American citizens nearly can’t avoid the simmering controversy over the Clinton emails. Not any that might be within them, mind you, but the controversy that they’ve been hacked and released via Wikileaks.
Which leaves me, with 35+ years experience in software, with the question – how do you verify these are the real deal, and not just the paranoid delusions of some smart folks?
Oh, there are ways, of course. The easiest is to obtain official access to the alleged source server and start verifying each email. Once you have that access, it’s not hard to verify quickly and accurately. Assuming, of course, that no encryption technology has been employed, that they haven’t been deleted.
And that you can gain that access. Suppose someone releases emails indicating a felony has been committed. Is this good enough reason for the issuance of a warrant permitting the local gendarmerie to seize and examine your computer? Beats me – but I’d be wondering if this was a fishing expedition involving a fictitious email, employed as an excuse to examine the contents of the email of some target.
So now we learn that Russia, so recently called upon by Mr. Trump to continue to hack the Democratic National Committee, has itself been hacked by a Ukrainian group named Cyber Hunta. NBC News reports:
A Ukrainian group calling itself Cyber Hunta has released more than a gigabyte of emails and other material from the office of one of Vladimir Putin’s top aides, Vladislav Surkov, that show Russia’s fingerprints all over the separatist movement in Ukraine.
While the Kremlin has denied the relationship between Moscow and the separatists, the emails show in great detail how Russia controlled virtually every detail of the separatist effort in the Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine, which has torn the country apart and led to a Russian takeover of Crimea.
And unlike the reported Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee, the Ukrainian hack reached deep into the office of the Russian president.
“This is a serious hack,” said Maks Czuperski, head of the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council (DFRL), which has searched through the email dump and placed selected emails on-line.
So what do we know? We know a Ukrainian group has released emails that show the Russians are responsible for the separatist movement in the Crimean region. But do we know they’re authentic? After all, this is the holy grail of Cyber Hunta.
Just as I wonder whether these supposed leaks of Clinton emails are authentic mail, or of someone’s fan fiction, I must grant equal skepticism towards the Ukrainian hack. I have no love for the current Russian government, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Cyber Hunta is honest in their assertions that this is, indeed, what it purports to be.
But where’s the supporting evidence? How do I know?
One problem is I know too much, as a software engineer, as to how these things are put together; and then again, I don’t know enough about the cleverness of the software engineers involved; and yet I’ve seen some purportedly clever people do some really stupid things, so again I know too much. Welcome to the roller coaster. Without more technical information, I’m sort of at sea here.
But long range, what does this portend for the citizen at large? To my sensibilities, either a procedure which guarantees the trustability of the source of the released material must be produced & publicized so that we can trust, say, Wikileaks – or the general citizen might be best advised to ignore these leaks as blatant attempts to manipulate public opinion.
With a general consensus to ignore such leaks, perhaps we can regain a sense of public equilibrium. They might become white noise, or they might disappear from public forums. Not that this espionage will stop – but espionage in the interests of swaying public opinion is a far different thing from espionage to acquire private information, such as chemical formulas. That has been going on since before alchemy came on the scene, and it’ll always continue.
But we’re at that queer moment in history, where the dangers of the leaks, the potential fallaciousness of the leaks, has not fully impacted us, and therefore long-term, nation-wide consensus on how to deal with such unverified leaks has yet been reached – and we’re left wondering just how these leaks about Clinton and Russia will impact each in the long run.
