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As I have just finished watching this... I find my mind strangely wandering back to something I have touched upon before but I have never fully developed. That being the psychology and thought processes that we can determine about the John P hacker.
Certain traits and motivations can be assumed based upon the methodology of the "hack" (phish if that's the real way it was done) and the very specific targeting of John. These demonstrate a moderate technological capability but more importantly a sophisticated understand of human response and ability to predict cause and effect chains in the long term. Now anyone can figure out a cause A and effect A (and so on) off the propagation of these emails and make certain assumptions about the hacker's political ideology but it doesn't particularly frame what this person believed nor their motivations since it could be reasonably placed into either a left or right mindset.
What will allow for a better framing is actually not what the hacker leaked but rather what they did not leak. To put this into context, knowing how the hacker got into the emails (via complete control of the gmail account) is crucial. Had it been me, upon assuming control of the account I would have had three primary objectives which I would have carried out in this order before sending it to Wikileaks.
1) Save everything quickly
2) Explore it to its fullest to ensure I had absolutely every last bit of data possible.
3) Post cleanup to cover my tracks (a step that realistically begins prehack)
So to start I would not have included my actual phishing email in the documents sent to Wikileaks but it's possible it was an oversight. Before doing anything so public I also would have spent a great deal of time reading through everything I had to collected before making a decision on what action to take. Now the tricky part comes in the realization that what we saw in the Wikileaks documents is not what the hacker would have seen in entirety. What he/she/they would have been looking at is two things.
1) The complete email database we saw
2) An internet search history of Podesta that may have spanned back as far as the email account itself
The possibility certainly exists that said hacker either overlooked this information or John had configured his account so it would not be collected. However, both of these possibilities seem inconsistent with a hacker who had this level of knowledge and what we know about John's personal technological habits.
With this in mind it's not hard to make the jump, though a jump it may be, to assume that the hacker had intentionally chosen to withhold the search history. Admittedly this could have been done on the Wikileaks side but that does not match with usual policies of full unaltered release. Placing myself into the same position as this hacker I can only see one real reason why I would withhold the searches. That being what was inside the searches was so massively damaging to John personally that I believed it would overtake the larger story of corruption played out within the emails. As a consequence destroying John would inadvertently save Hillary (as it did with Weiner and Huma). A difficult choice, if this is how it occurred.
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[–] 11962179? [S] 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
Thoughts:
As I have just finished watching this... I find my mind strangely wandering back to something I have touched upon before but I have never fully developed. That being the psychology and thought processes that we can determine about the John P hacker.
Certain traits and motivations can be assumed based upon the methodology of the "hack" (phish if that's the real way it was done) and the very specific targeting of John. These demonstrate a moderate technological capability but more importantly a sophisticated understand of human response and ability to predict cause and effect chains in the long term. Now anyone can figure out a cause A and effect A (and so on) off the propagation of these emails and make certain assumptions about the hacker's political ideology but it doesn't particularly frame what this person believed nor their motivations since it could be reasonably placed into either a left or right mindset.
What will allow for a better framing is actually not what the hacker leaked but rather what they did not leak. To put this into context, knowing how the hacker got into the emails (via complete control of the gmail account) is crucial. Had it been me, upon assuming control of the account I would have had three primary objectives which I would have carried out in this order before sending it to Wikileaks.
1) Save everything quickly
2) Explore it to its fullest to ensure I had absolutely every last bit of data possible.
3) Post cleanup to cover my tracks (a step that realistically begins prehack)
So to start I would not have included my actual phishing email in the documents sent to Wikileaks but it's possible it was an oversight. Before doing anything so public I also would have spent a great deal of time reading through everything I had to collected before making a decision on what action to take. Now the tricky part comes in the realization that what we saw in the Wikileaks documents is not what the hacker would have seen in entirety. What he/she/they would have been looking at is two things.
1) The complete email database we saw
2) An internet search history of Podesta that may have spanned back as far as the email account itself
The possibility certainly exists that said hacker either overlooked this information or John had configured his account so it would not be collected. However, both of these possibilities seem inconsistent with a hacker who had this level of knowledge and what we know about John's personal technological habits.
With this in mind it's not hard to make the jump, though a jump it may be, to assume that the hacker had intentionally chosen to withhold the search history. Admittedly this could have been done on the Wikileaks side but that does not match with usual policies of full unaltered release. Placing myself into the same position as this hacker I can only see one real reason why I would withhold the searches. That being what was inside the searches was so massively damaging to John personally that I believed it would overtake the larger story of corruption played out within the emails. As a consequence destroying John would inadvertently save Hillary (as it did with Weiner and Huma). A difficult choice, if this is how it occurred.
-forgive my format/gram/etc... I am tired.