heavily-weighted response skews things wildly. But that isn't all.
The USC/LAT poll does something else that's really unusual: it weights the sample according to how people said they voted in the 2012 election. The big problem is that people don't report their past vote very accurately. They tend to over-report three things: voting, voting for the winner and voting for some other candidate. They underreport voting for the loser. By emphasizing past vote, they might significantly underweight those who claim to have voted for Mr. Obama and give much more weight to people who say they didn't vote.
Which, again, catches our friend from Illinois. At nineteen, he obviously didn't vote in the last election. So his response is weighted even more. Using the poll's own data, the New York Times re-ran the poll using the same broad categories most other major polls used. When done, Hillary Clinton led in every single one of the iterations except for the one immediately proceeding the GOP convention. The difference between the poll's results as reported and what they would be with the normal weighted categories and the omission of the past vote weighting ranged form 1-4 points. In a political poll, that's enormous.
The final factor here is that the USC/LAT poll is a panel poll, which means that the same respondents are used each time the poll is run. So, our young black trump-voting man from Illinois got to skew these results nearly each and every time. The one time he failed to respond to the poll, Hillary Clinton suddenly led within it. As the NYT notes:
The USC/LAT poll had terrible luck: the single most overweighted person in the survey was unrepresentative of his demographic group. The people running the poll basically got stuck at the extreme of the added variance.
And, of course, the poll aggregators might include this poll, skewing the aggregate numbers as well. This isn't to say that all polls are skewed in the same manner. They aren't. The reason this is a story is because this poll is the outlier. But it is kind of fun to see how badly the sausage can be made if the methodology isn't in tune.
The New York Times editorial board speculates on where we're going from here following President Obama's not-doing-much-until-forced-to approach to surveillance and surveillance reform. Two candidates -- neither of them improvements -- are roughly a month away from one of them taking the nation's top office. As the Times' board points out, there's not much in it for anyone hoping the incoming White House will push forward with more reform efforts or better oversight.
The Republican nominee, Donald Trump, has not substantively addressed any of these issues. But he has proposed draconian, unconstitutional measures to keep the nation safe, including carrying out surveillance of mosques and creating a database of Muslims. This is offensive and outrageous. “We’re going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago,” he said last November.
Hillary Clinton has been more measured in discussing surveillance and encryption. Her campaign has suggested creating a national commission to explore legal and practical questions surrounding encryption. Mrs. Clinton has also said she would like to foster a more constructive relationship with Silicon Valley leaders, who have often been reluctant to collaborate with intelligence agencies. But she has been troublingly vague on specifics.
The Times is far too kind to Clinton. (No one really needs to rehash Trump's inability to form coherent sentences when discussing policy…) Clinton may be more measured, but what she has discussed suggests a return to form when Obama exits office. A return to GEORGE W. BUSH form, really -- basically another 4-8 years of post-2001 fear-based legislating, like her predecessor engaged in.
After the attack in Orlando, Clinton joined Trump in calling for expanded watchlists and denial of Constitutional rights to those placed on them. She has occasionally hinted at vague surveillance reform, but has also made it clear Snowden should hop on the next plane home and spend some time in prison. She has also suggested tech companies partner with the government to create backdoors in encryption -- but in an imaginary "safe" way that won't threaten their customers' security. And she's made it clear that deploying the military is a perfectly acceptable response to state-led cyberattacks.
Either way the election goes, the surveillance business will remain as usual. This is troubling, due to the fact that Section 702 -- which authorizes the NSA's internet backbone-based surveillance dragnet PRISM -- is up for renewal at the end of next year. With recent revelations about Yahoo's very proactive surveillance assistance generating some interesting questions about what the NSA can or can't do under this authority, it would be nice to have someone in the White House that would amplify these concerns, rather than help drown them out.
Yeah, so I get that it's political silly season, and people like to throw around all kinds of arguments of "bias" -- especially towards the media. I've been on the receiving end of those accusations, but for the most part, I think claims of media bias are silly and over-hyped. What's true, though, is that it's all too easy to be sloppy in reporting and to try to hype up a nothing story into a something story. Here's a story where no one comes out of it looking very good and the end result is a complete mess. It starts with Newsweek reporter Kurt Eichenwald. Last night I saw a marginally interesting story by Eichenwald about how a Russian government connected news website, Sputnik, misread an email leaked via Wikileaks from Hillary Clinton pal Sidney Blumenthal to campaign chief John Podesta. The email contained a link and full text to a much earlier Eichnwald story about Benghazi and Clinton. The Sputnik story incorrectly stated that the text in the email was by Blumenthal, and not by Eichenwald. It took one sentence out of this longer article, and falsely claimed that Blumenthal was admitting that the mess in Benghazi was "preventable." As Eichenwald notes, this is wrong:
Those words sounded really, really familiar. Really familiar. Like, so familiar they struck me as something I wrote. Because they were something I wrote.
The Russians were quoting two sentences from a 10,000-word piece I wrote for Newsweek, which Blumenthal had emailed to Podesta. There was no mistaking that Blumenthal was citing Newsweek—the magazine’s name and citations for photographs appeared throughout the attached article.
Okay. So that's actually kind of interesting. This Russian source was so eager to get a story out of the leaked emails that it misrepresented them -- either by accident or on purpose. That's marginally interesting, and certainly a fun thing to report on. What happened next is where things really go off the rails. While Sputnik pulled down its story once Eichenwald pointed out the error, a few hours later, Donald Trump mentioned the story at a rally as if it were true:
At a rally in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, Trump spoke while holding a document in his hand. He told the assembled crowd that it was an email from Blumenthal, whom he called “sleazy Sidney.”
“This just came out a little while ago,’’ Trump said. “I have to tell you this.” And then he read the words from my article.
“He’s now admitting they could have done something about Benghazi,’’ Trump said, dropping the document to the floor. “This just came out a little while ago.”
Okay. So we've still got a story here, and the story is this: holy shit, Donald Trump is willing to take very, very unreliable sources and broadcast them as fact. But that's not the story that Eichenwald started pushing. He went on something of a Twitter rampage making a bunch of claims that were not supported at all by the story, claiming variably that (1) the leaked emails were doctored (2) that Wikileaks was responsible for this (3) that the Russians and Wikileaks are in cahoots and (4) that Trump and the Russians are in cahoots. Now, any of these might actually be true. But none of them are actually supported by any actual evidence. Eichenwald just makes the logical leaps from what's written above, assuming that only the Russians could have given Trump that news -- ignoring that the story on Sputnik was getting passed around on social media (again: real story: Trump relies on unreliable sources for news). Here are just a few of Eichenwald's many, many tweets promoting his own article (and note how most have tons of retweets):
Note that he insists that the only way Trump could have gotten this is from the Russians. But that's clearly not true. The Sputnik story was up and lots of people saw it, and it was discussed on Twitter and elsewhere. It makes perfect sense that someone who saw it either works for the Trump campaign or knew someone there and sent it over. Again: that's the real story: Trump relies on sketchy sources found online.
This morning lots of people were pointing out the problems with Eichenwald's exaggerations about his story, including the Washington Post, NY Magazine and Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept. Greenwald's account highlights that many Hillary Clinton supporters keep saying that the Podesta leaks include faked emails, but no one has pointed out a single one.
Eichenwald, for his part, keeps insisting that the original Sputnik report involved a "manipulated" email, which implies that the email was faked or doctored. This is flat out wrong. The email was misrepresented. It's entirely possible that it was misrepresented on purpose to make Clinton look bad. But misrepresented is different than doctored. Here, let me prove it to you: Eichenwald misrepresented who could have possibly seen the Sputnik piece. He did not doctor that information.
I don't think -- as some are claiming -- that this is evidence of "media bias" on Eichenwald's part. I honestly think that he's guilty of the same thing that probably happened with Sputnik. He saw what seemed to be a really great story, and oversold it. Sputnik did the same. Both look bad.
And, honestly, almost everyone comes out of this looking bad. Eichenwald and Newsweek oversold a story. Various Clinton supporters look bad for buying the claims in the story without reading them or checking them carefully. Trump, of course, looks bad for relying on a Russian government site for unreliable news. And, basically, everyone looks at this story and sees from it what they want. Trump supporters can see more examples of media bias. Clinton supporters believe there's more support for the idea that Russia is supporting Trump. Wikileaks haters get more ammo claiming that the site is working with the Russians and/or that it's releasing fake emails (though it does not appear to be doing so). Again: many of these things may actually be true, but this story only supports the single claim of Trump relying on bad info.
But this is the state of things today. 2016 can't end fast enough. Hopefully 2017 is better.
We've noted a few times in the past our serious concerns about Hillary Clinton's hawkish and tone deaf views on cybersecurity, in which she wants the US to go on the offensive on cyberattacking, even being willing to respond to attacks with real world military responses. She seems to ignore the fact that the US has a history of being some of the most aggressive players on offense on such things (Stuxnet, anyone?), and doesn't seem to recognize how escalating such situations may not end well at all.
Of course, her opponent, Donald Trump has been totally incomprehensible on cybersecurity during the course of his campaign. There was his first attempt to respond to questions about cybersecurity in which it's not clear he understood the question, and started talking about nuclear weapons instead. Or the time he took a question on cybersecurity and answered by talking about the latest CNN poll. Or, of course, who can forget his debate performance on the topic, where his key insights were that his 10 year old was good with computers and a 400 lb. hacker may be responsible for the DNC hacks.
It appears that the Trump campaign finally decided that maybe Trump should say something marginally coherent on the subject, and sent him out earlier this week with a prepared teleprompter speech, which Trump actually managed to get through without going too far off script. And... it's basically the same kind of bullshit as Clinton -- pushing for more aggressive and offensive cyberattacks.
“I will also ask my secretary of Defense and joint chiefs to present recommendations for strengthening and augmenting our Cyber Command,” Trump said of his cybersecurity plan. “As a deterrent against attacks on our critical resources, the United States must possess, and has to, the unquestioned capacity to launch crippling cyber counterattacks, and I mean crippling. Crippling. This is the warfare of the future. America’s dominance in this area must be unquestioned, and today it’s totally questioned.”
There was also the kind of hilarious claim that the government has not made cybersecurity issues a priority, which is laughable if you've been paying attention to, well, anything in the "cybersecurity" policy space over the past few years. You could say that their priorities within that realm are screwed up. Or that the government seems to mainly use "cybersecurity" as a cloak to hide NSA surveillance efforts. But to argue that it's not been a priority is clearly false.
And, really, having our own side launching "crippling" cyberattacks (as with Clinton's plan) doesn't seem like the most effective plan. These kinds of things only escalate. Being an aggressor here seems particularly shortsighted. Taking out, say, China's internet, may show strength, but for what purpose? Will it really stop Chinese computer attacks on US infrastructure? Doubtful. Cybersecurity is mostly a defensive game, and it should remain that way. Encrypt everything possible. Disconnect critical infrastructure from the wider network wherever possible, and do everything to stop attackers from getting in, taking down, or mucking with systems.
This hawkish talk about offensive attacks in response to inbound online attacks is probably poll-tested to sound good as "being tough," but it's really stupid actual policy.
While politics isn't generally a topic we dive into around here, technology policy and issues certainly are. And, since presidential election cycles infect every conceivable topic like a wine stain spreading across your favorite couch, we've talked about the two mainstream candidates quite a bit recently. And I get the complaints from all sides against both candidates, but it's become somewhat breathtaking to watch Donald Trump build a campaign in large part on nonsensical and easily debunked conspiracy theories, such as how the planned internet governance transition will cede control of the web to China and Russia, or that our current sitting President might be a secret communist Muslim clay-person, but maybe not.
And, of course, there is the constant claim of victim-hood at the hands of that damned liberal establishment, which now apparently includes Google. Some background for you is in order. Over the summer, a really dumb video went viral after claiming to show that Google was manipulating autocomplete searches to keep any bad press out of the results for searches about Hillary Clinton. Compared with Bing, for instance, Google's autocomplete failed to finish off a search for "Hillary Clinton cr" with "Hillary Clinton crimes", instead completing as "Hillary Clinton Crimea." While your drunk uncle lost his goddamned mind over a conspiracy surely proven, Google chimed in to note that it specifically designed its autocomplete feature to keep disparaging results from anyone's name, not just Hill-Dog's. This was easily shown by putting in "Donald Trump cr", which likewise autocompleted as "Donald Trump Crimea."
And that really should have been the end of that. But, because Donald Trump's campaign isn't one to pass on a good chem-trails story, its candidate tried to deflect a general panning of his debate performance by repeating this already disproved accusation.
While discussing polling numbers at a rally in Wisconsin on Wednesday, Donald Trump offhandedly accused Google of manipulating search results in favor of rival Hillary Clinton, because hey, why not?
“The Google poll has us leading Hillary by two points nationwide,” said Trump. “And that’s despite the fact that Google’s search engine was suppressing the bad news about Hillary Clinton, how about that? How about that?”
I'm always reminded of a supposed quote from Michael Jordan back in the 90's when a reporter asked him why he didn't endorse political candidates, despite such an endorsement being so potentially powerful. His response was supposedly something along the lines of: "Because Republicans buy gym shoes, too." Imagine for a moment if Google, in the business of making money essentially by getting as many people as possible to use its search engine, decided to alienate roughly half of the American population by trying to dick around with search results for a political candidate. It would literally have to hate money to take such an action. Anyone think that Google hates money?
And, separately, I know that politicians generally lie, and have for quite some time, but it used to be that a candidate for president wouldn't simply be able to say something easily refuted and get away with it. I don't mean refuted in a murky way that can be debated. This conspiracy theory that Trump is continuing to raise has been debunked. It isn't a real thing. Yet he continues to repeat it. Some in the media may even call him out on the lie, but those that do will be accused of liberal bias and the whole thing will feed the playback loop.
This can't be a good method for picking our national leaders.
Did you come out of last night's debate feeling thrilled about your choices for president? No? What a surprise. Though there are fans on both sides declaring victory, most of the thinking/awake public saw what we expected: an intolerable buffoon babbling on one side, and the resultant lack of scrutiny for the hard-to-like career politician making worrying statements on the other. Perhaps nowhere was this clearer than on an issue of importance here at Techdirt: would you prefer Trump's directionless ramblings about "the cyber", or Clinton's coherent but terrifying overtures of war with Russia? Take your pick, America. And when you do, we've got a shirt for you.
There's less than a week left to order your Vote2016() gear. The campaign ends on Oct. 3rd so you can get it just in time for election day — and then it's gone for good!
Look at the mess that we're in. Look at the mess that we're in. As far as the cyber, I agree to parts of what secretary Clinton said, we should be better than anybody else, and perhaps we're not. I don't know if we know it was Russia who broke into the DNC.
She's saying Russia, Russia, Russia. Maybe it was. It could also be China, it could be someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds...
Look, anyone who refers to cybersecurity or cyberwarfare as "the cyber" is probably better off not discussing this. But Donald Trump, in last night's debate, felt compelled to further prove why he's in no position to be offering guidance on technological issues. And anyone who feels compelled to portray hackers as 400-lb bedroom dwellers probably shouldn't be opening their mouth in public at all.
With this mindset, discussions about what "the Google" and "the Facebook" are doing about trimming back ISIS's social media presence can't be far behind. Trump did note that ISIS is "beating us at our game" when it comes to utilizing social media. Fair enough.
But Trump's cybersecurity "plan" isn't actually a plan. What there is of it has to be compiled from a string of random, semi-related sentences. Apparently, the next cyberwar will pit tweens against 400-lb Russians...
I have a son. He's 10 years old. He has computers. He is so good with these computers, it's unbelievable. The security aspect of cyber is very, very tough. And maybe it's hardly do-able. But I will say, we are not doing the job we should be doing, but that's true throughout our whole governmental society. We have so many things that we have to do better, Lester and certainly cyber is one of them.
The problem isn't so much that Trump plainly has no idea what he's talking about or even the coherency to bluff his way through it. No one expects presidential candidates to be experts on every possible issue that might come up. But this has been the government's primary focus in recent years, and multiple high-profile hackings have only intensified that.
The problem is that Trump clearly has no interest in discussing these issues with those who can offer coherent, possibly-useful cybersecurity strategies. The more he speaks, the more he exposes his ignorance. Ignorance isn't unfixable. But Trump has done nothing over the past several months to close these (often significant) gaps in his knowledge. That's the scariest aspect of his presidential run -- the unwillingness to handle the boring but essential work of creating a platform composed of something more than half-formed thoughts and severely misguided jingoism that blames the rest of the world for somehow making America a worse country.
The mitigating factors are these:
Hillary Clinton's response may have been more coherent but hers suggests we should probably engage in more actual war than cyberwar to handle ISIS -- something's that gone oh so well for the past couple of decades. And she was ready to declare cyberwar on Russia after the DNC hacking, an idea that's not only stupid (seeing as the entity behind the hacking is still unknown) but an indication she'd be willing to wield government power to avenge embarassment.
Trump's power in office is likely to be far less than he obviously envisions it. Trump may be a rather extreme form of populist but those popular votes will be about as useful as Facebook likes when it comes to attempts to push his agenda past far more level-headed advisors and legislators.
Either way, voters are faced with choosing between the devil they sort of know and the devil other devils have been distancing themselves from for several weeks. In both cases, we're going to end up with a president who doesn't have the technical knowledge to deal with today's realities.
