I suggest you take a step back and have another look at the article and what I wrote. Sorry, but there's something wrong with you. The part I left out was parenthetical, i.e. "As part of the editing process, however," but here's the full first paragraph,
"
As editor of The Nation, my purpose in publishing Patrick Lawrence’s article was to make more widely known the VIPS critique of the January ICA assertions, the questions VIPS raised, and their counter-thesis that the disseminated DNC e-mails resulted from a leak, not a hack. Those questions remain vital.
Subsequently, Nation editors themselves raised questions about the editorial process that preceded the publication of the article. The article was indeed fact-checked to ensure that Patrick Lawrence, a regular Nation contributor, accurately reported the VIPS analysis and conclusions, which he did. As part of the editing process, however, we should have made certain that several of the article’s conclusions were presented as possibilities, not as certainties. And given the technical complexity of the material, we would have benefited from bringing on an independent expert to conduct a rigorous review of the VIPS technical claims."
The part in bold is totally irrelevant to what I am talking about so I left it out. But then, they go on to say,
"We have obtained such a review in the last week from Nathan Freitas of the Guardian Project. He has evaluated both the VIPS memo and Lawrence’s article. Freitas lays out several scenarios in which the DNC could have been hacked from the outside, although he does not rule out a leak. Freitas concludes that all parties “must exercise much greater care in separating out statements backed by available digital metadata from thoughtful insights and educated guesses.” His findings are published
here."
This paragraph confirms what I said with no equivocation.
The issue is that the government may not have tried very hard to make clear their claims were not proven, but that doesn't alter the fact that your own source says VIPS' conclusions aren't proven either. Read it again. You're off base.
Edit: it's also significant the their independent expert provided the following disclaimer in the accompanying analysis:
he work of the Forensicator is detailed and accurate. There are no significant errors in the specific findings, relating to the analysis of time stamps and calculations related to digital-transfer speeds (also known as “throughput”) between storage drives or over a network connection. The Forensicator has worked carefully with the limited set of data available, providing the means necessary for anyone to reproduce the work and analysis.
It is very important to note the set of evidence considered within the Forensicator’s analysis and the subsequent memo and articles based on his work. There are only documents and file archives that purport to have been extracted from DNC storage in 2016 along with the metadata contained within them. The metadata includes “Last Modified” timestamps at various levels of time resolutions (milliseconds, nanoseconds) that also include time-zone information.
Otherwise, t
here are no logs available that would provide an audit trail of network or system activity. There is no public copy of malicious software found on a targeted system that can be decompiled, reverse engineered, and analyzed. There is no information about where or how the extracted files were stored, what the operating systems involved were, or what the local, co-located, or hosted network configuration and speed might have been."
