YotaPhone, Going Dutch (Part 5)
Joffe's Silliest Trick, Part V
The white paper can be found here.
So lets wrap up this dog of a white paper.
“an opaque site that appears to be a VoIP-related site” Why do they consider it opaque? What makes them think it is VoIP related? Regardless, if the site is related to Voice Over Internet, that would make sense for a YotaPhone with bad network coverage to be connecting to.
This is (apparently) strictly in the Trump Tower (we still don’t which network in the building). Could there be a Russian tenant at Trump Tower using their Yotaphone to call home? Maybe. Who knows? None of this indicates anything nefarious, unless you are looking for something nefarious.
“The domain does not appear to resolve” The domain does not appear to resolve for the authors, at the time they are probing it.
“Trump Tower is among the few hosts in the world where frequent and repetitive requests for sipper.ru were observed” Well now at least we have some idea of the scope of comparison the authors are claiming. The world. As we discussed in Part 3, Joffe’s lackeys don’t have access to anything like all the DNS data in the world, even allowing for exaggeration. Without some idea of what their sample size is, this claim is at best a colossal boast. At worst its just fraud.
“It is possible that with the right VPN connection, a particular piece of equipment is able to reach the sipper.ru resource which could be private” Of course thats possible. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It could be this server restricted which IPs it would respond to. Keeps out the riffraff. Or it could also be something was misconfigured.
The point is, this may well be a Yotaphone set up for VoIP communication to that specific server. In which case it makes perfect sense that few other places in the world would be trying to connect to it. Is this suspicious? I suspect if it wasn’t a Russian domain connected to it, it would be entirely mundane. But its up to the authors to demonstrate that a connection like this is unusual, if not clandestine.
This is all just repeating over and over again the charge that somewhere in the Trump Tower network (whatever that is) there is probably a Yotaphone doing a lot of VoIP calls. If this wasn’t a Russian domain, it wouldn’t be of any interest. For instance:
The second most requested resolution is havermarkt.nl, a Netherlands domain that doesn’t resolve and might be related to voice over protocol. Were there Dutch spies crawling through Trump Towers? Probably.
So in conclusion, there were probably someone (or someones) somewhere in, or near, Trump Tower using a Yotaphone(s). We are told such devices are rare, but not how rare, or why we should be concerned.
Secondly, the Russian phone that doesn’t connect very well to American service providers was connecting to Russian servers, probably to make phone calls. As you would expect.
And these lookups were not related to real-estate or marketing, which is apparently all anyone does in the 'Trump network’, whatever that is.
So what have we learned? Well, apparently Joffe and Sussmann worked with some DNS guys to cherry pick networks they claim are Trump related (no further details available), found some people probably connecting with Russian servers on those networks (probably to make phone calls because their phones didnt work otherwise), and decided to tell the CIA that they think this is suspicious.
Its pretty clear the CIA laughed when they saw this just as much as we have, deeming it “not technically plausible”. But given the track record of the Joffe-Perkins Coie- DNC cabal, the point may not have been to raise any real scrutiny of Donald Trump and Yotaphones. As long as the could leak to their friends in the media that the CIA was investigating clandestine communications with Russia, they had accomplished much.
What they did not do, certainly, was provide any context for their claim, any methodology that might throw their analysis in doubt.
We also know now that Sussmann said a lot more to the CIA about specifics than is contained in this white paper. For instance, the CIA reported that Sussmann told them these were Wifi networks, but not (apparently) whether they were public, and who had access to them. Sussmann apparently claimed there were only a dozen or so Yotaphones in the entire country.
Sussmann also indicate that the Yotaphone activity at the Executive Office of the President started in April of 2017, shortly after Trump became president.
Special Counsel Durham indicated in his Sussmann filings that this was all a load of horseshit. According to Durham, there were millions of Yotaphone related lookups in America, and that the Yotaphone related resolutions in the EOP started before Trumps transition began (oops).
At any rate, it seems clear to me that whoever authored this paper for Joffe and Sussmann didn’t have their heart in it. Sussmann’s fairytales told directly to the CIA at least had the virtue of appearing sinister on their face. Not only does the white paper fail to deliver the basic methodology anyone would need to evaluate their claims, the claims are aren’t even nefarious. Its as though any tangential connection between anyone in any proximity to Donald Trump with any entity connected to Russia was enough.
Nice