Against the backdrop of a sanctions announcement, President Obama’s administration has released a Joint Analysis Report claiming to outline the details of Russia’s involvement hacking into targeted political data base or computer systems during the election.
Except it doesn’t.
Not even a little.
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The “Russian Malicious Cyber Activity – Joint Analysis Report” (full pdf below) is pure nonsense.  It outlines nothing more than vague and disingenuous typical hacking activity that is no more substantive than any other hacking report on any other foreign actor.
This might as well be a report blaming Nigerian fraud phone solicitors for targeting U.S. phone numbers.  DUH!  Just because your grandma didn’t actually win that Nigerian national lottery doesn’t mean the Nigerian Mafioso are targeting your employer to hold you accountable for her portion of the bill.
This FBI report is, well, quite simply, pure horse-pucky.

However, what the report does well is using ridiculous technical terminology to describe innocuous common activity.   Example: “ATPT29” is Olaf, the round faced chubby guy probably working from his kitchen table; and “ATPT28” is his unemployed socially isolated buddy living in Mom’s basement down the street.
This paragraph is priceless in it’s humorous and disengenuous gobblespeak:

Both groups have historically targeted government organizations, think tanks, universities, and corporations around the world. APT29 has been observed crafting targeted spearphishing campaigns leveraging web links to a malicious dropper; once executed, the code delivers Remote Access Tools (RATs) and evades detection using a range of techniques.
APT28 is known for leveraging domains that closely mimic those of targeted organizations and tricking potential victims into entering legitimate credentials. APT28 actors relied heavily on shortened URLs in their spearphishing email campaigns. Once APT28 and APT29 have access to victims, both groups exfiltrate and analyze information to gain intelligence value.
These groups use this information to craft highly targeted spearphishing campaigns. These actors set up operational infrastructure to obfuscate their source infrastructure, host domains and malware for targeting organizations, establish command and control nodes, and harvest credentials and other valuable information from their targets.

(*note the emphasis I placed in the quote) All that nonsense is saying is a general explanation for how hacking, any hacking, is generally carried out.  This entire FBI report is nothing more than a generalized, albeit techno-worded, explanation for how Nigerians, Indians, or in this case Russians, attempt to gain your email passwords etc., nothing more.

Here’s the “report“:

[scribd id=335307016 key=key-qvjYK3gLD9WdgOskmgoe mode=scroll]
What is alarming to consider is how far the various radical leftists are willing to go to create a straw man crisis for political benefit; and secondly how diminished the executive office of the U.S. presidency actually becomes amid this level of ridiculous propaganda.
There’s no doubt the intended outcome is to create internal confusion amid the U.S. electorate, because there are millions of people who will buy into these fabrications.
Consider the earlier example from inside the Yahoo News article:

[…] The US intelligence community has concluded that a hack-and-release of Democratic Party and Clinton staff emails was designed to put Trump — a political neophyte who has praised Putin — into the Oval Office. (link)

There’s still no evidence the DNC was “hacked” (WikiLeaks claims the information was an inside job of “leaking”), and even John Podesta admitted himself he was a victim of an ordinary “phishing” password change scam.
Does hacking exist, of course it does. Do hackers exist in every country connected by the internet, of course they do.  Do state governments participate in hacking offense and defense, again – yes, of course they do.   And yes, the FBI and U.S. intelligence community act purposefully against all participants they can catch.
But what does that intellectual truism have to do with the specific allegation that hostile Russian hackers attempted to gain entry into the DNC or John Podesta?  These are two entirely different issues which the Obama administration is attempting to conflate simply for political and ideological purposes.
Here is where we see Obama’s intended conflated outcome.  Consider the Yaho0 media paragraph above against the headline which accompanied the content:
afp-yahoo-tweet-2obama count it
 

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