NY Times reported on 1/27/17: Russians Charged With Treason Worked in Office Linked to Election Hacking
What we know from the NYT report:
- Arrested and (likely) charged with treason in December 2016:
- Sergei Mikhailov, a deputy director of the Center for Information Security (the FSB’s computer security wing), had a bag thrown over his head and was arrested in the middle of a meeting with other senior officers in Moscow.
- Ruslan Stoyanov, a senior researcher at Kaspersky Lab was also arrested.
- Two US officials confirmed that ”human sources in Russia did play a crucial role in proving who was responsible for the hacking [of the DNC and Podesta’s emails]”.
Back in July, Richard Engel interviewed a lawyer for one of those charged and was practically threatened simply for asking about the arrests.
A full year after the arrests…
Update reported on Rachel Maddow tonight:
According to the The Bell (a Russian news outlet) in a article titled How America learned about “Russian hackers”, the the reason they were arrested was because:
“They helped the U.S. Intelligence services receive the evidence of the Russian hackers’ involvement in the last year’s attacks in the U.S.” and that the arrests are ”connected with U.S. elections”.
In addition, the report adds that the reason Sergei Mikhailov had a bag thrown over his head was because he is a black belt in karate and they “feared he would resist”.
(The article is in Russian, you can use google translate or see video below for details)
tl;dr from Maddow (and translated) on The Bell’s report: Russian media report confirms cyber attack on the US election
”If Russia hadn’t attacked the election, they wouldn’t have to lock up people who told U.S. Intelligence agencies that the Russians attacked the election.”
It’s a big ole’ word salad!
