Hunter Biden laptop story

[Dill]

(10-26-2020, 05:28 PM)PhilHos Wrote: How did a Russian operative get emails that have been corroborated by at least 1 person with no denials as to their authenticity by the Biden camp? How did a Russian operative get a hold of a laptop in which Biden's lawyers wanted "back" from the repairman?

Insisting that the Hunter Biden laptop is fake is a trap. So is insisting that it’s real.

The lesson of 2016 is to be even more careful with potential disinformation in 2020.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/10/24/hunter-biden-laptop-disinformation/

Indeed, there are good reasons to be skeptical of the theory that the laptop is a foreign plot. If a competent Russian intelligence agency went to the length of procuring hacked material, blending it with forgeries, perhaps researching a suitable surfacing locale and setup in Wilmington and surfacing the package in a human intelligence operation that required careful planning — then it’s highly likely that agency would have found, or more likely forged, files that would have actual political impact, instead of the unremarkable material revealed in the Post so far.

Nevertheless, in the likely continued absence of certainty either way, the Biden leaks deserve the full potential-disinformation treatment. This means three concrete things.

First, every individual little fact — every email, every text, every photo — must be independently verified when data is surfaced in such a suspicious way, not just one piece of information. Genuine photos, for example, could be there simply to add credibility to forged emails surfaced along with the photos — shielding a few forgeries with genuine content would be a time-tested active measures tactic.

Second, the absence of a denial by the Biden campaign or Hunter himself should not be treated as a tacit admission of authenticity. Mixing facts with forgeries has another time-tested effect: It sets a trap for the victim. If Hunter or the Biden campaign started selectively denying pieces of the reporting ostensibly from the laptop, they would give oxygen to the operation, extend its life-cycle and get entangled in a losing battle about discussing what’s fact and what’s not. Verifying large amounts of leaked files, the Democrats learned in 2016, is also hard and labor-intensive.

Finally, and hardest of all, we must resist the temptation to jump to premature conclusions on “a Russian plant” without good evidence — “classic earmarks” are not nearly enough. The Mac Shop story, and even the files, could still be genuine, no matter how unusual the setup sounds. Worse, even if a foreign intelligence service had a role in the strange saga of the Biden leaks — a scenario that remains as likely as not — then the critical enablers at several steps along the way were prominent Americans who decided to act irresponsibly, again and again, by putting party above country — and after four years of publicly discussing useful idiocy, they could no longer be unwitting.