It would have to come from or be confirmed by the NSA. No one would be believe Assange by himself. Emails are trivial to fake.
>Do you think NSA does in fact release them?
I'd like to think so. But that would be difficult to do legally. And there is the minor issue of still public denying the existence of the mass surveillance program.
>Wasn't it shown that it had to be someone with direct access to the machines? Like a thumb drive?
It has been shown that:
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the files were copied using a tool that does not preserve timestamps. The Linux command-line 'cp' is the only one in common(ish) use with this property.
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that this happened at ~12MB/s, typical of USB drives.
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that they were later or concurrently copied to a FAT32 partition, which rounded all the timestamps to even numbers of seconds. USB drives, SD cards, etc still used this old Win95 era filesystem.
So it's constant with the mental movie of SR going into the DNC server room late one evening, rebooting the system with a live-USB Linux OS so at to not leave a trace, and absconding with the goods. But it's also consistent with some Russian hacker downloading them at whatever-speed over the Internet to his Linux machine and them copying them to a USB stick to be anonymously snail-mailed to Wikileaks.
Binney is probably correct. But I think he's overselling the evidence. And that annoys me because I see the potential for it to backfire.