‘The Logs Suggested That Trump and Alfa Had Configured Something Like a Digital Hotline Connecting the Two Entities’
Franklin Foer, the former editor of The New Republic, has a stunning 3794-word article just published at Slate, in which he asks, “Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?“
It is long and for those unfamiliar with computer technology it can be somewhat intense, but to summarize: There appears to have been a computer server located in Trump Tower in New York City that appears to have been communicating with two servers in Moscow that appear to be registered to a $28.5 billion Russian bank that has dealings around the world, including in the U.S.
These two lines deserve attention:
“bank in Moscow that kept irregularly pinging a server registered to the Trump Organization on Fifth Avenue.”
“a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank.”Â
Foer has contacted numerous top computer scientists, some of whom have been studying the servers’ logs for months. One of the top scientists he has been communicating with is Paul Vixie.
In the world of DNS experts, there’s no higher authority. Vixie wrote central strands of the DNS code that makes the Internet work. After studying the logs, he concluded, “The parties were communicating in a secretive fashion. The operative word is secretive. This is more akin to what criminal syndicates do if they are putting together a project.†Put differently, the logs suggested that Trump and Alfa had configured something like a digital hotline connecting the two entities, shutting out the rest of the world, and designed to obscure its own existence.
And another computer scientist:
I put the question of what kind of activity the logs recorded to the University of California’s Nicholas Weaver, another computer scientist not involved in compiling the logs. “I can’t attest to the logs themselves,†he told me, “but assuming they are legitimate they do indicate effectively human-level communication.â€
Alfa Bank and Trump’s spokesperson Hope Hicks both deny any relationship.
The servers, after Foer and The New York Times started asking lots of questions, have apparently been shut down.
The computer scientists believe there was one logical conclusion to be drawn: The Trump organization shut down the server after Alfa was told that the Times might expose the connection. Nicholas Weaver told me the Trump domain was “very sloppily removed.†Or as another of the researchers put it, it looked like “the knee was hit in Moscow, the leg kicked in New York.â€
Foer concludes:
What the scientists amassed wasn’t isn’t a smoking gun. It’s a suggestive body of evidence that doesn’t absolutely preclude alternative explanations. But this evidence arrives in the broader context of the campaign and everything else that has come to light: The efforts of Donald Trump’s former campaign manager to bring Ukraine into Vladimir Putin’s orbit; the other Trump advisor whose communications with senior Russian officials have worried intelligence officials; the Russian hacking of the DNC and John Podesta’s email.
We don’t yet know what this server was for, but it deserves further explanation.
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Image by Kjetil Korslien via Flickr and a CC licenseÂ