Since this past summer, the only publicly available evidence that the Russian government was responsible for hacks of the DNC and key Democratic figures is circumstantial and far short of conclusive, courtesy of private research firms with a financial stake in their claims. Multiple federal agencies now claim certainty about the Kremlin connection, but have yet to make public any evidence.
Now, a never-before-published NSA document provided by the whistleblower Edward Snowden suggests they have a way of collecting evidence of Russian hacks, because they’ve tracked it before in the case of a prominent Russian journalist, who was also a U.S. citizen.
In 2006, longtime Kremlin critic Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down in her apartment, the victim of an apparent contract killing. Although five individuals, including the gunman, were convicted for the crime, whoever ordered the murder remains unknown. Information about Politkovskaya’s journalism career, murder, and the investigation of that crime was compiled by the NSA in the form of an internal wiki entry. Most of the wiki’s information is biographical, public, and unclassified, save for a brief passage marked Top Secret:
Link here: https://prod01-cdn04.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/12/Polit1.png
“Russian Federal Intelligence Services (probably FSB) are known to have targeted the webmail account of the murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. On 5 December 2005, RFIS initiated an attack against the account annapolitkovskaia@US Provider1, deploying malicious software which is not available in the public domain. It is not known whether this attack is in any way associated with the death of the journalist.”
Although the NSA document does not specify the account, Anna Politkovskaya was known to use the email address annapolitkovskaia@yahoo.com.
In response to a query from the Intercept about the hacking of Politkovskaya’s account, Yahoo replied in a statement: “We can only disclose information about a specific user account pursuant to our terms of service, privacy policy and law enforcement guidelines.”
The year after her email was hacked, Politkovskaya was murdered, a crime that was widely suspected, though never proven, to be a Kremlin reprisal for her reporting on Chechnya and criticism of Vladimir Putin.
Via The Intercept