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Five years ago, online magazine Slate broke a story about how DNS packets showed secret communications between Alfa Bank in Russia and the Trump Organization, proving a link that Trump denied. I was the only prominent tech expert that debunked this as just a conspiracy-theory[*][*][*].
Last week, I was vindicated by the indictment of a lawyer involved, a Michael Sussman. It tells a story of where this data came from, and some problems with it.
But we should first avoid reading too much into this indictment. It cherry picks data supporting its argument while excluding anything that disagrees with it. We see chat messages expressing doubt in the DNS data. If chat messages existed expressing confidence in the data, we wouldn’t see them in the indictment.
In addition, the indictment tries to make strong ties to the Hillary campaign and the Steele Dossier, but ultimately, it’s weak. It looks to me like an outsider trying to ingratiated themselves with the Hillary campaign rather than there being part of a grand Clinton-lead conspiracy against Trump.
With these caveats, we do see some important things about where the data came from.
We see how Tech-Executive-1 used his position at cyber-security companies to search private data (namely, private DNS logs) to search for anything that might link Trump to somebody nefarious, including Russian banks. In other words, a link between Trump and Alfa bank wasn’t something they accidentally found, it was one of the many thousands of links they looked for.
Such a technique has been long known as a problem in science. If you cast the net wide enough, you are sure to find things that would otherwise be statistically unlikely. In other words, if you do hundreds of tests of hydroxychloroquine or invermectin on Covid-19, you are sure to find results that are so statistically unlikely that they wouldn’t happen more than 1% of the time.
If you s
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Read the original article: That Alfa-Trump Sussman indictment