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To date, the only public evidence that the Russian government was responsible for hacks of the DNC and key Democratic figures has been circumstantial and far short of conclusive, courtesy of private research firms with a financial stake in such claims. Multiple federal agencies now claim certainty about the Kremlin connection, but they have yet to make public the basis for their beliefs.
Now, a never-before-published top-secret document provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden suggests the NSA has a way of collecting evidence of Russian hacks, because the agency tracked a similar hack before in the case of a prominent Russian journalist, who was also a U.S. citizen.
[...] NSA whistleblowers have so far given the best idea of what the NSA's signals intelligence on Russia, today or in 2005, could look like. Earlier this year, Snowden tweeted that if the Russian government was indeed behind the hacking of the Democrats, the NSA most likely has the goods, noting that XKEYSCORE, a sort of global SIGINT search engine, "makes following exfiltrated data easy. I did this personally against Chinese ops." Snowden went so far as to say that nailing down this sort of SIGINT hacker attribution "is the only case in which mass surveillance has actually proven effective."
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31 2016, @07:58PM
> Why the hell wait until after the elections to impose sanctions?
Have you seen how the tweeter in chief has reacted to the entire issue?
He's made it all about him. So much so that you'd be forgiven for thinking that maybe there was some kind of collusion going on there and he's insecure about it being found out. Its bizarre.
If Obama had followed through before the election, Trump would have used it as 'proof' that Obama was meddling in the election to help Clinton. So he made the rational decision of holding back on it until after the election - if Clinton won the sanctions would have been completely uncontroversial. Since trump won he's throwing a tantrum anyway, so at worst same result as taking action before the election.