This has been floating around now for about two days, and this is the first time I've seen any formal outlet cover the story other than Telegram channels and Twitter aggregators. It's rather telling about the state of mainstream American media today. In any other country, revelations like this would be front page news and more or less a gigantic scandal. But in the USA, it's radio silence. Not even an attempted verification of the information leaked in an attempt to debunk it, which would have been a nice starting point at least.
If you have a look through the pictures and leaks, there are some absolute shockers within it, and given that it's already spread like wildfire across the broader conservative side of the internet, I think it's certainly worth engaging with from the side of outlets like the New York Times and the like in a bare minimum effort to do something constructive.
4chan must be getting a lot of heat about this. It is, after all a crime to defame someone like this. As a technologist I want more technical details on the cracking techniques used. What tools were used? Also how did they source the iCloud backup? Tip off, or a brute force scan?
Hunter Biden took his personal laptop in for repairs one day and just left it at the shop, never to return to collect it. The leaker is more or less an IT guy who found it hilarious to leak the contents of his laptop online.
The most important development was that they managed to crack his iCloud password via files left on his computer.
If you look at the torrent, it's almost 100% certain it's real. For me, his iCloud pictures seal the deal in terms of legitimacy. It would be a very elaborate scheme to fake all of those. Of course, deepfaking is still a hypothesis that to my knowledge has not been ruled out.
I don't think anyone is saying it is 100% fake. But heavily tampered and manipulated, absolutely plausible.
Remember the emails that got everyone believing there was a pedo ring running under that pizza joint? Ends up there is no "under" in that pizza joint, let alone the rest of the story. Those were real emails from a real leak, but they were heavily tampered with. There has been a couple of years to tamper with this laptop and online access already.
Keep in mind that faking evidence could also be done to benefit Hunter. If you mix in fake images into these leaks so that later they get disproved as fake, people will be more likely question the legitimacy of the real ones. Throwing people of the right track is like almost universal theme in detective novels.
As a thought experiment, imagine some cheating was done using fake signatures during the last election. If you plant and broadly circulate stories of voting machines being hacked, so that everyone pays attention to voting machines, only to later disprove that they were hacked. You've successfully managed to misdirect public opinion when it mattered the most.
These are all important questions. There is one way to answer them. Hunter Biden could dispute the contents of some content – any content – on this laptop. Has he done that?
Crimes have been committed against his property. I don't think it is up to him to answer to anything until that is resolved. Disputing something he doesn't even have access to is a guaranteed way to drag the situation further south, no matter what he says or does.
What seems to be coming out is that the laptop was missing for years before it showed up at the repair place. As such, there are a lot of alterations on it that occurred well after his last known access to it. There are also additions and deletions that occurred well after his last known access. So we know that anything that looks like evidence of something nefarious is tarnished. That's pretty much exactly what two unrelated forensics reports on the hard drive image said about it, so we have no choice but to take it as gospel unless a court (very unlikely) suggests otherwise.
So he really doesn't have anything to answer to, without investigating it himself first.
The vast majority of what people claim is on there are things we already know about him, and things he openly discusses in his book. So there is that, too. Currently his only accountability is to not add anything to the fire.
From what I have seen so far, everything people are going crazy about are things Hunter wrote about in his book. So at least people know he wasn't making that stuff up, I guess. We know he was addicted to crack and alcohol. We know he enjoyed the service of sex workers. We know that he thought he was outsmarting his father, Joe, at every turn. Some people call that the Crack Mentality. He wrote about that in his book, too. And he talks about it.
The skinny dipping video is a non-story. People do that sort of thing. There are beaches and resorts, and private back yards, where that kind of thing is done all the time. Hell, adults sometimes get "daring" and do that in more public places. But it doesn't usually reflect on an adult's parents. Unless of course there are videos of Joe following him down the slide (which would be hilarious), this was a nothing burger.
The one thing that actually connects directly to Joe Biden is the "Pedo Pete" contacts entry. The Tom Clancy character has already been described so we know where the "Peter" name came from. I think the Pedo part is in reference to that period when Republicans were calling Joe a pedo for his (albeit unusual) hair sniffing habit.
So none of this is actually shocking. It's turning Hunter bashing into a spectator sport, though.
If you have a look through the pictures and leaks, there are some absolute shockers within it, and given that it's already spread like wildfire across the broader conservative side of the internet, I think it's certainly worth engaging with from the side of outlets like the New York Times and the like in a bare minimum effort to do something constructive.