
Reddit Shuts Down AMA from Former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney - jules-jules
https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/iggp4z/reddit_shuts_down_ama_from_former_nsa_technical/
======
AaronFriel
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:

> 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.

Here's the article from Patrick Lawrence in 2017
([https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/a-new-report-
raise...](https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/a-new-report-raises-big-
questions-about-last-years-dnc-hack/)) and a quote:

> “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/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/s is a typical transfer rate when using a USB–2 flash device
> (thumb drive).”

I have two issues here:

1\. The basis for this allegation is nonsense. Filesystem timestamps using
local clocks are not a reliable indicator of transfer speed.

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/s using my residential internet connection to
servers in Russia, from Iowa. Here's a screenshot I took back then:
[https://twitter.com/AaronFriel/status/896072426143993856](https://twitter.com/AaronFriel/status/896072426143993856)

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.

~~~
nickysielicki
The argument isn't that 23MB/s is so outrageously fast that it must be from a
USB drive and couldn't be from the internet. The argument is that 23 MB/s is a
peculiar number because it is so close to USB 2 max throughput (480Mbit in
spec, but practically closer to 280Mbit due to bus access overhead and
underlying storage limitations.) It's not at all unreasonable to expect that a
USB2 mass storage device would cap out around there for write speeds on a
larger USB 2 flash drive.

What's more relevant is the jitter on the timestamps. IF it was just an
average of 23MB/s, I'd agree with you. But what I suspect is that it's
sustained 23MB/s with little variation.

Putting aside wild theories about the timestamps being intentionally modified
to represent a USB transfer, a sustained 23MB/s with no variation is awfully
characteristic of a USB transfer.

~~~
AaronFriel
This is again absurd.

You have simply regurgitated a series of numbers without evidence. Meanwhile:

The Mueller report and grand jury indictments against Russian state actors,
the intelligence community's public statements, and the bipartisan assessment
of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence all dispute these coincidences.

Your numbers do not make sense. You write 480mbps, then you write 280mbps, but
23MB/s is 183mbps. It's also a perfectly reasonable sustained speed to get for
a file transfer over the internet!

As Patrick Lawrence's source described:

> “Transfer rates of 23 MB/s (Mega Bytes per second) are not just highly
> unlikely, but effectively impossible to accomplish when communicating over
> the Internet at any significant distance,”

This is obviously false, obviously disinformation, obviously wrong. Anyone
could prove it wrong in 2017, I did, and I emailed, wrote, and tweeted at
Patrick Lawrence and The Nation in 2017 and it was never retracted. It doesn't
belong in any reporting, period, let alone reporting on the hack of the DNC
servers.

~~~
nickysielicki
> Your numbers do not make sense. You write 480mbps, then you write 280mbps,
> but 23MB/s is 183mbps.

There's a series of bottlenecks. The spec bottleneck is 480mbit, but it's
further constrained by bus access to something like 280mbit, which is further
constrained by the underlying storage medium to something in the ballpark of
20MB/s to 30MB/s. It depends on the particular flash chip in the device. Try
it yourself with a handful of older usb2 drives and see.

> > “Transfer rates of 23 MB/s (Mega Bytes per second) are not just highly
> unlikely, but effectively impossible to accomplish when communicating over
> the Internet at any significant distance,”

You're being uncharitable. Maybe what he's saying isn't that the overall
transfer rate is impossible over the internet, but he's saying that a
sustained unvarying 23MB/s transfer is unlikely over the internet. I think
most reasonable techies would agree that the former isn't true (aka: I agree
with you), but the latter is a much more interesting claim. It's definitely
not total nonsense, as you're making it out to be.

~~~
AaronFriel
It is absolutely total nonsense and it is the basis for the following
proposition:

(The following is not true!) "It is impossible to transfer files at a speed
over 23MB/s over the Internet."

If we accept that proposition as true, then yes, there is maybe a world in
which we can discredit the DNC hack as an inside job, _if_ we conditionally
also believe that the timestamps accurately reflect the transfer speed and
not, say, the result of the files being transferred at some point after the
hack.

For example, if the hackers transferred the files to a thumb drive. Or to a
file server. Or they archived the files then unarchived them with fresh
timestamps and the rate of decompression was ~23MB/s. There are many, many
different ways to get file timestamps that reflect a transfer speed of 23MB/s
at any point after the initial transfer.

These are the two key propositions to believe the inside job argument.

On the other hand, grand juries, the intelligence community, the Mueller
report, and the bipartisan consensus of the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence all agree those propositions are nonsense.

------
Kihashi
I looked at the linked thread and don't see anything to substantiate the claim
in the title here. It looks to me like the thread was shut down by the AMA
mods, not the Reddit Admins.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/igeixp/i_am_william_b...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/igeixp/i_am_william_binney_former_nsa_technical_director/g2tcs71/)

> While this is a fascinating topic from a notable public figure, the mod team
> would like to remind everyone not to believe everything they read on the
> internet. Normally, we’d hesitate to allow an AMA with a topic like this at
> all, but Mr. Binney meets our notability qualifications better than most,
> and he has the support today of a US Senate candidate. Consequently, we
> think it’s important we offer them this platform to share their views. That
> being said, we have a policy against disinformation being shared on this
> subreddit: we won’t hesitate to remove harmful disinformation if posted by
> the OP or users, particularly if it’s harmful to innocent people or spreads
> incorrect information about elections and voting. We also encourage all
> users and AMA participants to review Reddit’s site-wide rules carefully
> before posting - it would be quite easy to let this AMA venture into
> territory that would get it shut down by the Reddit Safety teams. > > EDIT:
> OP is making very bold claims with insufficient proof. This AMA has devolved
> into a significant vector for disinformation. We have removed and locked it.

~~~
jdhbbbhb
Thank God those subreddit admins are keeping us safe from disinformation. We
wouldn't want anyone to think.

------
codezero
Binney seems like such an interesting person who stood up for what most folks
on HN would probably agree with - that the government had been overreaching in
surveillance - and he was mostly sidelined for his opinions.

People shunned by the establishment often end up being abused by the enemies
of the establishment - so in this case, Fox and Infowars who would love to
give this guy time on air.

He could be right, but I think his lack of awareness of why he might be wrong
has really hurt him, he seems to like the attention he's been missing for the
past twenty years, so I guess we're all human.

------
mark_l_watson
I think I will cancel my monthly support for Reddit, partly over this and
partly because I find it less valuable than Twitter and HN and don't visit
that often anymore.

BTW, in general I support whistle blowers - they play an important part in
free and open governments. I have heard Bill Binney before and thought that
his experience and opinions were interesting.

~~~
blnqr
Ever since my service in the Navy I've thought that whistleblowers (1) should
definitely speak out, and (2) should be prepared to suffer the consequences.

~~~
paulryanrogers
What do you think these consequences should be?

What do you think of the consequences suffered by those who were exposed?

~~~
blnqr
Consequences for the whistleblower should depend on the laws that were in
place when (or if) they broke the law. For example, Edward Snowden probably
committed treason and that carries a harsh penalty _but_ it is good that he
leaked the NSA classified docs.

Not sure what you mean by exposed, but I think the same logic applies. Those
who suffered harm should get redress. Those who committed harm should be
punished.

------
joelkevinjones
Calculating transfer rates based on time-stamps is ridiculous. At any point
from source to destination, the individual files making up the emails could
have been aggregated, transferred, and then disaggregated, potentially
multiple times. Preserving time meta-data during these sorts of operations can
go wrong even when one is trying to preserve it. The delta file times could
simply reflect the transfer rate of the final disaggregation step in the
chain. This could have been a from a directly connected storage device over a
less than full-disk-speed interface, or from such a device accessed over a
network.

------
johnklos
"I have proof", but no proof is given.

Perhaps Reddit is just trying to stop a misinformation campaign.

~~~
paraxisi
IMO if you're not familiar with the story, this alone makes it worthy of
deeper inspection:

"Would you like me to post the last modified times for all of the 35,813
emails? And include the Podesta email last modified times for comparison?
Because the Podesta stuff was hacked."

Again, in my opinion, but there are major inconsistencies.

~~~
addicted
So the proof that a certain set of files were not hacked by an expert hacking
agency is that the last modified time stamps are not consistent with them...

I remember fooling my 9 year old sister by modifying the metadata for files
when I was 14. I didn’t realize expert hackers are incapable of figuring out
what I did as a 14 year old.

~~~
nickysielicki
I can't stand to see this sort of logical inversion take place.

There are exactly two possibilities:

A. The timestamps weren't modified at all, and the modification time on the
file truly represents the time at which they were written. ie: the timestamps
are a roughly accurate indicator of transfer speed.

B. The timestamps were modified, but the hackers specifically went through the
effort to calculate timestamps that align with 23MB/s, and then set those
timestamps on the files.

Possibility B is much more contrived, is unfalsifiable, and yet you're
defending it as if those that believe Possibility A are the real conspiracy
theorists.

In reality, you're the conspiracy theorist! You're saying there must have been
an explicit effort (say, a conspiration) to set modification times to align
with 23MB/s. It's ridiculous.

~~~
AaronFriel
There is a much more plausible explanation:

1\. The timestamps reflect some process that occurred before the files were
uploaded to the internet.

That's it. That's the plausible explanation.

* Secondary transfer to removable media that changed timestamps

* Transfer to network file server, likewise

* Archival

* Compression/decompression

* Encryption/decryption

* Analysis of files that touched them (set timestamp) to indicate completion

Basically any process that proceeded at an average of 23MB/s would produce
that pattern. And note, that it doesn't preclude the possibility that the
timestamps changed many times between when they were on the DNC server and
when they were made public. So indeed, the 23MB/s could indicate removeable
media was involved, but it could have been from one Russian intelligence
officer's computer to another's.

Occam's razor: the simplest explanation is the most likely one: The timestamps
reflect a process that occurred at a rate of about 23MB/s.

We just can't speculate on _what process that is_.

~~~
justinclift
It'd be interesting to note which application was supposedly used to copy the
files around.

eg `rsync -aP` widely used by SysAdmin/DevOps people specifically sets the
timestamp of copied files to match their source.

------
dustingetz
"we have an economic phenomenon sometimes called the lemons problem. Suppose
you want to sell a used car, and I’m looking for a car to buy. From my
perspective, I have to worry that your car might be a “lemon”—that it has a
serious mechanical problem that doesn’t appear every time you start the car,
and is difficult or impossible to fix. Now, you know that your car isn’t a
lemon. But if I ask you, “Hey, is this car a lemon?” and you answer “No,” I
can’t trust your answer, because you’re incentivized to answer “No” either
way. Hearing you say “No” isn’t much Bayesian evidence. Asymmetric information
conditions can persist even in cases where, like an honest seller meeting an
honest buyer, both parties have strong incentives for accurate information to
be conveyed."

Yudkowsky, Eliezer. Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get
Stuck (pp. 49-50). Machine Intelligence Research Institute. Kindle Edition.

------
mixmastamyk
The original page is interesting:

[https://archive.is/WWKu2](https://archive.is/WWKu2)

------
johnnyo
The headline is a bit misleading.

Is it “Reddit” as a company shutting it down, or an unpaid mod team?

Is the AMA mod team employed by the company?

------
nkurz
It probably doesn't merit its own submission, and this thread is long dead,
but for the historical record, let it be noted that Binney came back and
successfully completed another Reddit AMA in a different sub with less
stringent moderation a couple days later:
[https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/ihnp8j/hi_im_bi...](https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/ihnp8j/hi_im_bill_binney_nsa_whistleblower_the_russians/)

------
kats
That's outrageous. If someone is a public figure, they should be allowed to
speak.

~~~
codezero
They allowed him to speak. The mods also made it clear that unsubstantiated
claims (from users or the guest) would not be productive and would devolve -
yet he did it anyways.

I think it's safe to say the audience was aware of his POV, so expected more
than regurgitation.

~~~
tanseydavid
Who will substantiate the substantiators?

------
pcdoodle
dude made a video response:

[https://twitter.com/Burke4Senate/status/1298318463610560512](https://twitter.com/Burke4Senate/status/1298318463610560512)

~~~
AaronFriel
Please don't enable the spread of disinformation.

~~~
pcdoodle
How is this misinformation?

~~~
AaronFriel
The basis of William Binney and Patrick Lawrence and other grifters is:

1\. Filesystem timestamps are a reliable indicator of transfer speed,
mechanism of transfer, or anything at all 2\. It's impossible to transfer
files over 23MB/s over the internet

The first is hard to disprove, admittedly. There might be some cases in which
filesystem timestamps, which can be changed by all sorts of different things,
are relevant.

The second though is laughably absurd. I don't know what internet the DNC
server hosted in a colocation facility had. I do know for a fact that from my
residential internet connection in Iowa I could transfer data well in excess
of 23MB/s (a mere 184mbps) over the internet, even to servers in Russia.

From these two claims above, they state without any reservation that the DNC
hack must have been an inside job, that Russia was never involved, etc. The
intelligence community, the Mueller report, and multiple bipartisan Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence reports all point to the hack being committed
by Russian state actors.

~~~
nickysielicki
> 1\. Filesystem timestamps are a reliable indicator of transfer speed,
> mechanism of transfer, or anything at all

How do you figure they're not? Can you explain this?

Obviously they can be modified after the fact, but you seem to be presenting a
wild theory that the timestamps were presumably modified after-the-fact to
represent 23MB/s. That's a wild unfalsifiable theory with zero evidence. The
most likely and reasonable explanation is that the timestamps line up with
23MB/s because they were actually transferred at 23MB/s.

~~~
AaronFriel
> How do you figure they're not? Can you explain this?

Filesystem timestamps are based on local clocks, various command line
arguments and tools to package up files can manipulate those timestamps, and
there are ways to simply _set_ them to whatever one wants.

That the alleged transfer speed was 23MB/s is not proof of anything on its
own, and it certainly isn't proof that it's impossible that it was a hack.

The allegation from Patrick Lawrence's 2017 article in The Nation, since
repeated by countless grifters, has consistently been:

> “Transfer rates of 23 MB/s (Mega Bytes per second) are not just highly
> unlikely, but effectively impossible to accomplish when communicating over
> the Internet at any significant distance,”

This is so laughably false that you should immediately doubt anyone who
repeats that as if it were a fact.

~~~
nickysielicki
> Filesystem timestamps are based on local clocks, various command line
> arguments and tools to package up files can manipulate those timestamps, and
> there are ways to simply _set_ them to whatever one wants.

Right. I just said that in the comment you're replying to...

But that's a pretty wild theory you're presenting, isn't it? Why would they
transfer at some speed, then go back and calculate timestamps to make it seem
like the modified times line up with a transfer at 23MB/s? Isn't it much more
reasonable to just assume that the files, y'know, were actually transferred at
23MB/s?

> That the alleged transfer speed was 23MB/s is not proof of anything on its
> own, and it certainly isn't proof that it's impossible that it was a hack.

Agreed. It's not proof. It's just evidence. But when there isn't proof to be
had, what else can we go off of except evidence?

~~~
AaronFriel
Because the evidence is nonsense! It's not proof of what the authors, Patrick
Lawrence or William Binney, or anyone else, claim!

Their central thesis is, and it pains me to repeat this:

(This is a false claim.) "The DNC files could not have been transferred over
the internet because a speed of 23MB/s is impossible."

That is demonstrably, laughably false. The fact that on Hacker News we're
disputing whether or not it's possible to transfer files over 23MB/s is
absurd! OF COURSE IT IS!

As for why the timestamps might reflect that speed, there are many possible
reasons:

* That was the actual speed of the initial transfer/dump from the DNC - whether over the internet or to a USB2 flash drive

* The timestamps were planted to provide plausible deniability or disinformation

* The timestamps were the result of a program producing files at a rate of 23MB/s, such as: a secondary transfer to a flash drive after the hack occurred, an archival or unarchival process, a compression or encryption process, copying to a network storage server, or an analysis process step that touched each file and averaged 23MB/s.

Since there are many possible ways to get to 23MB/s, it's not proof, or even
evidence, of what the authors claim.

------
justanotheranon
while i disagree with the Forenaicator's theory that file time stamps prove it
was Seth Rich and not GRU, i think this is shameless censorship by Reddit.

Aaron Shwartz would be disgusted by what Reddit has become.

instead of censorship, the correct approach would be to refute Binney and
Forensicator's claims with counter evidence. file time stamps can be trivially
modified to whatever you want and so cannot be trusted. as we saw from the CIA
Vault7 leaks on Wikileaks, CIA had dozens and dozens of programs for forging
metadata in files to frame foreign govts with attribution, which is one of the
biggest reasons why the whole narrative that Russia hacked the DNC is on shaky
ground.

------
troughway
Reddit is just another propaganda arm in the same vein as FB, Twitter and the
rest.

As usual when these things come up, jedberg is very quiet.

