This Slate article sheds a lot of light on what happened - suspiciously timed - but many of us missed it? (Also, amazing the detail they go into when looking for Trump dirt.)
This explains the narrow FISA request. But, to get a warrant, don’t they need a potential crime? There is none, IMHO. It’s a private citizen’s server pinging a foreign server, supposedly.
But the article reveals how hard it is to prove anything anyway, without content. The only way to prove anything nefarious would be to use Federal gov’t tools - which apparently is what Obama tried to do for months.
FISA warrants can be issued wrt “foreign agent” allegations, they are national security based not criminality based.
But there is supposed to be a serious level of “probable cause” and the information sought and how it can be used is strictly controlled (supposedly). So there are various ways that the Obozo team may have politically abused this process, and given today’s Trump tweets I think he must be very confidence that he’s caught Obozo & co. red handed.
debunked in an article, and extensively discussed in a comments section, here:
trump server communicating with russia story gets debunked
http://www.[censored_on_fr].com/trump-server-communicating-with-russia-story-gets-debunked/
the DNS (domain name server) “expert” paul vixie seems politically motivated to me, no matter what his technical credentials are (recall zuckerberg, schmidt, etc. pro-obama, pro-hillary biases). (someone could in theory do some background research on his politics as it such research commonly turns up something indicating political activity such as donating to certain political campaigns, etc.) he perhaps crossed the line the moment he started claiming that a certain pattern of dns activity is strongly associated with criminal activity, since the only qualified background promoted by the article is computer science (internet design) and not criminology. the article itself seems to cross the line the moment it begins to discuss strange “pinging” or whatever. what they actually seem to mean (judging by context, and this is jmho) is probably dns request protocol packets, not ping request protocol packets, which are different (icmp protocol versus dns protocol). these are analogous to apples and oranges in the internet packet world. the writer imho seemingly missed the ambiguity, but perhaps could not help wanting to sound technically savvy, so he/she proceeded anyway, and conflated the two terms. the remainder of the article is trash. in one of the [censored by fr] article’s comments, it is noted that anyone who really wants to and who really knows how to (junior high level stuff here, folks) can avoid using dns servers altogether by reverting to hardwired IP addresses. Duh! This is well known in the internet community by all oldtimers who had to learn to live in a world without DNS servers, that is, after the internet was invented, but before DNS (and the DNS protocol) was added to the internet. For informational purposes, this was IIRC about 1982-1983 or so (depending on where one’s research lab was located physically, and what type of operating system one was using at the time on the nodes communicating over the Arpanet (now Internet), beginning with concepts and protocols described in standards: IETF RFC 830 (Z Su, 1982) and IETF RFC 870 (PV Mockapetris, 1983). This proposed DNS system replaced the prior static name service per-node host configuration files containing hostname to ip address associations, which needed to be updated and kept in sync by manual methods on each computer node that wished to communicate over the internet. all such communicating nodes in addition were required to maintain synchronization with a centralized registration authority (and this is still true today).
side note- i’m only paying attention to this in a very casual way. my responses are likewise somewhat casual. i may miss something here or there. but all this drama is getting a bit unexciting to me. i have a life outside of politics. I like other stuff too. can someone bring on some dancing squirrels? please?? :-P