For what it’s worth, I hate teasing stories. Sometimes I find out enough about the documents that I know they will be significant even before I see them. That is precisely what has happened in the last few days, and I expect to have an important set of documents within the next week. It might be the most important story I have stumbled on to date.
Before we get there, I have begun slogging through old FOIA’s and emails. This one is worth circling back to.
We know that the researchers at Georgia Tech assisted with the investigation of the DNC hack. Here, we saw that it extends beyond Russiagate. The DOJ routinely requests assistance straight from DARPA in investigations. This seems very unusual.
DARPA is not a law enforcement entity. It’s a research branch of the Department of Defense.
Within hours, this request was forwarded from DARPA, and professors at Georgia Tech were working on a tasking from the Department of Justice.
In how many other federal investigations do private parties take on the role of investigator? What does the chain of custody for evidence look like? What does this look like in discovery? Does the defense team realize that college professors did some leg work on the investigation?
There are many questions unanswered. We will attempt to answer them.
All the academic work here is aligned under the "Enhanced Attribution" project, which has existed for a decade, under various names, various organizations, and, unsurprisingly, has seen recent budget cuts. The stated long-term plan is to transition the project to JCWA. Headline of GAO's report on JCWA: "Joint Cyber Warfighting Architecture Would Benefit from Defined Goals and Governance"
It seems like the academics are the rubes in this boondoggle, got played, and are left holding the bag.