Bill Binney, the former Technical Director of the National Security Agency, in a lengthy press conference, lays out evidence he says shows Russia could not have been behind the hacks of the Democratic National Committee in 2016.
Binney points to digital forensic evidence conducted on the hacked files that shows the documents were not the result of a “hack” but rather a physical download to either a CD-ROM or a thumb drive.
“Now, if you know anything about data processing and data storage and things of that nature, there is a program that was quite common in the past [including 2016] using what’s called fat file formatting file allocation, table formatting, which is a process that when doing a batch process of data and transferring it to a storage device like a thumb drive or a CD-ROM, it rounds off the last modified time to the nearest even [next-higher] second, so that’s exactly the property we found in all that data posted by Wikileaks,” Binney says.
He also shows that the speed at which the data was downloaded points to a download conducted “in person” and on the East Coast of the U.S., rather than a download conducted over the internet to a location in or near Russia.
So, we looked at all those files, and we ran a program to calculate the transfer rate of all that data, because all you have to do is look at between the two time stamps, the file name and the number of characters in the file, and take the difference between the times [start-time versus end-time], and that’s the transfer rate for that number of characters.” Binney said.
“So we found that the variations ran from something like 19 to 49.1 megabytes per second. Now, that means for 19 to 49 million characters per second, and [yet] the world wide web would not support that rate of transfer, not for anybody who’s just, you know, a hacker coming in across the net, trying to do it. They won’t support that kind [speed] of transfer…”
Binney says he wants to present this case at a trial, against the CIA’s top officials.