Reddit Shuts Down AMA from Former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney
The central component of the allegation that the DNC leak was an inside job as opposed to a hack has been repeated by writers at Consortium News and by journalist Patrick Lawrence:<p>&gt; Key among the findings of the independent forensic investigations is the conclusion that the DNC data was copied onto a storage device at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack.<p>Here&#x27;s the article from Patrick Lawrence in 2017 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thenation.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;archive&#x2F;a-new-report-raises-big-questions-about-last-years-dnc-hack&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thenation.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;archive&#x2F;a-new-report-raise...</a>) and a quote:<p>&gt; “A speed of 22.7 megabytes is simply unobtainable, especially if we are talking about a transoceanic data transfer,” Folden said. “Based on the data we now have, what we’ve been calling a hack is impossible.” Last week Forensicator reported on a speed test he conducted more recently. It tightens the case considerably. “Transfer rates of 23 MB&#x2F;s (Mega Bytes per second) are not just highly unlikely, but effectively impossible to accomplish when communicating over the Internet at any significant distance,” he wrote. “Further, local copy speeds are measured, demonstrating that 23 MB&#x2F;s is a typical transfer rate when using a USB–2 flash device (thumb drive).”<p>I have two issues here:<p>1. The basis for this allegation is nonsense. Filesystem timestamps using local clocks are not a reliable indicator of transfer speed.<p>2. Back in 2017, I lived in Cedar Falls, Iowa. I was fortunate to live in a place with a municipal fiber optic internet connection, and I wrote to The Nation and to Patrick Lawrence and tweeted at them back then. I was able to get far in excess of 23 MB&#x2F;s using my residential internet connection to servers in Russia, from Iowa. Here&#x27;s a screenshot I took back then: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;AaronFriel&#x2F;status&#x2F;896072426143993856" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;AaronFriel&#x2F;status&#x2F;896072426143993856</a><p>I raised this with Patrick Lawrence, aka @thefloutist, on Twitter back then and the article in The Nation was never retracted or fact checked, and this absurd claim keeps being repeated.