Claims that Russia hacked the DNC may lead to a new “Cold War” that would be profitable to those interested in military intelligence budgets, says former National Security Agency technical director and NSA whistleblower William Binney.
“[The CIA] haven’t come out with the evidence to show the tracing of the data from the DNC server to, for example the Russians, or anybody else, or going from them to WikiLeaks, which is a high priority target for NSA, in terms of network monitoring,” Binney told RT.
He’s one of the group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity who signed a letter arguing that if the data was a hack, the NSA would have a trace of the hack. The letter was published by Consortium News on Monday.
They argue “all points point to leaking, not hacking… leaking requires physically removing data – on a thumb drive, for example – the only way such data can be copied and removed, with no electronic trace of what has left the server, is via a physical storage device.”
Binney said why it is not a hack is the NSA basically has the collection of the entire network worldwide.
“If [the CIA] are going to allege something like that they should show the trace route, and the path it went and how, and through which path those packets went from the DNC to the Russians to WikiLeaks. They failed to do that,” Binney added.
He said it also wouldn’t be the CIA illustrating the trace route, it would be the NSA as it owns the network and citied a previous occasion when the NSA showed the trace route of a hack from China back to a specific building in China.
“If you did it then, why are not going to do it now when this is a very serious allegation?” Binney said.
“When you send something across the network you are sending it into NSA land, and they own everything,” Binney said. “They have tens of thousands of embedded implants in terms of hardware and software around switches of the world, and they got trace route programs by the hundreds all around the switches, and they are collecting at different points throughout the network in the entire world, redundant collection. So, there is no excuse for them not to have both the content and the trace route, anything going across the network.”
Binney said he thinks the accusation is political motivated. One argument has been a neo-con drive towards sustaining military budgets as the country moves from a “war on terror” toward a “new Cold War.”
“Certainly, that’s behind some of it. Hillary Clinton and a number of people were going that way, and certainly the military intelligence complex fosters that because that means for a “new Cold War” trillions of dollars going into the coffers of those people, they would certainly be advocates for this thing. There is a lot of vested interest to keep this kind of thing going,” Binney added.
Binney said Julian Assange has already said publicly it was not the Russians, but “a leaker inside.”
“If the CIA is alleging a different story, they need to produce the evidence like they did on the Chinese hack,” Binney said. “There is no reason to withhold this kind of information, especially if they can prove it and so far as I can see they won’t even brief the House Intelligence Committee on the evidence they are using to make this statement. That tells me that what they are saying is a pack of crap.”
“That are just concocting these things to support the existing administration and to also support the move toward a new Cold War.”
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.