U.S. government accuses Russia of hacking campaign to influence elections | Hacker News Reader

U.S. government accuses Russia of hacking campaign to influence elections

washingtonpost.com

168 pointsrunesoerensen335 comments

This is silly. Check out the two major "targets": Clinton's emails and the DNC. Read about how the Clinton server was "secured" (hint: comically). Read about how the DNC has been getting hacked: very simple phishing scams. Everything about the DNC screams shoddy. Why haven't the Republicans been hacked? This isn't a question about politics, its that the DNC clearly has some operational problems.

No, what this really is is an information campaign that both countries are playing against each other. You've got Crimea, Syria, other hotspots. Check out Trump's rhetoric: he admires Putin, he clearly doesn't want war. Check out Clinton's rhetoric: conflict.

Donald Trump being a racist Neville Chamberlain should make no one excited, but the neoliberal part of the Democratic party (which is clearly ascendant and has been for some time like the neoconservatives) doesn't like getting bullied in retaliation for being a bully.

What's silly is saying oh, since I read some stuff online about how crappy the DNC security is, I should probably chalk it up to some unknown actor for some vauge hand-wavy reasons instead of taking the statements of the the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security at face value.

Why would they lie? What gives you reason to think they (not the DNC!) be that colossally stupid? Why would you do anything other than take allegations of yet another Kremlin attempt to interfere in fair elections as seriously as the people of Europe and Ukraine have learned, the hard way, that they must?

> taking the statements of the the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security at face value

Frankly, it's hard to do that in a post-Snowden, post-Comey world.

Then use your critical thinking.

I'll repeat the question:

> Why would they lie? What gives you reason to think they (not the DNC!) be that colossally stupid?

Because it helps them justify a larger budget?

This is ridiculous. Why would they not lie? The US intelligence community appears to lie reflexively about everything. Why would anyone take their words at face value?

> it's hard to do that

I'd say it's completely impossible to do that :)

For what it's worth, and apropos this thread, I responded to your comment about this issue from earlier this week (sorry it took me so long).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12664172

Thanks for replying. I don't disagree with any of your conclusions but I'll reply in that thread with a brief comment in a moment.

There are some people that, if they told me the sky was blue I'd look around for unexplainable chromatic aberrations.

>Why would they lie?

Are you joking? Do you not see the massive political motivation there?

And of course, the US government has a great track record with telling the truth about security issues.

What's the political motivation for the DNI to lie? Clapper isn't really a politician and as far as I know he's not affiliated with any party.

> Clapper isn't really a politician

No one who gets any position that requires Senate confirmation is "not really a politician" (and, yes, that includes general/flag officers in the military) -- they may be purely bureaucratic rather than electoral politicians, but they are politicians nonetheless.

But, yeah, I don't see a lot of evidence that Clapper is a Democratic (or other) partisan.

Russia just told the US that if Americans attack Syrian troops, Russia will intervene on Syria's behalf. That should be the major story actually.

Of course I do, which is why I asked the 2nd question:

> What gives you reason to think they (not the DNC!) be that colossally stupid?

The political motivation is what would make lying here colossally stupid.

What would be the point in telling the truth? There is no truth, no lies, just carefully crafted words to pursue political agendas. I fail to recognize any difference between carefully selected truth and a lie. They all are used to achieve the exact same thing.

> taking the statements of the the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security at face value. >Why would they lie?

One reasonable reason for why they would lie is that their jobs are somewhat political and the person being targeted is likely going to be their boss soon. Claiming Russia is behind the hacks draws attention away from the hacks themselves, the shady campaign finance allegations they brought to light and the fact that Clinton was storing classified data in her home (I know the hacks were not of that particular server, but the two are still related.)

In a world where James Clapper is willing to egregiously lie, under oath, to congress, the default assumption that these people can be trusted to automatically tell the truth is suspect.

So far, the main evidence that I can find that links the hacks to the Russian government are two things:

1. Some of the documents had Russian metadata added to them. 2. The timing of the attacks seems to follow public holiday schedules for the Russian government.

These are both reasonable items of circumstantial evidence but it doesn't seem to be enough to accuse a foreign government directly.

Since this event has national political implications, and since the people making the statements have good reasons for being less than truthful, I am happy waiting for better evidence before making a decision one way or the other.

So The Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security are conspiring to provoke a serious intentional problem solely to distract from an already admitted to and apologized for personal server that is only important to Trump voters (ie won't change the election outcome)?

Doesn't that sound just a tad wild even for a conspiracy theory?

Yes, it is the "already admitted to and apologized for personal server" that this would distract from; certainly not the ongoing email leaks or content of those already released.

The server was a simple 'mistake' anyone could 'accidentally' make; I honestly think people don't understand how easy it is to accidentally configure a mailserver, happened to me just this morning.

>Doesn't that sound just a tad wild even for a conspiracy theory?

Sadly, it doesn't sound wild at all.

> ... how easy it is to accidentally configure a mailserver ...

Should be "... how easy it is to accidentally configure a Sendmail server..."

>So far, the main evidence that I can find that links the hacks to the Russian government are two things...

As well as, from the private sector:

Various forms of infrastructure correlation analysis [1]

Correlation with past Fancy Bear breaches [2]

Very similar phishing tactic of link shorteners to steal email credentials (see for details) [3]

Similar RATs and C&C protocols [4]

Google independently correlating attacks with what they believe to be state-sponsored TTPs [5]

Correlation between all targets associated with a shared set of indicators, and the Russian government's geopolitical goals [6]

Additionally, Kaspersky, a Russian infosec firm founded by Eugene Kaspersky (Kaspersky is highly suspected to have had Russian intelligence ties, so of anyone he would want to challenge the US's story here) and who broke several stories about NSA's attacks and tools, names one of the groups as CozyDuke. [7] They do not explicitly say they're Russian, but they agree that they are one of the groups responsible for attacks against the US government. Crowdstrike calls this same group Cozy Bear (Kaspersky named them CozyDuke after Crowdstrike already established Cozy Bear) and other firms strongly believe them to be tied to the Russian government. They do not provide any evidence confirming or denying attribution either way. If they had even the slightest inclination that it wasn't Russia, I imagine they'd be pushing it hard.

Plus, probably a whole bunch of classified information gathered by US intelligence agencies if they're willing to make this claim publicly now.

And anecdotally, everyone else I know in the infosec industry agrees it's probably Russia. No company in the US or in countries with governments that oppose the US have provided differing stories. Admittedly, the fact that it's mostly US companies tying it to Russia should cause you to be skeptical, but you can read their actual analyses and fact-check them easily. No competing firms or competing countries have questioned their facts.

That's not necessarily proof Russia is trying to influence the election, sure, but they're definitely trying to piss in the US government's cheerios at the least. And I wouldn't doubt NSA has made plenty of Russian infiltrations of their own in the past; probably how Kaspersky got their hands on some of their tools in the first place.

[1] https://www.threatconnect.com/blog/tapping-into-democratic-n...

[2] https://www.threatconnect.com/blog/fancy-bear-it-itch-they-c...

[3] https://www.threatconnect.com/blog/guccifer-2-0-dnc-breach/

[4] https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democ...

[5] http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/08/dnc-staffer-got-pop-...

[6] https://debugged.wilsoncenter.org/evaluating-the-dnc-hack-b0...

[7] https://securelist.com/blog/research/69731/the-cozyduke-apt/

> Plus, probably a whole bunch of classified information gathered by US intelligence agencies if they're willing to make this claim publicly now.

When they're willing to lie to our face under oath, trying to sell us secret evidence isn't going to buy much.

That's fair. Still, though, to formally make the accusation public knowing the severe diplomatic and geopolitical risks of lying about it means they're willing to withstand counter-evidence from Russia's own intelligence agencies and potentially huge political setbacks. Counter-evidence has yet to be provided.

All signs point to Russia; no signs (currently) point away from Russia; the public and private sector are in agreement; Obama is ballsy enough to call them out on it to their face; Russia has plenty of motive and more than enough talent to do it; it's probably Russia.

I'm not saying I trust the current administration or the intelligence community at all. I also wouldn't put it past Clapper to lie to other countries about various matters (just as he repeatedly lied and probably will continue to lie to the American public and Congress). Their job is to lie. I'm sure they lie about a lot of things.

But it would be dumb of them to make this particular accusation formal without pretty good proof, and all other independent analyses published support the accusation.

What does Russia care? If anything, they're probably flattered by the idea that they have so much influence. They're normally quite blunt: dropping polonium in someone's tea or pointing sniper rifles at the president of Georgia or whatnot. The idea that they'd merely throw out some dirty laundry that won't really accomplish anything seems more like an inoculation than trying to take someone out.

Good question. Maybe they thought what they found/leaked would be more impactful to the election than it was. Maybe there's some reason only Putin knows.

I have to question that given that one of the main revelations of the leak was how the DNC and WaPo are joined at the hip.

It's not about Russia, it's about smearing the RNC.

Why wouldn't they lie?

If the announcement came from, say, Major General Mark W. Westergren, USAF, Deputy Chief NSA/CSS, it would be more credible. He's not a political appointee, and should know in detail what's going on in this area.

Why would that make a difference? If the US government is so brazen to force a public official to lie about this, they would make him lie about it, too.

(There's almost no chance there is a conspiracy here. I think it is probably Russia.)

> If the announcement came from, say, Major General Mark W. Westergren, USAF, Deputy Chief NSA/CSS, it would be more credible. He's not a political appointee

I am aware of no commonly used definition of "political appointee" that does not include (among others) all officers of government that go through the appointment-by-the-President-and-confirmation-by-the-Senate process that applies to -- as well as to officials that get more media attention for this process -- all military officers (and with notably more personal attention in the process to 1-star and higher ranks -- generals and admirals.)

All O7- and above are not apolitical; all flag officers in all services must be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate at each promotion beyond O6. It's often a rubber stamping process, but it is there. Denial of promotion and individual intervention is relatively frequent.

Technically all officers also have this treatment but Senate oversight and intervention is much lower, and the batches are much bigger.

Also, a republican led incident response firm attributed the hacks to Russia.

> Why would they lie?

- To distract us from their own incompetence. - To avoid talking about the content of those leaks (from memory, the WaPo is an arm of the DNC that they hold illicit fundraisers with, the DNC funneled all of the money to Hillary from the outset so Bernie never had a shot, etc.) - To paint Trump as an agent of a foreign power (he's bad enough even after you filter out the nonsense).

They turned off logging on those servers to avoid transparency. If they want me to believe claims like this, I'll need to see the full server logs from the email server. Oh, wait, they destroyed those. How convenient.

My thoughts are that the elections will continue to get worse as long as we keep voting for lizards to keep the wrong lizard from winning. Anyone who tells you you're limited to the choices made for you on the ballot bears some personal responsibility for the mess.

It's comical that anyone claims US presidential elections are fair. I'm not picking a political side here, both parties are duping the voters.

Because Putin is actually actively trying to get Trump elected? Most likely because he has enough dirt on him to manipulate him.

> Most likely because he has enough dirt on him to manipulate him.

Or, you know, doesn't want WWIII, like the rest of us.

Could you count how many times in history yielding to bold advances of power hungry ruler served as effective deterrent to war?

You're right, Putin shouldn't stand by idly as America builds a missile shield around Russia to negate their ability to launch nukes...

We already have a deterrent for war with Russia. Russia knows this, I think the US is forgetting it.

A lot of countries forget a lot of things US & other major nuclear powers conveniently forgot how they negotiated Ukraine to surrender worlds 3d largest nuclear arsenal in exchange for "security guarantees". US is acting prudently in building up missile shield around Russia since in the event of russia collapse who knows what will happen to their nuclear weapons.

There was worry with the collapse of the USSR that Russian nukes would be donated to terrorists. It was a very common theme in 90s fiction. It ended up not happening at all, in fact the only major nuclear proliferation since then has been from Pakistan to North Korea, which is not mentioned by the western media because Pakistan is a very important ally against the Soviets. Wait...

The worry was more then reasonable the lucky outcome of worst scenario not materializing is not an evidence that there was no risk.

I don't even think a missile shield is necessarily bad, but it is a little troubling to see the attitude of taking offense that Russia just doesn't do what it's told. Forgetting Russia is a superpower too.

Should other countries have a plan in case of USA collapse? At least our codes got upgraded from a string of 0s... But I imagine there are some foreign officials worried. Russia has started calling America "not-agreement-capable" after recent events in Syria and a UNSC meeting.

Russia is not a super power and to be honest I am not totally sure even USSR ever was.

How are you defining a superpower such that Russia is not a member and maybe the USSR wasn't one?

I don't have a good definition but their ability to project power is/was greatly exaggerated.

Russia can do whatever it wants in its jurisdiction.

But it cannot be allowed to dictate the bilateral terms between other countries. If Ukraine or Poland wants to be in NATO, it's not up to Russia to say "no". Especially given the histories of those countries, and Russia's role therein.

And that's basically what that "OMG NATO is surrounding Russia" thing boils down to.

"it's not up to Russia"

It is if they have the power to stop it. The whole "moral justification" part is for plebes like us. If powers feel threatened by the movements of other powers in neighboring countries, they will act[1]. How they spin it to the public is secondary.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis#Quarantin...

Sure but it didn't get them very far

Which is why it is important to everyone else to stand together make sure that Russia doesn't have the power to stop it.

Ukraine never had nuclear weapons. Those where Russian nukes stationed in the regions of Ukraine.

The Kremlin had operational control of all nukes pre and post the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

There was no negotiations required to get them back except for a procedural "note of record". They would have been taken by force if necessary.

Have fun with your powertrip Russia was one of the republics of USSR, so far Russia has one success story in taking something by force and most likely it will play out very similar to the fate of USSR.

One would have thought that the Russians would know this better than anybody after the USSR's collapse but military might is meaningless if you don't have the economic might to back it up.

Russia is little more than a petro state whose economic fortunes are almost completely related to the price of oil.

Putin should be focusing on broadening the Russian economic base but is instead engaging in stupid military endeavors that are only kidding Russia friends. The EU would love to trade with Russia but his European tinkering had made it impossible for them to do so. The US is obviously not a fan. Give it a few years and he'll probably piss off China too (or they'll find the US and European relationships more useful) and the Ryssians will have little more to do than reminisce about the time they annexed Crimea.

Well as things stand now Russia's GDP is less than GDP of NYC :) So how they still believe they can be a super power is beyond me.China is far from being Russia's ally they are using the current situation to take over Russia's resources and make Russia extremely dependent. It looks like the end game is peaceful return of the territories that Russia annexed from China or installation of puppet government at some point.

People die and kill for just a few square meters of land, you're delusional if you think the Russian nation will just let itself be destroyed without fighting back. Nominal GDP is not a good way to measure wealth, GDP PPP, industrial output and other stats are better. Russia is not a superpower but no one can deny that Russia is an industrial power. Your hate of Russia disgust me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_first_use#Russia

Lets remember how things unfolded last time was there much fighting? The China has fairly simple working strategy they stimulate immigration into formerly annexed parts at current rates in a decade +/- they will be local majority population.

And what bold advances has Russia made?

They neutralised Georgia after Georgia attacked and killed several of their soldiers.

They seized (bloodlessly I might add) Crimea after the new western-imposed government threatened to end the perpetual lease of the Sevastopol naval base. I might also add that 'Maidan' was the 2nd western-sponsored 'revolution' in Ukraine in a decade.

Now Russia is defending a long-time ally in the middle east from western-backed terrorists.

Then there's also NATO advancing all around Russia, the various 'defensive' missile systems being installed by US-allied countries who happen to encircle Russia, etc...

> Could you count how many times in history yielding to bold advances of power hungry ruler served as effective deterrent to war?

The only one making bold advances is the US, and yes, Russia isn't yielding, and the US is making it a problem. But you're right, it is a deterrent to war - if a weak ruler like Yeltsin were still in power Russia would probably be in another dozen pieces right now, with wars raging in half of them...

>And what bold advances has Russia made? > They neutralised Georgia after Georgia attacked and killed several of their soldiers. > They seized Crimea after the new western-imposed government threatened to end the perpetual lease of the Sevastopol naval base

wow, what universe do you live in where conquering a whole nation is justified by a few lifes lost or stopping a commercial agreement? disgusting

> wow, what universe do you live in where conquering a whole nation is justified by a few lifes lost or stopping a commercial agreement? disgusting

And which whole nation was conquered?

You are spinning this.

A twice elected democratic government of Ukraine was overthrown in a violent coup, orchestrated from abroad, that used neonazis to do the dirty work.

When this happened, the people of [what was then called] the "Autonomous Republic of Crimea" voted in favor of leaving what was left of Ukraine and rejoining the Russian Federation - which they were originally part of for longer than the US has existed.

Ukraine as a country has only existed for 20 some years. Before that is was a loose territory of different regions. The East was mostly ethnic Russians, the West was mostly other groups. And Crimea was always Russian.

The majority of the force used in Crimea composed of Russian solders that stood outside the gates of Ukrainian military bases, blocking them from leaving, to carry out orders to stop the referendum... Which turned out to be over 95% in favor of rejoining Russia.

Ignoring all the bs in your post would you recognize the right of any of the Russian regions to vote for their independence? (as far as how things unrolled you just have to watch interviews with Igor Strelkov who hardly can be accused of pro western bias).

Facts are bs?

> would you recognize the right of any of the Russian regions to vote for their independence?

Has the Russia government been overthrown? When it is, lets talk then, because the answer will depend on the circumstances of the event.

BS is BS. Orange revolution rigged election and re-election during this time the president and parliament remained the same so no clue what you are talking about. 2012 rigged parliamentary election but people let it slide. The removal of Yanukovich from power constitutional majority of parliament (same members as under Yanukovich) voted to remove him. Your russian TV narrative is great but disconnected from reality.

USSR/Russian overthrows/subversions so many it's not even funny. From which year do you want to count? 1917 1920 1964 1991 1993 1996 2012

> A twice elected democratic government of Ukraine was overthrown in a violent coup, orchestrated from abroad, that used neonazis to do the dirty work.

Perfect example of russian propaganda.

> leaving what was left of Ukraine and rejoining the Russian Federation - which they were originally part of for longer than the US has existed.

Crimea was part of Russian Federation _for longer than the US has existed_???

Dude, stop smoking whatever you're on.

Western imposed government that's precious you get a cookie from Kiselev. If NATO wanted to destroy Russia it would have done so in the 90s.

Would it? MAD was still a thing back then. Hence the brouhaha over the missile shield...

Back then a major TV program crue unobstructed marched to the ICBM launch site and had a party there. The country was bankrupt if not for the western help it would have collapsed.

I heard (possibly tall) tales of Russian sniper rifles pointed at the president of Georgia at one point many years ago now.

Most likely? Based on what?

The more probable reason in my eyes is that criminal Hillary is more likely to engage Russia in conflict.

I mean Putin has dirt on Trump (based on Trumps shady dealings with Ukrainian and Russian Oligarchs)

The entire world has dirt on Clinton given her email server security.

The Putin/Trump friendship is largely invented by the media. For example when Putin supposedly called Trump 'brilliant' he used a Russian term that means 'bright colorful personality' not intelligent. Our media knows this but ran with the illusion of Putin admiring Trump because it serves domestic political talking points. Trump's whole platform of America First(tm) populist rhetoric would be detrimental to any agenda Russia has.

It seems to me that embarassing leaks are best distracted away from the political news cycle by manufacturing a sexy story about Russian interference instead of trying to spin the content of the leaks themselves.

I didn't say there was friendship. Trump and his buddy and partner Phil Ruffin are also partners and buddies with ukrainian oligarch Onyshenko who at present is hiding out in Russia as ukrainian parliament voted to lift his immunity (as a parliament member) so he can be prosecuted for his various schemes. He is most likely one of the key pawns for Putin for having influence on Trump. So far only minor things came out relating to Paul Manafort, I am guessing closer to elections something major related to the above connection will come out.

such lies.

1.) Paul Manafort, Trump's previous manager, received a cash payment of more than $12 million from Pro-Russia party in Ukraine

2) Donald Trump's campaign's ONLY intervention in the entire GOP platform was to remove anti-Putin language from the platform re: Ukraine.

3) Not only that, but just days before the RNC, Carter Paige, one of Trump's foreign policy advisers traveled to Russia and gave a speech attacking America's policies towards Russia, calling America's focus on democratization and fighting inequality "hypocritical."

4) The Intelligence community has confirmed that Russian Intelligence is responsible for the hacking of the DNC, which is an obvious attempt to harm Hillary Clinton's campaign.

5) Furthermore, Donald Trump called on Russia to release/hack any emails they could get their hands on.

6) Trump's campaign manager has ties to pro-Putin oligarchs who were propped up by the Kremlin. This isn't new information. As long ago as 2005, there were calls to McCain's people to try and do something about Manafort because he was working against American interests in the region.

7) Trump has praised Putin numerous times, calling him a far better leader than Obama.

8) Donald Trump has taken an anti-NATO stance.

I love how this comment has been down voted, even though it's much more truthful than the parent comment (which misses many other points as described above.)

Which points were missed

>campaign ties to the Kremlin

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-clinton-foundation-state-and...

>speeches in Moscow that benefit the Kremlin

https://www.quora.com/Who-paid-Bill-Clintons-2-5-million-com...

We can play this game all day. Both US major federal political parties are neck deep in Kremlin corruption and ties to each other. Trump has also never taken an 'anti-NATO' stance, he wants to shake down NATO countries for cash to pay for protection, and so did Dubya, who threatened my country into joining the Afghan military adventure with that whole 'you are with us or our enemy' speech.

The question is, is Russia trying to get Trump elected which is hard to believe since they enjoy a pretty good relationship with the Clintons, but who really knows I will concede. I'm also not buying the secret IOCs that "verify" state sanctioned involvement, they verify similar attackers, that use a Russian VPS.

You didn't even bother to refute the GP's points; rather, you go on some strange invective against both US political parties. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader of what this implies. (hint: it smells a lot like cheap vodka and balalaika on a polar bear)

Awesome compilation of facts. It's getting to the point that the only people who am ant see a Russia-Trump connection do so willingly.

I agree with your sentiment, but is Putin personally buddies with Trump, or is Trump's team just heavily invested in Russia?

The end result is basically the same, but I feel like the second is easier to prove (By your points)

I'm Russian, and I regularly follow Russian news. I can tell you two things.

One, coverage of Trump in Russian media (which is almost entirely government-owned or controlled) is generally positive, and that of Clinton is generally very negative. You can clearly see the political preferences they're trying to push.

And two, it's actually a fairly easy sell to the public, because it plays well into the "degenerate West" narrative that Russian propaganda has been using as one of its lynchpins for several years now. When Trump comes out and says that he's against political correctness and immigration, he becomes a part of that narrative, as some sort of valiant crusader against "degeneracy", and his popular support becomes a "proof" of its existence.

> Because Putin is actually actively trying to get Trump elected?

That's not the only plausible interpretation of the intervention. A desire for weak (perhaps particularly in terms of international standing) US leader could lead to efforts to specifically weaken Clinton's standing and nothing against Trump if Trump was seen as either unlikely to win in any case or already weak (or both). Or, perhaps, the overt manipulation on behalf of Russia that favors Trump is, itself, an attack on Trump's standing, while the overt content leaked is an attack on Clinton's.

A desire for Trump to win is not necessary to explain Russian intervention of the type that is alleged and apparent here.

If I were Putin I would be mad at Clinton for punking me re: Gaddafi. Russia made a good-faith attempt to stop Libya from descending into total chaos and well, look where it got them.

I think it was a timely reminder to Putin that NATO has no interest in playing nice with Russia, and informed his actions in Ukraine and Syria.

I am obviously biased being from Ukraine but Putin is being active mostly because he perceives EU as being extremely weak and US President as weak so he has a window to act. If he received some serious level of resistance (not military) he would quickly back down, but he only receives very minor resistance which is interpreted as farther sign of west's weakness.

Do you live in Ukraine now? What is the general mood in the different parts of the country? If you do live there I would like to read your opinions, there is so much spin and lies in the media (from both sides).

I moved to US a year ago, there is always spin in the media, so if I can help providing some useful information would be glad to do so.

I'm not sure that is true. It's a popular theory, certainly, but another popular theory is that he genuinely believes in all that Third Rome, Russia as savior of the world pseudo-religious bullshit. With the guy being in charge of the world's largest nuclear arsenal, this is not something that we'll want to test experimentally.

USSR had a much more potent military and I don't remember US employing a strategy of yielding to that.

No, but US didn't openly engage Soviet forces anywhere, either. In proxy wars, it was always covert for either side (as in e.g. Vietnam or Afghanistan), or sometimes both (as in many places in Africa).

I specifically mentioned non military response.

There has actually been an unverified rumor, ostensibly from Putin's inner circle, that Putin was extremely spooked by Qaddafi's eventual fate (to remind, he was tortured and raped with a stick before being shot in the stomach and slowly bled to death).

And when the massive pro-democracy protests against electoral fraud in 2011 election started 2 months later, he started to take it as a personal threat. The rumor claims that this emotional response was a significant contribution to the course change (towards more authoritarianism) that followed.

Dirt on Trump? The dude's 70 years old and fucking rich, there's no way there is enough dirt only known to Putin that could manipulate him. If there was such a quantity of dirt, it would have leaked beyond Putin, and we'd have heard about it. The most enjoyable part of this whole election is seeing so many otherwise smart people losing their minds and trying to find any way to keep Trump from the White House, disbelieve in his legitimacy if he actually wins, or just plain deny reality.

Donald Trump Makes History With Zero Major Newspaper Endorsements

Historical & Groundbreaking Endorsements Compiled:

The Chicago Tribune endorsed a Non-Republican for only the 2nd time in 163-years by supporting Johnson

The Atlantic endorsed a Presidential candidate for only the 3rd time in 159-years by supporting Clinton

The San Diego Union-Tribune endorsed a Democrat for the 1st time in 148-years by supporting Clinton

Detroit News endorsed a Non-Republican for the 1st time in 143-years by supporting Johnson

The Arizona Republic endorsed a Democrat for the 1st time in 126-years by supporting Clinton

Philadelphia endorsed a Presidential candidate for the 1st time in 108-years by supporting Clinton

The New Hampshire Union Leader endorsed a Non-Republican for the 1st time in 100+ years by supporting Johnson

The Cincinnati Enquirer endorsed a Democrat for the 1st time in 100+ years by supporting Clinton

The Desert Sun endorsed a Democrat for the 1st time in 90-years by supporting Clinton

The Dallas Morning News endorsed a Democrat for the 1st time in 76-years by supporting Clinton

The Tulsa World refused to endorse a Republican or Presidential Candidate for the 1st time in 72-years

The Houston Chronicle endorsed a Democrat for only the 3rd time in 70-years by supporting Clinton

The Richmond-Times Dispatch endorsed a Non-Republican for the 1st time in 36-years by supporting Johnson

USA Today gave a endorsement/non-endorsement for the 1st time in 34-years by opposing Trump

The Dallas Voice endorsed a Presidential candidate for the 1st time in 32-years by supporting Clinton

Wired endorsed a Presidential candidate for the 1st time in 25-years by supporting Clinton

http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/the-wrap/article/Donald-...

so everyone is stupid in your opinion?

Huh? I said otherwise smart people are losing their minds over this election, not that everyone is stupid. Your list underscores my overarching point though: there is incredible motivation from many parties and many parties with resources to see Trump fail, at every stage from the primaries to the GOP nomination to the eventual election in a month, that if there was real dirt on Trump that could make him dance like a puppet (or otherwise be manipulated, or tarnished so terribly), it's incredibly unlikely that such dirt would only be known to Putin.

This just proves to me it's the crooked Establishment and Elites vs Trump and the Middle Class, even if half of us will have to be dragged kicking and screaming 'racist!' and 'literally Hitler!' into our new Trump-built promised land.

These are great days we're living, bros.

Why do newspapers even have to endorse candidates at all? Isn't the idea of newspapers telling people how to think - and how to vote - somewhat Orwellian?

I'd much rather that people vote for Clinton because they made up their own mind and decided she was the better candidate, not because "well everybody told me to so I guess I better do what they say". That's scary.

Expressing an opinion is "Orwellian"? When you use words in such a manner they start to lose meaning. Maybe that already happened and led to your post.

No, I do not think it is a problem for any person or editorial body to share an opinion. I do not see it as a form of mind control to be exposed to other people's worldview. And Trump is exactly as hideous a human being as everyone has pointed out, besides being a deeply flawed candidate who is in over his head and has no capability to deliver on even a fraction of (what little) he has promised.

I started replying, but much of what I would have said is covered better by the USA Today post regarding their endorsement breaching their editorial ethics of neutrality:

"Endorsements might taint the objective reporting we were trying to do in the rest of the newspaper. Moreover, [USA Today founder Al Neuharth] felt it was elitist to assume we know better than everyone else when it comes to voting."

[1] http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/10/04/disendorsem...

wow, ever heard of freedom of speech? newspapers are free to express their own beliefs. you won't get that in Russia or China.

Could you define your intended definition for the terms "neoliberal" and "neoconservative"? Unfortunately these are bandied about so often that their definitions are hazy to me and seem subjective, so I don't feel like I can really reason about what you're saying without having the terms defined.

"Neoconservative" is often described as "liberals with guns". In the US the word "liberal" does not mean laissez faire oriented, it means leaning toward statism.

Neoconservatives are typically of the opinion that the US can effectively intervene in foreign politics through the use of force, and they view such intervention through a moralistic lens. They typically attempt to justify interventions by using typically progressive causes such as "freeing women from oppression under Saddam's rule" or preventing other illiberal practices from happening.

While the circumstances used to justify military action are sometimes true, the defining characteristic of the neoconservative view is that the US should be actively promoting "democracy", "freedom", "women's rights", etc. all around the world.

When it comes down to it, these things are typically used as an excuse for the US to destroy lots of infrastructure, kill lots of people, and attempt to enact regime change.

Some notable examples of neoconservative intervention are the US invasion of Iraq and the US invasion of Libya.

What's interesting is the way that highly politicized statements about other countries, their customs, and their leaders are taken seriously in the US. At this point, most American support a neoconservative view of the proper US role in world affairs, and the moral high ground the US has with which to judge foreign situations.

Statements made advocating a neoconservative approach to world affairs must be political (and persuasive) in nature, because unlike the traditional causes for war (invasion, invasion of neighboring territory, etc.) without quite a lot of convincing it would not be apparent that intervention would be helpful or the alleged outcome possible simply by projecting force.

> In the US the word "liberal" does not mean laissez faire oriented, it means leaning toward statism.

I'm not sure this is completely true. It's how conservatives frame liberals, but that's part of scoring political points. It does have some truth, but the mainstream of the Democratic Party, for example, is strongly free-market (ask the progressives, who despise them), and conservatives prefer a powerful government for security and law enforcement, religion (prayer in schools), abortion, etc.

I'm saying this in as non-partisan a way as possible: Encapsulating the opinions of a hundred million people in a sentence is tough, however. The best generalization I can come up with is that 'liberals' seek progress and change, and 'conservatives' seek to protect what they already have - and those perspectives apply to the economy, culture, and much more. Liberals want to develop clean energy to deal with climate change, conservatives want to preserve existing oil and gas industries. Liberals want to promote integration and the rights of minorities, conservatives want to protect traditional mores. Liberals believe the world can move forward and become more peaceful, conservatives believe humanity will never change and want military power.

Of course, very few real people actually fit those definitions.

I think that is a valid point.

My take is that both parties are both conservative by your definition... The majority of the policy objectives have to do with strengthening established interests and established money flows, and keeping established winners on top.

I also think both parties have a similar fondness for authoritarianism that you ascribe to conservatives.

On social issues there are bigger differences, but ultimately not many that would actually become law. When you filter the two parties alleged ideals and remove the things that would never become law, there is not much difference at all.

For instance, both parties strongly support the US foreign military intervention (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, etc.) and massive public/private partnerships for the financial services industry and healthcare industry. These industries (defense, financial services, healthcare) make up the majority of campaign contributions to both parties.

In a way I agree about similarities, but in a way enormous differences remain. I've heard the same general argument (usually from progressives) before your comment made me analyze it in more detail.

> keeping established winners on top

On one hand, the unfortunate nature of politics is that interests obtain power, and then use it to protect it. However, minorities such as LGBTQ people, Black and Latino people, etc. are not vested interests.

> both parties strongly support the US foreign military intervention (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, etc.) and massive public/private partnerships for the financial services industry and healthcare industry. These industries (defense, financial services, healthcare) make up the majority of campaign contributions to both parties.

(... and oil and gas.) Yes and no. Both parties supported Iraq and support defense spending, but Iraq was GOP led and the GOP advocates military force far more often. Both are influenced by powerful interests, but the Dems want to regulate financial services more, the GOP wants to cut back. There is a vast difference between the parties' budget plans and vision of government. Positions on climate change and immigration are night and day.

I'm not sure how to characterize it more generally though, where they are the same and where they differ. It's an important, interesting question.

> There is a vast difference between the parties' budget plans and vision of government

Yet no matter which party holds the presidency and controls the legislature, we end up with the same status quo year after year.

This would simply not be possible unless both parties were heavily invested in maintaining the status quo.

On the other hand, the best rhetoric to use when fundraising is about things that will not happen (overturning Roe vs Wade, for example) because then there is no accountability when the status quo continues. Not coincidentally, both parties use this particular issue as a major fundraising plank.

> we end up with the same status quo year after year

As I said, in some ways that is true and some ways it's not, but now we're going in circles.

The budget and economy, foreign policy (including wars), health care, and more were much different when Bill Clinton left office, when Bush left office, and now near the end of Obama's terms.

The courts have been and will be much different depending on who is elected. Congress acts very differently depending on which party controls it.

EDIT: LGBTQ rights are a big change of the status quo, as is a black President and changes in national health care. And before that, pre-emptive war, torture, Guantanamo, and mass surveillance were big changes. Congressional gridlock is ironically a big change, as is only 8 Supreme Court justices.

It would have been interesting to learn something about in what cases it's true about the status quo and in what cases it's not.

Don't forget that HRC and Obama both felt strongly (based on their faith) that marriage was between a man and a woman until popular opinion was quite a bit more progressive and there was no longer any political cost to being supportive of LGBTQ rights.

While politicians like to pretend that they are a source of progressive energy, any member of a major party will typically lag by at least several years on any important issue... until it's "safe" or "mainstream" enough not to threaten the status quo too much.

I simply do not believe that HRC and Obama suddenly realized that LGBTQ rights mattered, they are self-serving self-promoters who calculatingly switched their opinions only when it was advantageous to do so. Such horrible, unprincipled people do not deserve our support!

Liberals don't necessarily seek progress and change, those would be progressives, liberalism is concerned with personal liberties and equality. It's also important to note that liberalism does not have necessarily an affinity as far as the left/right wing goes, or to be more exact by definition liberalism is an intrinsically centric view.

Communism is just as enemy of liberalism as Fascism is and for all intents and purposes both modern and classical liberalism are by far more compatible with current US conservatism than with either of those. And historically the opponents of laissez-faire capitalism were the conservatives who did not like the political and social changes that economic liberalism brought.

However the GP is quite correct that these days liberalism in the US is not focused about it's original or historic core values, modern US conservatives are the ones who root for the causes of traditional liberalism.

Liberalism in the way it was adopted by the left in the US is very much focused on statism and socialism way beyond what one might be considered traditionally liberal, especially considering that historically liberalism fought against taxation (especially progressive taxation) and government intervention.

What was and should be liberal today in the US is more in line with the "libertarian" worldview, while the "liberals" are more in line with socialism and it's various offshoots.

This thread is exactly what I was looking to avoid, by asking for the definitions being used by aaron-lebo, who is not you.

All this stuff about "in the US" and "typically of the opinion" is exactly why it's important to know which of the many definitions for terms like this an individual is using when they write or say something. I'm not trying to litigate what the "right" definitions are! I'm trying to understand one person's communication.

That's why I answered it from my own perspective and was careful to contextualize it to American politics. If you don't like it you are free to ignore it.

Do the Republicans have better operational security for some reason? Especially with these being simple phishing attacks (which are targeted by their nature) I don't think it's an unreasonable to say that these are targeted.

I seriously doubt that. I've know a few people that have worked for either party in a technical capacity and I've never heard anything impressive about opsec. In fact, during the '08 election Palin and several Republican lawmakers were the victims of phishing or similarly low hanging fruit variety attacks. Maybe they're just lucky this time around. Maybe the DNC has higher value info, maybe they hired a few unusually careless people. It will probably take awhile to gain any real insight.

I'd guess that they just didn't release the republican national commmittee hacked fruit yet. If I was russia, I'd obviously hack both. In a normal year, probably the Russians would be for the dems. It's just this bizarro election year where the dems are the hawks.

Both parties have shifted dramatically towards hawkish positions since 2001, even in the face of waning public support for foreign adventurism. I'm curious to see how long it takes the pendulum to swing back.

Maybe the 2020s will see an end to support for war in the US, but it will take the continuing reduction of the old white conservative white people class, that seems to lose about 1% of the voting population a year. I'm a white person but not conservative, and I do come from that group. These demographic changes take a while to percolate through the political leadership, because the folks that liked military action will have to age out of leadership. So while I'm voting for Hillary, I wish she was a lot less a part of the conservative dems that generally support military actions.

I think what will probably happen is that the decreasing political power of conservative older (mostly white) people will lead to even more national extremism, and then the demographic changes will force the republicans to change to attract conservatives who aren't white. It saddens me to feel this is all but inevitable. I'm from a southern state but now live in one of those economically successful liberal coastal tech hubs. I wish there was more opportunity in the state I grew up in, but mostly I just see them wasting time and passing laws against gay people and transgenders in my home state.

Interestingly there is a similar issue facing China. If China and the US can avoid fighting a war against each other for 15 years, then the population of China will experience a movement to having many fewer workers per retired person, partly caused by having had so many more male than female children, they will get older. For example, see http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/chinas-t....

My fantasy then is China and the US don't destroy the world in a fight, and by 2030, China will be more focused on internal issues around retirement and economic retraction than trying to take small south China sea islands from the Philippines. Of course, US history shows that there's nothing that excites the population than a good war. Similar forces are at work in Russia too, with an aging population. And then China can gradually transition to being a real democracy (yeah, just like russia did, for a little while :-)). Putin is not going to live forever, but will he still be in power in 30 years?

Not really. You may remember Palin's email being hacked some years ago, for one example. Not much came of it because there was nothing very interesting in it.

This is more of an aside, but my understanding is that the DNC has an actual tech outfit and is doing a lot of stuff digitally, but a lot of RNC ops are just ad-hoc relations (which leads to their shittier ground game).

So there might not really be a big RNC target. Also Republican outfits tend to be naturally more leaky anyways, so there's probably not much to have leaked.

>Read about how the Clinton server was "secured" (hint: comically). Read about how the DNC has been getting hacked: very simple phishing scams. Everything about the DNC screams shoddy.

The worst thing is that you tend to get blamed for "victim-blaming" when you point this sort of thing out. No one ever wants to admit that they should have paid attention to security instead of jury-rigging things together incompetently.

People like to make analogies to hackers being street-robbers attacking interesting-looking defenseless people. If you suggest that people should have secured their infrastructure better, they look at you like you suggested that people walk around on the street with body armor. No! Most hacks you hear about are like if a bank kept everyone's money in a pile in the corner of the front lobby and insisted on an honor code to make people stay away from the pile. Yes, the thief that takes something from the pile committed a crime, but that bank was incompetent in securing what their consumers trusted to them and has a great share of the blame.

Ok, good analogy on how _businesses_ run their internet security.

However, the government, and the DNC too, are only interested in security when they can't just use their thugs instead. We're way behind in cyberwarfare precisely because our federal government thinks like a thug ... or in other words, like a big dumb criminal.

The DNC gets political mileage out of being hacked because they can create a controversy (blaming Russia) and look good (their opponent isn't as anti-Putin as they are).

Why should they ask their contractors for better security? They pay top dollar and are getting what they want: none of the hassles of real security, and if ... when they get hacked, they get to choose their response:

(1) blame Russia

(2) blame Trump

(3) blame the contractor

(4) blame the government

I'm sure there are more response strategies, I'm just too lazy to think them all up. The point is, they're not ignorant of their incompetence. No, they are very competent and manipulating the ignorant masses who will believe them when they announce "Russia did it!"

(Everything I just said applies equally to the R party as well.)

If the DNC, RNC, or federal government was even halfway smart in their criminal mindset, they'd secure their systems. Maybe plant some honeypots. Probably fire all the government contractors who are leaving them wide open.

DWS basically lost her job because of the leaks.

Your thesis: They purposefully left their security shoddy because maybe they'd get hacked and then blame Russia. This was worth the cost of all their e-mails being out in the open.

What do you think is more valuable? This accusation? Or not having to worry that every e-mail will be leaked.

Ocamm's razor (DNC is run by people with no notion of security and nobody cared) is a lot easier to believe, because it matches what basically every non-tech organization does.

It is not the argument that the DNC was so secure that only Russia could have owned it up. Literally nobody thinks that. Everyone agrees the DNC's security was comical.

The problem for Russia skeptics is that as easy as it was to own up the DNC, it is in fact very difficult to own it up in a way that points a finger back to Russia, because the "finger" in this case is a collection of IOCs forensically taken from previous attacks that are in most cases known only to law enforcement and to a few very reputable attribution firms.

Sabu disagrees, claims the methods and tools are widely shared on the same criminal forums http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/news/450298715/DNC-hack...

Well if SABU disagrees with Mandiant and CrowdStrike...

Hmm, their claims don't actually necessarily disagree that I can see. One says this RAT is used by Russians, the other says it's available to more than just the government.

If anyone truly wants to refute it, they just have to visit the forums SABU found and figure out if it's the right tool or not.

The RAT(s) used aren't the only IOC here!

True. But if they missed finding one thing that's publicly available, how can we say they missed nothing else? It's a big internet out there. I don't think anyone can say that things are unavailable, only that they haven't seen them.

> are in most cases known only to law enforcement and to a few very reputable attribution firms.

No one in eastern europe knows how to run a honeypot? Or the article is wrong that Russia attacked them? If they are attacking non government computers that doesn't include every candidate's website?

I have no question that Russia has infiltrated these machines and is as interested in manipulating elections as the US is capable, but manipulation through public disclosure of data is not a precedent Russia should want. I think the treatment of Russia is clearly a boogey man response and everyone would know that and know they needed such a deflection, if they were going to mount such a rough shod attack.

Forensics could only deal with a serial killer who collected used condoms to confuse them since he used too many. I have to wonder how many were cleverer and didnt make it into tales of the forensic experts.. Digital forensics can only recognize patterns and know what the chosen style was, which can at most eliminate amatuers that are too low value to attract attacks.

This is an interesting twist on the ninja defense ("I am a ninja, ninjas are undetectable, therefore I could not have done it") where Russia is simultaneously capable of hacking both US political parties without leaving a trace, but so stupid that they fell into some rando's honeypot --- and then the randos subsequently framed them.

We're getting into Calvinball territory here.

? You have strange beliefs about what is easy and what is hard on machines that are setup properly in advance and ones that are not. I could believe that the DoD can occasionally do attributions on attacks into its network. That poorly administered machines attacked over years contain sufficient data to identify that only one perpetrator took data and then which attack they were needs a lead actor like travolta.

(Nowhere did I say Russia attacks without traces, script kiddies just watch ninja films. They are among the tens of thousands of attackers that leave traces of attempts every few minutes. The only inherent advantage state attackers have is that they don't need to monitize so 90% of the ways they should get noticed are gone, leaving them to get noticed more by honeypots than people running machines on the open Internet with no specific plan to detect intrusions.)

I think this is a (rare) case where my beliefs are pretty much entirely within the mainstream of the broader infosec community.

Well it is a shame to see the industry converging on believing the seemingly impossible based on secret evidence when presented by people who have every reason to lie (or build their own overconfidence) about their capabilities. When I worked in infosec the dominant opinion was that anyone with extrodinary claims should be ignored until they presented means of community verification, not just more salesmen who said they can do it too.

The other problem that Clinton has is that her rhetoric is one of conflict, but when it comes to Russia the current administration is decidedly lacking in bite. So she's got to lean on the idea that Trump's "Putin is stronger than Obama" statement is dangerous, unpatriotic support for someone annexing countries and committing war crimes to paper over the fact that, well, it rather seems to be true given the way the US folds like paper whenever Putin annexes countries and commits war crimes.

I'm not entirely sure what your argument is here.

Yes, the Democrats servers may not have been well secured.

How does that affect the issue of whether or not the Russian state was responsible for the hacking or sought to influence the election?

Not the OP but: If the servers were poorly secured, the number of entities that could have hacked them goes from "nation states" to "damn near anyone who wanted to"

With a much larger pool of potential actors, it's more difficult to conclusively assume that exactly one actor is behind all of the hacks to the exclusion of all others.

> Not the OP but: If the servers were poorly secured, the number of entities that could have hacked them goes from "nation states" to "damn near anyone who wanted to"

The argument that Russia did it has never been that "only a nation state could do it" (which would leave lots of possibilities besides Russia).

It was that forensic analysis revealed specific indicators of specific threat groups that have been previously identified as being operated by specific components of the Russian government being the parties involved in the attacks. Motive is also a factor.

I mean, yeah, the door being unlocked means anyone could have gotten in without breaking it down and killed the guy, but its kind of natural to zero in on the guy whose fingerprints were on the knife and who had a motive to commit the murder.

Except, maybe China retrieved the emails, but was more careful to leave no trace and didn't say it. Which means they can have been used in order to blackmail people against the interest of the United States, without us knowing, which makes whoever didn't secure the server a treator.

What would you say if a guard let a foreign spy walk into the pentagon? Blame the spy?

>What would you say if a guard let a foreign spy walk into the pentagon? Blame the spy?

Yes, you don't get immunity from espionage if the job was easy.

And so what? Putin did not write the emails, maybe focusing on the leaks would be better than blaming Russia all the time.

"Check out Trump's rhetoric: he admires Putin, he clearly doesn't want war. Check out Clinton's rhetoric: conflict."

Trump is playing up the strong man role to the hilt. Clinton is playing up the strong woman role.

No matter how fond Trump is of another stereotypical strongman, do you really think that if he gets in to office and then tells Russia to get the fuck out of the Ukraine or Syria that he's going to take no for an answer?

Clinton will be much the same, except maybe not quite so batshit insane.

I'm afraid that no matter which candidate gets in to office, it's almost a certainty that there'll be war. We'll just be lucky if we scrape by without it turning nuclear.

Wait for this to be use on Sunday's presidential debate. The timing is also interesting: end of weekly news cycle, Friday afternoon. Hence, not much time to digest but enough to use for sound bites.

Hmm, a Friday afternoon dump like all the other ones...

> Donald Trump being a racist Neville Chamberlain

Neville Chamberlain? Really? And who, in this curious conception, fits the role of Hitler?

You presume Trump has a strategy in mind with regards to Russia. I think it's just as likely he has no intention of actually being president and just likes the attention he's getting, so he will say whatever he feels like in the moment. He thinks Putin is a macho strongman leader and that's the image he has crafted for himself, so it feels right to praise him and draw parallels.

Putin "doesn't want war"? He invaded and annexed another country.

GP clearly said Trump doesn't want war (implicitly, specifically war with Russia), citing as one bit of support Trump's admiration for Putin.

Not that Putin doesn't want war.

Ah! I mis-read. Thanks.

Do you know what his explanation for that is?

Do you care what his explanation for that is? He invaded and annexed part of another country.

Yes, I do care. I think morally there are circumstances where attack is justified, for example if one believes to be under very serious danger. Do you not agree with this? Another question is whether or not that is the case for this instance - we can discuss this too. But do you or don't you agree? And if you don't agree, do you apply the same standard to all the times our country invaded another?

This by the way was also the justification to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. Again, whether the fears at the time were correct (they weren't) is a different question. But if the mistake had been honest, I would say the attack would've been morally justified.

Do you agree? (I'm just trying to understand whether you really see the world in black and white in which case I'm not really interested in talking to you, or whether you can see that some times circumstances can be quite extreme which might call for extreme measures, in which case I'd be interested in finding out where we're disagreeing.)

No, I think annexing other countries is a pretty black and white issue.

"Why haven't the Republicans been hacked?"

Assumes the conclusion. Possibly they have been hacked, but the hacker sees no value in releasing that information. The publicly available data at hand may not be enough to reach a conclusion here.

its that the DNC clearly has some operational problems.

I wonder if there was no possible way to identify Russians (disregard the question whether the evidence is reliable and sufficient for a moment), or worse, if there was valid and sufficient evidence that the perpetrators were completely domestic, would this change the dialog at all? As in, would they suddenly start saying that they are taking measures to better protect government systems? Let's put aside the hope that they'd admit they screwed up and apologize. When was the last time you heard an intelligence official say that? Just hearing them say that they'll be securing systems better would be astounding for me, and I wonder what it would take to get an announcement like that.

> Check out Trump's rhetoric: he admires Putin, he clearly doesn't want war. Check out Clinton's rhetoric: conflict.

I am embarrassed to say, but you've just changed my mind to vote for Trump.

I'm fundamentally a single issue voter. I think the most important problem is one that no one in the world is talking about right now: escalation with Russia. The situation has slowly been getting worse since 2002 when the US withdrew from the anti-ballistic missile treaty [1] and is getting worse faster.

I also think there's a massive misinformation from the US government about its interactions with the Russian government. What I mean is that the narrative that the US government tells its citizens is that anything that the former does is very well justified (eg bombing Syria) whereas anything that the later does is just because Russians are evil (eg invading Ukraine). Yes, obviously the Russian government uses the same misinformation on their citizens, the difference is that the US is much more successful at this game at the international level. The problem with the citizens specifically is that if two governments are enemies and they have the support of their respective populations... you can imagine what a small leap it is to start war.

Yes, Trump is a racist dimwit, but I think that is secondary compared to the consequences of more war.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Ballistic_Missile_Treaty

What an incredibly myopic view. Trump plays conflict every bit, if not more, than Clinton; the one area Trump is less conflict-focused is Russia, whose semi-totalitarian leader Trump admires and would like to emulate.

[1][2] Trump is the only candidate who has openly floated the idea of using nuclear weapons. [3] Trump is ready to start a political pissing war with Mexico over a wall. [4][5] Trump wants to ban all Muslim travel to the US, and profile all US Muslims. [6] Trump, the "Law and Order" candidate, would prefer to convict minority men based on police testimony alone, never mind the courts [7] Trump is more militaristic, by his own admission, then George W. Bush [8] Trump called for direct intervention in Libya just like other leaders [9] Trump basically wants to steal oil from Iraq using our troops as the muscle [10] Trump is doing more sabre-rattling with China than Clinton, by a mile [11] Trump wants China to invade North Korea, or just have its leader assassinated

Trump, the anti-conflict vote? He makes everyone an enemy, including and especially our own citizens. His followers like him because he's a strongman, a bully. But sure, he's the anti-conflict vote because he admires Putin. Never mind the fallout for everyone else, especially poor, non-white citizens.

I suppose if you think an actual war is likely or possible with Russia then your fears are founded. That seems more than outlandish to me, and far from justification for putting a racist, misogynist bully in charge or the country and nominating Supreme Court justices.

--- 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCHQPCXbt1w 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVTAaJ1fzfc 3. Do you need a citation for this? 4. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/07... 5. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/06... 6. http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/donald-trump-s... 7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PakHtuTrvV8&feature=youtu.be... 8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnZFQiDR4hQ 9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZxD_RFvXpA&feature=youtu.be... 10. Watch the debates 11. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/09/27...

Dude, you didn't need all the citations. I am very keenly aware of every stupid thing Trump has ever said, probably. And I repeat that all of those things are secondary compared to this.

Unfortunately, I don't think war with Russia is outlandish at all. Like I said, for the past 10 years Russia has been repeatedly saying that the US's missile "shield" is threatening their nuclear capabilities (please please see [1], or you won't understand where I'm coming from). Obviously, there is the question of: do they really believe their nuclear capabilities are threatened, or are they just using that as a talking point? If they actually do, that's by far more dangerous than anything Trump can do. You know what happens if you corner a rat, right?

All I said is that the above is more important than Trump's idiocy. I'm not sure why you think this is a myopic view. It's not like I don't know about the things you mentioned. I know about them and took them into account. In fact, I've always said I'd vote Clinton because Trump is too much of a wild card. But actually... as things are, I'd rather take the wild card.

[1] If you're actually interested in informing yourself about this, start with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqD8lIdIMRo The bit I'm talking about starts at 4:00 to roughly 9:00.

1.) you're assuming voting for hillary is automatic war with Russia. and would vote based on that single fallacy. (very doubtful you're american anyways)

2.) You, being "single issue" voter, ignore that trump is a psychopathic, women-hating, racist, tax-dodging, russia-affiliated antichrist who will bring shame and destruction to America.

3.) You are so afraid of Russia (they're failing economically, politically, and technically) that you would vote a madman into the US office. You are the type of people that would vote in Hitler.

> 1.) you're assuming voting for hillary is automatic war with Russia. and would vote based on that single fallacy.

No, I'm assuming that hillary would be very similar to obama and bush. You're the one making the wrong assumption.

> 2.) You, being "single issue" voter, ignore that trump is a psychopathic, women-hating, racist, tax-dodging, russia-affiliated antichrist who will bring shame and destruction to America.

Like I said above, I don't ignore any of the things you mentioned, as I've been following the subject extremely closely. In all likelihood I'm better informed about how flawed Trump is than you are.

> 3.) You are so afraid of Russia (they're failing economically, politically, and technically) that you would vote a madman into the US office (doubtful you're american anyways)

I'm not afraid of Russia, I'm afraid of war. War isn't "we win they lose". More likely, we both lose. In any case, you're mistaken in saying that they're failing in any of the categories you mentioned. Russia was failing in the 90s. I guess you haven't been keeping with the world outside of your bubble since then.

> You are the type of people that would vote in Hitler.

Aright buddy, just lost interest :D

>hillary would be very similar to obama and bush

lol you lost my interest here too. anyone who thinks obama and bush are the same has no clear grasp of reality

Well, they're very different in terms of domestic policy, but not in terms of foreign policy.

> No, I'm assuming that hillary would be very similar to obama and bush.

It's worse than that. If Hillary was going to be similar to Obama, I'd be ok (not happy, but ok) with electing her.

Based on the available evidence though, Hillary is actually far more hawkish than Obama. She was the one pushing for intervention in Libya, Biden was entirely against it - and IIRC Obama has mentioned that as possibly the biggest mistake of his administration. She's also been repeatedly posturing for more intervention in Syria, as if that place isn't enough of a clusterfuck already.

She appears to lack any kind of introspection whatsoever about use of force (look up her comments on the aftermath of Libya...), and worse, appears to view it as some kind of a dick measuring contest (remember the whole "under sniper fire" thing? She clearly has a need to be seen as appearing tough...).

Frankly, I don't know which of Hillary or Trump is more scary. As flawed as Obama has been, I would vote for him in a heartbeat over either of them. Or Romney, for that matter (and I was a Bernie supporter, so that should tell you something).

I honestly cannot agree with your reasoning or conclusions at all. You'd choose to vote for the unpredictable bully that isn't totally against using nukes because he admires Putin; nevermind his aggressive rhetoric in literally every other sense (rivals, allies, and our own citizens alike). That's the anti-war vote? It's obviously your vote, but good grief, I can't believe you'd find that more comforting. So yes, I find your position very, very, very myopic.

And just to get ahead of it: I've seen that video. I'm familiar with the topic. I think the idea of an actual war with Russia is very outlandish.

Well, I hope you're right.

I think that we humans find it hard to conceive such humongous changes in the world around us. We're used to a certain background in our lives and under-estimate the likelihood of any scenario that changes that a lot. Evolutionarily this makes sense: if you always think that the things you've never seen changing will never change, you will be right almost all of the time (and I could just as well call you myopic for not believing _my_ scenario).

But at the same time if instead of going with your instinct of how likely it is that such an outrageous scenario would occur, you instead follow simple game theory, there is only a few ways out of this situation, at least that I can think of:

A) The USA says We acknowledge your concerns and and actually, we're not gonna build that shield after all (or some variation of this)

B) Russia says Actually, I'm just gonna lay down and be bullied into irrelevance

Do you see either of these happening? Things will have to get much worse before either of these happens. Do you see other alternatives?

Yes, of course there are other alternatives. This isn't "simple game theory", this is the real world. Economies are not independent; a declaration of war against a major trade partner is effectively a declaration of war against yourself. There are thousands of unknowns.

The most obvious potential solution is some sort of tit-for-tat diplomatic agreement where both sides appear to win while both lose something. If your requirement to believe that is likely is for me to draft the proposal then your fears will be validated because I'm not qualified to do so.

To me it is more than far-fatched to believe 1) that the end-game of a highly multi-faceted socio-political issue has only a dichotomous outcome with no middle-ground, 2) that the "Law & Order" bully candidate would abandon the missile shield even though he admires Putin, or 3) even if the worst comes to pass that Russia would put itself into a position to fight the world's strongest military + an entire continent it neighbors, all with a questionable economy.

Of course you could call me myopic for not believing your scenario. 9/11 Truthers could say the same. But I'm not the one betting on a super long-shot hypothetical while ignoring the near-certain other negative outcomes that a Trump presidency brings. To ignore those factors can only be done from a place of privilege where his white male supremecist rhetoric isn't interpreted as a personal threat to your own well-being.

> Of course you could call me myopic for not believing your scenario. 9/11 Truthers could say the same.

Dude, no need for this style of conversation.

I wasn't being aggressive or an asshole, I was being literal. Everyone can accuse everyone else of being myopic when they feel their perspective is reasonable, justified, and un-shared. It wasn't my intention to insult, but I see how it could be taken so. I offer my apologies.

> I am very keenly aware of every stupid thing Trump has ever said,

(Cited from another reply.) This misses the point. Most importantly, like Clinton (but really far MORE than Clinton), nothing he says has any particular aim other than objective emotion of the moment (except in the rare case there is another equally vacuous cause). Nor can you reliably predict behavior based on past statements by presidential candidates. It's a joke that people citing these clowns have clearly not understood. That being said, Trump likes economic and populist conflict, not actual war. He defers to experts for physical conflict and has no incentive to initiate as he is fundamentally an egoist. Would he rather spend 100 million on moving some ships around, or put his face on Rushmore. It's that simple.

So you're kind of agreeing with me...?

As far as I know from the debate, Trump does not adore Russia. ( I guess he does not want to blame and name and shame. ) Trump wants to stay ahead of Russia in nuclear capability. He does not want to strike first.

When I heard in the debate what Clinton wants; She wants to let Russia improve their nukes but not the USA's. Clinton Likes to call out Russia in public and calls for responses in public. ( I think calling this out in public isn't the most tactical thing to do, its not called poking the bear for nothing )

But, I am aware of Trump saying contradicting things. So its going to be a surprise.

> As far as I know from the debate, Trump does not adore Russia.

Yeah, who knows, the guy is a moron, I'm not sure he himself knows what his position on the subject is.

> When I heard in the debate what Clinton wants; She wants to let Russia improve their nukes but not the USA's.

That definitely does not sound like Clinton. Reference?

> Clinton Likes to call out Russia in public and calls for responses in public.

Putin does that all the time too. I think they're both posturing for their domestic audiences, who want them to be strong against the "enemy".

I am very sorry, You are right to correct me Clinton did not say that. (however I did not really get a clear answer on how she feels, but that might be my lack of understanding her)

Trump might be a moron in your eyes, I think he is very untalented in the political way of talking.

I don't think being comparable to Putin is good or smart.

> I don't think being comparable to Putin is good or smart.

I get what you're saying, but this has been textbook politics since forever. The most reliable way to rally people around you is convince them there is a great danger in X, and only you can save them from X. Every single politician does it. And it's easier if X is external. Clinton does it with "the Russians", Putin does it with "the Americans", Trump does it with "the Muslims and the Mexicans". In the UK Nigel Farage does with Europe/the immigrants.

I'm not saying that aren't some times external dangers. But these four characters I mentioned use this just as a political tool.

And this is was brought me to what I wrote at the top of this thread. This is very concerning especially in the case of Clinton/Putin, because when they've been using each other as a political tool eventually your population have been fed so much shit for so long, they actually hate the enemy country. And when that happens it gets even easier to start war. And that is really concerning :-/

It's so annoying how journalists refuse to link to the source documents they are reporting on. Here it is, https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/215-pr...

Not that it contains that much information. I would have liked to see a more technical breakdown of their reasoning.

It saddens me that this is the meat of the story and it's halfway down the page right now. Have an upvote.

Are news like this a sign everyone is worried Trump might win so they are pulling all stops?

What's next, Trump is a Russian agent planted years ago and now taking over the country.

> The denunciation, made by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security,

Don't know about others, but I don't really have much faith in the "Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security". Somehow they let the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management... hack happen, they are obviously incompetent even to protect our govt's data. I simply don't trust their "expert" opinion.

It is also funny how there is not much talk about the things discovered in the email. All attention is drawn to the boogeyman. It mentions how Wasserman-Schultz was forced to resign. I think it could have gotten a bit more in depth into what was embarrassing there... but that would not be playing according to the script probably.

> What's next, Trump is a Russian agent planted years ago and now taking over the country.

I suspect it's more a warning to Russia that the NSA are now watching the election systems and stand ready to intervene if they see something strange going on.

I like to trust things my government says, but I have doubts about this for two reasons. The administration is pulling out all the stops to help Clinton get elected and she is a hawk vs. Russia and Trump is probably less so.

Also, I do't really know for sure, but I think the Russia and China are most interested in growing the Eurasia economy in the direction they want, and in the USA we are putting most effort into maintaining our sole super power status.

Maybe I am not critical enough, but I think that USA, Russia, and China are all doing the right things to look out for their own self interest. It all seems to make sense.

> I like to trust things my government says, but I have doubts about this for two reasons. The administration is pulling out all the stops to help Clinton get elected and she is a hawk vs. Russia and Trump is probably less so.

The first of these reasons is arguably a statement of a reason to be skeptical about this statement, but the second is simply a statement of one plausible motivation for the Russians to do exactly what the government is alleging that they have done.

I agree most countries do what is in their own interest, at least as they perceive it. I'm sure they considered whether they should wait a month for the election to be over, but this is serious business. I don't think the us govt hacked the dnc. We need to do something to discourage this. I don't think we can do much or anything though.

The US itself has become slightly less shy recently about it's efforts to manipulate elections. With high likelihood, direct criticism back and forth between these two superpowers is likely to inform those in smaller countries that their votes are subject - as they have been for a long time - both domestic and foreign manipulation, some of it very clever and very deniable.

In this case it should be introduced as a concept in civics courses that as an individual your vote is not 'your own' and an expression of your personal thoughts, but that your vote is a commodity that other people are trying, covertly, to convince you to spend certain ways. Civics courses would do well to train citizens not to believe their own states, not to believe major news outlets, and to otherwise vote when they feel they've come to be able to identify the discrete manipulative narratives coming from various political information warfare centers.

Even if attribution of these attacks to Russia is correct, I think it is fair to say that such poorly concealed covert efforts would be Keystone Kops compared to the color revolutions. And no doubt were the US to promote a color revolution somewhere in the world today, cracking local systems would be part of that effort.

An aside: I've come to the conclusion that 1) we end up in the same threads, and 2) we almost consistently agree on these issues.

> Civics courses would do well to train citizens not to believe their own states, not to believe major news outlets, and to otherwise vote when they feel they've come to be able to identify the discrete manipulative narratives coming from various political information warfare centers.

Never will this happen in public educational institutions. There is too much risk, and Civics courses generally glorify American history and then explain that the current electoral system works just the same as it did with the founding fathers, and that it has scaled miraculously with the country's population, demographics and wealth. A "realistic" Civics class would likely serve to alienate young voters, lead to yet more political apathy, or, in the case of the really angsty, lead to situations of civil unrest.

> Never will this happen in public educational institutions.

To disagree, this was my experience at HS and college.

A lot of my US history classes involved covering the history of corruption in the US. As an example, we took a look at the funding sources for the revolutionary war. That was a very direct and immediate way to deflate belief in everyone being involved solely for the sake of liberty.

Add on top of that a Philosophy class that had us apply formal logic to the statements of politicians. One of the most amusing classes I've ever had, I got to diagram out political speeches and see that they, quite literally, equaled out to null!

> To disagree, this was my experience at HS and college. A lot of my US history classes involved covering the history of corruption in the US. As an example, we took a look at the funding sources for the revolutionary war. That was a very direct and immediate way to deflate belief in everyone being involved solely for the sake of liberty.

If you don't mind me asking: when and where did you graduate from high school and did you learn this in a Civics course or an American History course? I'm curious if it's a generational thing, or a geographical thing (ie coastal vs midwest, rural vs urban).

Seattle WA. Experiences described are from College, my HS courses also encouraged lots of free thinking, but my most memorable HS courses are from European history. The often chanted refrain in class was "OLD DEAD WHITE MEN", in response to "and who did this?" That and "The holy roman empire wasn't holy, wasn't roman, and wasn't much of an empire."

Then again, part of the class was taught in relationship to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, so the teacher was a bit eccentric. ;)

The US tampers with elections openly all over the world including in the election of so called allies.

This isn't a jab at the US just a simple fact, swaying the local political opinions of both your allies and your enemies is a pretty standard practice in geopolitics and diplomacy.

Right. We shouldn't pretend that the US doesn't do this to other countries. What happened in the Ukraine, for example, almost certainly wasn't an organically grown domestic insurrection. That was nurtured by NGOs and foreign intelligence agencies.

Nonetheless-- it's one thing when the superpowers do that to smaller countries, and another, far more dangerous thing when they start doing it to each other. We're in uncharted territory here. As you saw in the Ukraine (and Syria, and Egypt, and so on and so forth), when the political system fails, you have violence, and the US isn't going to stand by and watch Russia destroy the integrity of our elections. And our means for retaliating are untested, and the risk of escalation is pretty high.

> What happened in the Ukraine, for example, almost certainly wasn't an organically grown domestic insurrection. That was nurtured by NGOs and foreign intelligence agencies.

And it happened twice I might add...

> and the US isn't going to stand by and watch Russia destroy the integrity of our elections

To be fair, exposing the corruption of one of the major parties isn't exactly going to 'destroy the integrity' of your political system. If anything he's doing you guys a favour.

Also, the US has been trying to manipulate elections in Russia for years. It hasn't worked yet because all the opposition to Putin are a bunch of clowns, and because enough Russians still remember the 90's.

They're hacking into election systems as well, not just the DNC: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-i...

"Russians".

They could just as easily be hackers looking to sell to the highest bidders, criminals, etc... The fact the US even allows electronic voting machines is beyond absurd. Honestly, living outside the US, your whole election system looks like a joke.

Hackers don't tend to target states these days unless they have a state to hide behind, hence being state sponsored.

If you are a bored teenager in Poland you'll get to to join the mile high club on one of the fine aircraft of Premier Executive Transport Services or whichever front the CIA uses these days.

If you are a bored teenager in the horn of africa you are likely to be placed at the wrong end of the sensor to shooter loop of a UAV.

Governments are very good at tracking down intrusions these days, and there is nearly no way of selling this information without being caught, intelligence agencies monitor all the channels, markets, and they operate both undercover agents and informants within virtually any social ring that hackers hang out in.

Cyber Crime pays when the risk is considerably smaller than the reward, just like any other type of crime, steal money from a bank and while you'll be hunted down by law enforcement you won't be hunted down by spies and the military, and since the money is insured no one really cares enough to invest too much effort into tracking you down in the first place.

It was absolutely domestically grown -- had the foreign intelligence and NGO's been as strong as you suggest, things would have never gotten to that point, as the money and effort spent on influence by Russia absolutely dwarfed everything else: Ukraine has never been high on anyone else's radar.

The reason Russians have not been particularly successful is mostly due to certain widespread delusions in Russian society, that result in people at all ranks seeing the entire Russia/Ukraine split as unnatural. What I mean is, when you are coming from a prior that there were no underlying differences in 1991, and Ukraine before then was simply a province of a Russian state operating under a different name, of course any disagreement could only be seen as a result of external meddling since that time. Of course, when this view conflicts with reality, the failures are attributed to foreign meddling being stronger than unticipated...

You would be surprised https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Endowment_for_Democra...

And this is just one NGO.

The "West" forced Ukraine to choose between it and Russia, including the looming free trade deal with the EU being contingent on that.

There is/was also a plan to bypass the Russian controlled oil and more importantly natural gas pipelines that are keeping the lights in Europe both the conflict in the Ukraine and the previous one in Georgia are directly connected to the proposed caspian pipelines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Caspian_Gas_Pipeline

While you can make Russia look antagonistic it is just as easy to make the west look that and even worse, the west effectively violated the non-formal agreement that maintained peace after the fall of the soviet union and that is that the former states would effectively be a buffer zone.

The EU and NATO have (and it is very important to note that Russia does not distinguish between the two, and effectively nor should they) been expanding into these buffer states and worse they are expanding into the caspian region and beyond leaving Russia effectively surrounded.

Russia is a landlocked country, it always was, it always was missing a single important thing and that is a warm water port in an open sea, this is why Russia invaded Manchuria/Korea multiple times since the 19th century and this is why Russia would not tolerate any loss of it's ports in the black sea or syria.

The black sea is enclosed by the bosphorus which controlled by NATO, Kaliningrad is a tiny enclave surrounded by NATO and any ship sailing out of it would have to go through the fjords and the northern sea another NATO controlled territory, on the other side of the globe Vladivostok is not a warm water port (although global warming might help Russia with that problem soon enough), effectively Russia has to rely on the "kindness" of NATO to allow it's ships to get out into the ocean, this puts them at a huge disadvantage.

Another key aspect of Russian geopolitics is their "monopoly" on gas pipelines into Europe both from their own reserves and those coming from the caspian region and beyond, this is what keeps Russia relevant and what gives them some power over what is going on around them.

With NATO effectively being able to shut down all Russian sea travel and make Russia's only "diplomatic tool" other than it's strategic nuclear arsenal irrelevant we are not heading into a pleasant direction.

> With NATO effectively being able to shut down all Russian sea travel and make Russia's only "diplomatic tool" other than it's strategic nuclear arsenal irrelevant we are not heading into a pleasant direction.

Why is Russia entitled to imperial pretenses when they are no longer an empire?

I get what you are saying and it does make sense up to NATO is making territorial hay while the unipolar sunshine lasts, but where it stops making sense is why is Russia entitled to buffer zones etc.

Why isn't Poland entitled to the same, for example. Or should people across the water from St. Petersburg complain about Russian naval activity so close to them? We would laugh at all this since (reality check) they are not "powers".

Russia demands to be treated like a "power", its propaganda sites are entirely silent as to why every nation that was liberated from USSR's empire is more than grateful for having their nomnal independence back, etc.

The second thing to note here is that it is Russia, Russian propaganda sites, and a minority western critical voices that have raised the stakes from literally some minor local action to threats of "Nuclear War" and "WWIII".

Regardless of how one feels about the clearly aggressive actions of the West in the past 2 decades, to mistake Russia for some kind of peacenik nation, or the Russian Yoke as a gentle alternative to bankster international is a gross error, in my opinion.

I'm not saying they are entitled to anything; it's just the other side of the picture.

You are also using an incorrect analogy Poland is already entitled its part of NATO, Russia isn't.

Real world politics are about interest and power, there are no absolute and objective right and wrongs at these levels, no one claims Russia is a peacenik nation, most nations aren't.

As for what and what does not make sense to you; I cannot help you in this regard mostly because you seem to treat a statement of a condition as a position.

This is reality we treat entitlement today on different aspects one of which is ones ability to enforce their claims to what they are entitled too.

Russia due to their limitations tend to do it asymmetrically, hence Russian nuclear development in response to ABM deployments.

This hack is actually fairly unique because in the manner to which Russia chose to respond; the US tampers with their local geopolitical situation Russia tampers with US elections.

Likely it's due to the fact that there aren't any proxies of note that Russia can currently influence but it's an interesting departure from common discourse nonetheless.

You don't need to try hard to make Russia look antagonistic - it's perfectly capable of doing it on its own. Here's one example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkMT_oLempE

Posting a video like that without context (if you even have any available) is inflammatory and unhelpful. Is there really an expectation that an english speaking viewer can parse the relevance of a video clip like that? As if we don't have our own media personalities saying wild things about foreign nations? Or presidential candidates (with significant national support) talking about using nukes?

The guy is a senior news host, and this was ostensibly a news report in a prime time news block - on an officially government-owned and operated TV channel, no less.

I guess I don't see how dumping DNC databases as "Guccifer 2.0" is really doing much negative influencing if it is actually providing legitimate information and making the process more transparent to American voters. Isn't transparency into the political process a core part of what makes a democracy? The parties should want to be as open as possible, ideally.

This feels like a deflection and a way to point the finger politically. If they're causing a denial of service on election day by taking out voter registration databases, rooting those shitty Diebold machines, etc., well, that's really influencing the election.

If the Obama administration is going to complain to the public about Russia fucking with American elections, they should be just as willing to retaliate for it in some public manner; if that's diplomatic, so be it in the realm of the UN/ICJ. IMO the foreign policy strategy against Russia is spineless, and Russia/Putin takes advantage of it; see Crimean aggression, the Syrian "ceasefire", this Guccifer nonsense. I don't personally have a solution, but showing teeth at Putin doesn't really seem to hinder him. Sometimes you need to bite so people know you can and will make good on your threats.

I see a _lot_ of comments here describing these email leaks as 'facts' or 'not necessarily Russian propaganda'; you've completely missed the narrative here, allow me to correct the record.

These emails were _illegally_ hacked! If you had a _shred_ of dignity you wouldn't even look at them. It should be illegal.

If you take any of the information contained in those emails as 'evidence of wrong-doing' you're only playing right into Russia hands.

This kind of deplorable meddling in another nation's election by leaking 'actual emails' is exactly what we need to be vigilant of.

Such blatant targeting of the most transparent administration in history demands recourse!

With such heated topics, I struggle to detect sarcasm.

> These emails were _illegally_ hacked! If you had a _shred_ of dignity you wouldn't even look at them. It should be illegal.

The bigger point is that you shouldn't regard them as credible without corroboration. It's very easy to make things up.

We accept the truth of the Snowden documents because every time we can cross-check the information, it proves correct.

Yes, the DNC wouldn't have called these out as fake the second they dropped were they actually fake.

C'mon son.

Obama administration's approach to conflict has generally been "they are making threats and can escalate them, if they do, we would not be willing to respond in kind, therefore let's do nothing and avoid conflict, and hopefully eventually things will be nice between us again, because somehow magically history is on our side". This is quite a radical departure from the "peace through strength" approach that has kept the US safe for the 60 years before that.

Of course anyone who's ever gotten into a fight in middle school can see the fatal fault with this line of thinking :(

> Of course anyone who's ever gotten into a fight in middle school can see the fatal fault with this line of thinking

Yes. This line of thinking is complacent, and it is how benevolent empires fall to ruthless conquerors.

There's no such thing as a benevolent empire

> Of course anyone who's ever gotten into a fight in middle school can see the fatal fault with this line of thinking :(

Of course, anyone who has grown up around gangs can see the fault in "We must retaliate for all insults or they will quit fearing us and take our territory." Occasionally, you wind up with everybody dead or in the hospital.

Fortunately, our leaders are mostly adults who understand that there is nuance to diplomacy.

"Peace through strength" very nearly turned the Cuban missile crisis into WWIII.

In the real world things aren't black and white, they're often nearly indistinguishable shades of gray and at the nation state level nobody has clean hands. "Peace through strength" is more often than not an excuse to ignore the many reasons one's own side has been escalating conflicts.

If we actually want peace, we need to get serious about deescalation, and the nature of world politics - and endless series of tit-for-tat - means that someone has to go first.

Obama appears to get this. Hillary doesn't. Who fucking knows what goes on in Trump's head...

> If the Obama administration is going to complain to the public about Russia fucking with American elections, they should be just as willing to retaliate for it in some public manner; if that's diplomatic, so be it in the realm of the UN/ICJ.

I suspect this announcement is the first step, actually. You don't call someone out publicly unless you plan to go somewhere with it.

My suspicion is that the announcement was probably timed with some hacking activity of our own so Russia will get the message that they are playing against a dangerous opponent.

Asymmetry. Asymmetry of "transparency" can benefit one side over the other. Not that hard buddy.

Asymmetric information of political operations has no place in a well-functioning democracy.

I'm not sure why none of the other replies to your post as of this writing mention this, but "Guccifer 2.0" is not only providing legitimate information. A few days ago they claimed to have hacked the Clinton Foundation, but the documents they released appear to have been recycled from previous breaches of different organizations (DNC and DCCC), and there is reason to believe they may have been modified. Even if they weren't modified, the mere presence of campaign data on servers belonging to the Clinton Foundation would be considered potentially shady and newsworthy in itself, especially in today's political climate; in fact the Guccifer post explicitly calls this out. The story was debunked before it had much chance to spread in the media, but I bet lots of people still believe it's real.

It should go without saying that false information is a negative influence on the presidential campaign. Indeed, there's quite enough of it already without the need for foreign disinformation campaigns...

Source: http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/10/researchers-find-fak...

Seem plausible Russia would be doing this. Russian media, which is controlled by the Kremlin, has made clear it is completely against Clinton, and for Trump.

We've got some Russian trollers here. Putin would like everyone to think he is just great, but he knows he can't do that. So he has his trollers tell everyone that all the Western countries are awful, so people will give up supporting anyone, and he will be free to go ahead unopposed.

The reality is that the West, for all its many faults, is 10 times better than Putin's Russia. Anyone who thinks otherwise is nuts.

There are three superpower poles in the world.

1. The United States, as the primary hegemon.

2. Russia, which is still powerful but in 'wane' after containment and the costs of the Cold War.

3. China, the preliminary rising power on the world stage.

These three powers have found cybertreaties between China and the US and China and Russia.

But Russia and the United States have not yet found a good framework for cyberagreement.

Is there a candidate or administration today in the United States that considers finding a cyber treaty between the US and Russia a priority?

It seems to me, based on the past few decades of cyber war and the conversations and priorities inside of the beltway that the US considers it's cyberwar activities against the Russians more important than a cyber arms armistice.

Given the US's superiority in cyberwarfare, total as it may not be, this recent surge in Russian modernization and activity looks a little bit like "complaining" and less like "moral acumen".

The United States should consider drawing up stronger garuntees for Russia about it's cyberweaponization. Handled correctly, the results from superpower agreements could percolate down to Middle Powers, regional powers and third world nations to become a basis for global cyber norms and eventually a basis for international law.

It seems to me that complaining and upping the ante, while it might theoretically lead to "peace through conquer", will work to undo any concept of cyber norms or international law.

This comment seems to assume you think Russia was responsible for the hacks/leaks... ?

I think the comment makes sense on its own, as it is a response not specifically about the specific recent accusations, but about the trends in both American and Russian cyberproliferation.

I don't think the comment assumes that Russia was responsible for these specific hacks/leaks. I think it makes sense either way.

> I don't think the comment assumes that Russia was responsible for these specific hacks/leaks. I think it makes sense either way.

Well, it does make sense as is, but I'm glad you clarified that it isn't intended to entail that you are convinced of the origin of the hacks/leaks.

You forgot Poland!

Not your core point but I'd take issue with the usa being a hegemony. Hegemonies lead. Great powers walk behind you holding a gun to your back.

Is the usa not a great power?

Each power has its own norms for network exploitation operations, and thinks their own model is the only "right" one.

1. United States, FVEY, Germany model: exfiltrate the maximum amount of information from foreign governments and an expedient amount of information from SOEs to satisfy unlimited desire of information by decision makers in government. Occasionally throw a bone to domestic business but only via government trade negotiators. Perform offensive actions only in warfare or warfare-like situations. Leave coups, election manipulation, etc to HUMINT and military action only.

2. China (pre-2016) model: exfiltrate the maximum amount of information from companies and an expedient amount of information from foreign governments, to provide commercial information to satisfy unlimited desire of information by domestic businesses and SOEs and to satisfy limited desire of information by decision makers in government.

3. China (2016) model (ostensibly with the new treaty): exfiltrate an expedient amount of information from foreign governments.

4. France model: exfiltrate an expedient amount of information from companies and foreign governments to satisfy desire of information by domestic businesses and decision makers in government.

5. Russia (pre-2016) model: exfiltrate an expedient amount of information from foreign governments. Perform offensive actions only in warfare or warfare-like situations.

6. Russia (2016) model: exfiltrate an expedient amount of information from foreign governments. Perform destructive actions only in warfare or warfare-like situations. Perform election manipulation via network exploitation in addition to HUMINT and military action!

I think the "complaining" is an apt description of what's going on. However, complaining is a legitimate reaction to having one's elections tampered with. Iran has a legitimate complaint to the US's meddling in its affairs in the 1950s.

Pres. Obama clearly sees a cyber treaty as a priority, as the US is in the process of negotiations with China. Russia should follow.

I agree that complaining by itself isn't productive. Escalation would also be bad. Norms established by treaties appear to be the only effective method. It mostly put an end to the great powers using chemical weapons.

Pretty neat attempt at a summary.

I feel you've understated the US investment in manipulating elections. Sentry Eagle's feeding information into HUMINT isn't without a commitment within HUMINT and CIA to work in the psychological and political domains.

I'm not sure I feel that your list is a list of the norms that each have put forward to establish. The US is closer to a representation of their proposed norms. The others are closer to a description of operations/dossiers.

It would be very interesting to read a report on proposed norms next to dossiers and strategic incentives for each country.

We fully agree that norms established by treaties is a nice path forward.

I don't know if I quantified US election manipulation; I think it's fair to take it for granted that most 20th century Central American elections were manipulated by the United States. Does this satisfy your requirement?

Your allusion to Sentry Eagle feeding information to HUMINT is pretty transitive; by that logic, Taco Bell helps HUMINT because they have a franchise in the CIA food court. (Not to mention, a CNA program has nothing to do with information gathering)

True, stated vs observed are different. I believe the US and French stated match the observed, while the new Chinese statement hasn't been definitively established (detected Chinese intrusions in U.S. companies have sharply decreased, but maybe they improved tradecraft). Russian statements recently are bizarre and serve to promote their new "question everything, including facts" PR push.

Most likely the path forward to deescalate the defensive Russian position is to limit aggressive NATO maneuvers, e.g. reconsider emplacing the missile defense installations in peripheral NATO states.

Sentry Eagle feeding SIGINT to HUMINT is nothing like Taco Bell.

What an absurd thing to say.

Yeah, it's pretty absurd. I went a little bit too far. BTW, I didn't downvote your posts; I enjoyed the discussion.

I'm with you. I was rushing out for the weekend so didn't get the time to write anything more comprehensive anyway.

Russia is a convenient boogeyman but to call it a cyber superpower is laughable.

Who controls the manufacturing?

Who tapped in all the internet cables?

Who has the power to get any info they like from technology giants such as google, microsoft?

Who can turn any phone, webcam, microphone into a surveillance device?

Who has their fingers from the lowest hardware layer up through the whole software stack?

I called Russia a superpower, not a "cyber superpower".

I freely admit that the US has outpaced Russia, indeed much of the rest of the world, in cyberwarfare.

What metric do you use to call Russia a superpower? Saudi Arabia has larger military budget than Russia. And compared to US, it is not even in the same order of magnitude.

Well, Russia has about 5 times as many military personal, plus about 2,000 nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.

Again, Russia won't even get a bronze medal by the "active military" metric. Unless you would call North Korea a superpower too; it is the poor metric.

I give you nuclear weapons. Only US has more nuclear weapons. But does it matter in the real world? https://youtu.be/1Y1ya-yF35g (imagine what happens in Russia that has military budget 10 times less than US and no less corruption).

Though I still don't understand the logic: Russia has nuclear weapons and therefore it is a superpower compared to US and China? (non-existent political power, isolated, under economic sanctions--what the word "superpower" even means in that case).

I understand something has to justify an enormous US military budget--if you don't have real threats; you have to invent them. It wouldn't be unusual that a war were started under false pretences anyway. (if a presidential candidate can laugh while talking about the rape of a 12-year-old girl; she wouldn't even blink before launching the next war https://youtu.be/e2f13f2awK4 )

From the underlying statement:

> The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts

I really hope that we have better evidence than this. The US intelligence community has made errors before, even in circumstances where they released considerably more information than this.

Given that the attacks have been directed at a particular party, and that party is the one currently in power in the executive branch, establishing that the results of the investigation are truly objective should be a critical goal here, to prevent this press release itself being seen as an attempt to influence the election.

Exactly. I hope that additional detail is released. It's a pretty serious accusation to make.

Also, I think it's worthwhile to draw the distinction between a state sponsored attack (as in Project Sauron) and state sponsored mischief (as in launching script kiddie style pen tests on unsecured systems).

Obviously Russia is doing the first kind of attack, but what would be the strategic benefit of doing the latter but not covering up the tracks well enough to prevent this sort of accusation?

You're probably not going to see any additional details. If you have an intelligence asset on the inside, revealing the source can jeopardize that asset. For example, if they say that the CIA is funding a vpn provider in Moldova that revealed in its logs that the source is Russia, well that wouldn't be appropriate to the continued monitoring effort. You've burned your asset.

Ok, I don't dispute that, but why would the following happen:

- The campaign led by a former secretary of state decides to essentially go rogue and start accusing a foreign government of election tampering.

- The USG stays silent for a while and then rather than simply having a direct communication with Russia decides to issue an extremely vague public statement about the alleged cyber attacks.

> I really hope that we have better evidence than this.

That's not the evidence, its the conclusion. (And its a conclusion reached by private attribution firms and made public long before any official government statement, at least as to the methods part.)

I don't want to bandy words -- what they say is that the attacks "... are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts". This seems to be an extremely weak statement -- that they are "consistent with", rather than "can be unambiguously traced to".

Assuming good faith in the intelligence community, we can only assume that these "consistencies" would be difficult or impossible for another actor (a different state or a rogue agent) to mimic. The statement is phrased so weakly that it is difficult to say this with confidence. Because of the political situation, government agencies should be extremely careful to avoid making statements like this unless there can be concrete assurances that the conclusions are fully supported by the evidence, without any political agenda attached.

Again the attribution by private security firms, and it's (general, at least, but more specific than the government statement had specified) basis had been public for some time.

And, in any case, even if government agencies are as careful as you suggest, you are unlikely to be able to distinguish that, because the kind of evidence that works fully support it us not the kind of evidence that could be fully disclosed without compromising future intelligence activities.

I've read those reports, and I did not find the evidence particularly convincing. Much of it was of the type "if you want to make it look like Russia did this, what metadata should we conveniently leave lying around?"

IIRC the major points of evidence were a Cyrillic character set attached to an SSH session, and Russian IP addresses connecting to a VPN website.

This is hardly substantial evidence.

And don't fool yourself - these "private firms" have no interest in biting the hand that feeds them. They want the next contract too.

An important point in understanding Russia: Russia is not a superpower; it's a new situation, not the cold war. They are a sinking regional power with nuclear weapons, trying to find a cost-effective way to have some influence.

In the cold war, the Soviet Union was far larger than Russia today: It included Ukraine, Belarus, the Central Asian states, Armenia and many others. And the states it dominated (part of the the Warsaw Pact) were much of Eastern and Central Europe, including half of Germany, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania, and more.

Russia no longer controls those countries and many of the largest ones changed sides to NATO, greatly shifting the balance of power. Power flows from money and population:

---

GDP/population 1977 (best I could find in a quick search):[0]

* Warsaw Pact: $1.2 trillion / 366 million

* NATO: $3.4 trillion / 563 million (I think that includes France, which was allied but not part of NATO).

---

~2016 [1]

* Russia: $1.1 trillion / 144 million (and shrinking, afaik)

* NATO (2014): $37.5 trillion / 906 million (and growing)

* Spain: $1.7 trillion / 46 million

* Germany: $3.8 trillion / 82 million

* Canada: $1.4 trillion / 36 million

* U.S.: $18.5 trillion / 325 million

---

Russia cannot compete with NATO. Their economy is significantly smaller than Spain's and than Canada's - those nations could afford more powerful militaries than Russia's if they chose.

[0] (PDF) http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/cbo/77...

[1] Wikipedia

The size of Russia's military (especially the number of nuclear weapons) says that Russia is considerably more than a regional power.

Sinking (that is, declining in influence/power)? I can go with that.

Others (Canada/Spain) could have larger militaries than Russia if they choose? Great, but they don't choose to do that. Russia does. When the shooting starts, how much you could have spent on our military doesn't matter.

> When the shooting starts, how much you could have spent on our military doesn't matter.

Agreed. However, NATO, and the U.S. in particular, still outspend Russia by a very wide margin.

> The size of Russia's military

From what I've read, they lack the capability or money to deploy more than small forces beyond their borders. Russia is poor, has serious economic problems, and wars are very expensive. Iraq cost the U.S. over a trillion dollars, IIRC.

Everything they do is on the cheap, designed to maximize the appearance of strength: In Syria Russia sticks to the air, and we don't know how many missions (or at least I don't), how much it costs or for how long they can afford it. In Ukraine they used small amounts of special forces to seize Ukraine's southern peninsula, Crimea, and support insurgents mostly with equipment.

They hide deaths of the any Russian troops in Ukraine, indicating that there may not be much public support for foreign deployments.

> especially the number of nuclear weapons

Nuclear weapons make a strong impression but are status symbols; in practice, they are almost unusable. They do prevent the invasion of Russia, but nobody was going to do that anyway except, as a long shot, China in the far east. Probably they do make the U.S. and Russian forces in Syria keep a distance from each other, to avoid unintentional conflict. Otherwise, they provide no influence; nobody worries that Russia will nuke them.

The russians are more likely to use nukes because any conflict with them will have to be near their borders since their military simply does not have the capability to fight far from home. Its easier to get support from your population when your threat is near your home than on the other side of the world.

China is also in the same situation. They don't have projection capabilities either yet.

> China is also in the same situation. They don't have projection capabilities either yet.

True right now, but to add to my table above:

* China: $11.3 trillion / 1,376 million

China absolutely has the resources to be a superpower.

> In Syria Russia sticks to the air,

FWIW, it's not entirely correct. There are specs ops and advisor teams on the ground (and there have already been officially reported casualties). But beyond that, some people who previously fought for the separatist militias in Ukraine told me that quite a few of their militia friends have been unofficially "contracted" to Syria. This appears a convenient arrangement, since when they get killed, it doesn't get reported as a military casualty, and doesn't really need to be reported at all.

Similar to the use of contractors by US in Iraq, I guess - but these guys are actually used at the frontline to support Assad troops in direct engagements, not just to provide security for civilians etc.

BTW, ironically, they have a very low opinion of the local troops. One guy over there joked that the war is essentially fought by foreign troops against each other on either side (Assad and ISIS), whereas local recruits on either side are really unmotivated to fight, and are easily routed or forced to surrender. The only locals he considered to be a viable, motivated fighting force capable of winning without foreign manpower backing them are the Kurds.

(This is unverified Internet rumors, I don't know those people personally, you don't know me personally, so take it all with a grain of salt.)

I've read in several credible sources report that former anti-Russian insurgents from the Caucuses (e.g., Chechnya) are also in Syria, and rumors say Russia facilitated that.

This is likely a conflation of two different facts.

On one hand, the Syrian branch of what later became ISIS has a lot of Chechen fighters, mostly associated with Doku Umarov and his "Caucasus Emirate"; indeed, one of the groups that united to become ISIS was founded by a group of Chechen separatist commanders. The aforementioned contractors pegged them as the best fighting force that ISIS currently possesses, due to both high morale and experience.

On the other hand, Russia has been kinda sorta reviving the "savage division" traditions of the Empire, specifically with Chechnya as a source of recruits. They were used in Ukraine (ironically, sometimes fighting against Chechen separatists who came to join the Ukrainian National Guard volunteer battalions), and now also in Syria. But they're usually not former anti-Russian insurgents from the most recent war (the one that started in 1999). Many of them were separatists in the first war (1994-96), but switched sides in the second war, like the current Chechen leader Kadyrov.

Thanks.

OT: Where do you learn all this? I read a lot of foreign policy and I'm always interested in excellent new sources. The Jamestown Foundation provides in-depth coverage Russian and Caucuses issues like these, if long-winded a little partisan, but I haven't found much else.

I'm Russian, so it's easy to follow the local news and social media.

Also, I follow a variety of "interesting" people on LiveJournal. Among them are some separatist militia fighters from Donbass, so I get a scoop of their inner news, rumors and propaganda. These guys are actually surprisingly ready to share with most anyone who's willing to listen - they have a lot of broken expectations, and many are angry in a very loud way.

>> The size of Russia's military (especially the number of nuclear weapons) says that Russia is considerably more than a regional power.

It is a regional power because it doesn't have means to project power beyond its region. Even the operation in Syria is stretching the supply lines significantly.

Compare this to US with its several carrier strike groups.

The only weapon that Russia has that has truly global reach, comparable to those CSG, is its nukes, which aren't actually usable in any scenario other than an all-out nuclear exchange. Which is why "regional power with nukes" is so accurate.

The problem is that Putin, as he has stated clearly, has made it his goal to get back to superpower status. He doesn't have the population and economy to do it, so he has to use dirty tricks. And even if he fails, he sure can cause a lot of problems in the attempt.

I don't have anything to say about the geopolitical or moral importance of Russia hacking the US to influence elections.

But I do have something to say about the attribution here:

A very common sentiment on HN is that the US intelligence community has decided that Russia has a motive to hack the US, and spends money on offensive security, ergo "it was probably Russia".

That is not how attribution works. Officials (and the firms they hire) are working with vastly more specific fact patterns than the news stories about these incidents convey. They are matching Russian means, motive, and opportunity at a far more precise level of detail than is commonly reported.

The major attribution firms --- FireEye/Mandiant, Crowdstrike, &c --- have for years prior to these breaches been collecting huge volumes of information from a pretty significant fraction of the Global 2000, who deploy their tools as part of their anti-malware strategy. That's the entire idea behind Crowdstrike†: you deploy their agents, and they hoover up IOCs and malware samples from around the world and analyze them. These firms have been involved in thousands of compromises we've never heard of, and have staffed large teams of experts (both FireEye and Crowdstrike have gold-plated reputations in the infosec community) to analyze and develop signatures from that information.

The DNC compromise is analyzed in terms of IOCs --- network traces of command and control channels, captured backdoor and malware samples, vulnerabilities employed, IP addresses of staging servers --- and those IOCs are matched to previous compromises. When DHS says they're working with a "high degree of certainty" about who's behind the compromise, they're saying that they've matched the compromise to a set of IOCs --- many of which are not public --- that are tied to previous known Russian compromises.

That doesn't mean everyone involved here --- multiple departments of the US Government, the executive branch of the government at the very highest level, and several of the largest security firms in the US --- couldn't be lying. It could all be a conspiracy. If it was, it would be the largest conspiracy ever carried out by the US government. But I guess that could be what happened!

† Crowdstrike, by the way, is run by a conservative Republican.

>That doesn't mean everyone involved here --- multiple departments of the US Government, the executive branch of the government at the very highest level, and several of the largest security firms in the US --- couldn't be lying. It could all be a conspiracy. If it was, it would be the largest conspiracy ever carried out by the US government. But I guess that could be what happened!

I don't think it's as simple as that. When the case for war against Iraq was made, "multiple departments of the US Government, the executive branch of the government at the very highest level, and several of the largest security firms in the US" all seemed to be in agreement that Iraq definitely had weapons of mass destruction.

Clearly, they did not, what happened is that certain facts were overstated and repeated and certain other facts were ignored or downplayed.

There is no reason to believe that this is any different because, again, there is a strong political gain for the current administration to have these facts be so.

I agree completely that Russia may well be behind the attacks but given the fact that the people making the announcement also have the most to gain from the announcement, I am happy to remain unconvinced until I see more evidence.

It's not simply the USG reporting the attribution, but also several of the most reputable forensics firms, independently.

In more depth, see also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12664172

Iraq is a bad example. That is because almost all the non-american nuclear proliferation experts also thought that Iraq had a big nuclear program. That is because they were shocked to discover after the Kuwait war that he was a year from having nuclear weapons, and he refused to agree to real inspections.

Am I the only one who would like to see cold hard evidence for these claims? I want server logs, ip traces, intercepts, or some proof besides just "intelligence says".

You will never see it. The US never provides proof. Only "Intel sources say" and rumors.

> You will never see it. The US never provides proof. Only "Intel sources say" and rumors.

That's not entirely true, though the only time the US Executive Branch will provide the backing for its intelligence conclusions is if it needs to in order to convince some other entity in order to motivate that entity to take action; the public is rarely an entity which it must approach this way (and, when it must approach Congress or US Courts, there are procedures to keep intelligence material from the public, which are often, but not always, used; some information may come out this way, though), and occasionally the public will also receive some of the evidence incidentally to the US government presentation to some other entity, like the UN Security Council.

I would too, but consider what you are asking for. Text logs. Easily fakeable text logs. If they provided an excel spreadsheet with a bunch of Russian IPs on it, what do you really do with that? In this case they are just saying "look, you'll just have to trust us on this one.."

I firmly believe that in many of these attribution cases there is a lot of top secret source discovery methods they cannot mention, like sniffers on routers, or implants on the actual computer used to send the message.

EDIT: Additionally, it's pretty unlikely that you'd see a Russian IP address and be like "Oh Russia did it". Instead, NSA would have a list of IPs known to be compromised by Russian actors. If they shared that list with the public, it would not help clear things up for us, because we don't know the history of the traffic coming from that compromised box, it could be in another country and idiots would point and say "See! Not Russia!". And it would reveal to the Russians that we knew they owned that box. All bad things.

From what I can see there are two bits of evidence other than IP logs:

1. Russian metadata on some of the files was added, implying it came from (I believe) a known Russian government actor. 2. The timing of the attacks match that of business workdays in Russia, including a cessation of attacks during official holidays.

Now, if we were talking about a hack of NORAD or something , i.e. a hard target, where the pool of actors that are likely to be successful at hacking the target is low, then this circumstantial evidence could be reasonable. The problem is that, from what we have seen so far, the DNC server and others were poorly secured. This means that the pool of potential hackers goes from "nation states" to "skript kiddies and up" and as a result, circumstantial evidence is much weaker.

If the problem is people getting access to voter databases, it's really much ado about nothing, since many of those databases are already public, and besides you can pay a data warehousing company a few bucks and get much more data about any American than what exists in any election database.

If the problem is actually the voting machines, then maybe we should go back to all paper ballots like many other western countries like Canada.

Funny how the proven, reliable and simple solutions are never proposed...

>If the problem is actually the voting machines, then maybe we should go back to all paper ballots like many other western countries like Canada.

Problems with paper ballots in the 2000 election are a big reason the US no longer trusts them. No one wants to go back to the days of scrutinizing hanging chads and indistinct pencil marks.

Electronic voting has obvious problems but at least you know what a vote is or isn't.

If it's DRE, you don't actually have any idea what the vote is or isn't. With a paper trail in theory you can at least recount.

Ahh, right. A few old people misread those poorly designed ballots, therefore let's use a poorly secured system that is hackable by foreign governments.

Or, we could design the ballots to not be confusing?

It's funny how other western countries using paper ballots don't have these problems.

Yes, the actual solution is to have a /computer/ make the markings on a ballot, which is then reviewed by human eye, and turned in.

Or mail in ballots and trusting that end users know how to fill out 'scantron' like forms from years of testing in public schools.

Press release (with the joint DHS and ODNI statement referenced in the article): https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/10/07/joint-statement-departme...

A big question is why government stays on the sidelines of cybercrime (and espionage). They said something here, but it's not usual, and what have they done about it? They don't seem to feel responsible for protecting IT assets like they do for older infrastructure: If someone was blowing up pipelines, it would be shocking if the U.S. government was so passive about it.

The government needs to step forward and do its job of protecting citizens, including in cyberspace - hardly a minor consideration at this point. I've been thinking about it recently after reading this article:

http://blogs.cfr.org/cyber/2016/10/04/risky-business-when-go...

The US? Seriously is this some kind of joke? The same US that has been assassinating leaders and overthrowing dictators for over 100 years is accusing someone else of interfering with an election? That's really a sign of mental illness on the part of the US.

Quite the contrary. This is superficial sanity, planting necessary ideas into mass consciousness. You cannot touch China, they are important trading partners, despite facts that chinese intelligence is writing files at US defence contractors at speed of hard drives there. You cannot touch Germany, otherwise this will jeopardise transatlantic treaties. Blame Russia, it cannot do anything, anyway.

> You cannot touch China [...] Blame Russia, it cannot do anything, anyway.

Except, you know, the US government has not only also blamed China for state-sponsored cyberattacks, but actually gone further and indicted specific members of the PLA for those attacks.

Russia can do plenty. Like fuckup the US's overthrow of Assad so they can build their precious nat gas line through Syria that Assad won't allow. Russia put a stop to that. Now it's down to how much blood is the US willing to spill in order to ensure Europe gets free of Russia's natgas hold on them.

No one forces the EU to buy gas from Russia. Besides, the US successfully completed huge liquid gas terminal facility at its EU satellite - Lithuania, so there is an alternative supply since 2014.

I can't believe i'm read so many commenters here say that the government is lying that is Russia. Think about it why would Americans officials lie about this and its not just the US government (now) saying its Russia but independent security groups have been saying this too.

I know its hard to believe in post Snowden America that everything the government says is a lie but it just doesn't make sense for use to point the finger at another country for this.

Depending on the out come of this election Russia could be in a world of hurt.

It's not news that Russia is doing this. It is news that the government is officially accusing them of it. There are going to be geopolitical and diplomatic repercussions from this.

okay but but whom? geopolitical and diplomatic repercussions by Russians or Americans?

In case Americans... is there anything America can do to them to make them feel the heat? I mean you talking about the country that was in a deep poverty for decades but still praised and loved their dictator...

That mentality won't change.

If we're going to move toward open cyberwarfare, we could do a lot to their network infrastructure.

And they could do a lot with our power grid. Probably not a wise path to move down.

Without nukes I'm fairly confident that the US and Russian governments have their own hackers buried so deep in eachothers SCADA style systems they could wreak havoc if ordered to do so.

Think things like energy grids, dams, financial markets, etc.

It would be counter-productive to escalate this issue in the cyberwarfare arena. We'd just do what we always do, punish them financially with sanctions and by continuing to push fracking so that the price of oil stays low.

No Diebold statement? They're still widely used and just as hackable.

No need to sway the public opinion by releasing troves of party emails if you can just directly hack the vote itself!

>"We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities

Perhaps.

Russia and China have been "cyber attacking" my servers for years. Last server I set up for a friend I blocked both countries by IP range.

I can imagine because the intensity of what's going on with this election, it has drawn out a more concerted effort from your typical misanthrope probing servers.

> Jason Healey, a senior research scholar on cyber issues at Columbia University, said the Pentagon’s Cyber Command should disrupt Russian hacking operations. “Go after their command and control,” he said. “ ‘Counteroffensive’ is the key word here.”

Oh lovely- get back at them with their own medicine, normalizing a continuous cyberwar in nominal peacetime. Its great- as fun and lucrative as regular warfare, except without all those issues with optics because no one understands all this cyberbusiness regardless. Want to be rich in ten years? Throw a pile of CS grads together to start up a cyberwarfare consulting company, and you can still carve out your slice of the new military-industrial complex.

Is there really anyone who isn't trying to influence the U.S. elections? Why single out Russia for criticism? President Obama himself is trying to sway voters to vote for Hillary Clinton. The New York Times recently released Donald Trumps's 1995 Tax returns in an attempt to influence voters to vote for Hillary Clinton instead of Donald Trump. Then just a few days ago, the Washington Post released a video of Trump's 2005 crude sexual comments which provoked outrage among the public and resulted in the plummeting of his poll numbers. All these media organizations are, in one way or the other, attempting to influence the U.S. elections. So why blame Russia when others are doing exactly the same thing?

Although I'm a citizen and resident of the US, I can't help but smirk when government officials are outraged and shocked that another nation state is trying to influence our electoral process.

Question for someone more informed than I: With the Citizens United ruling, what's to stop another country from pumping money into US elections?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Ac...

Is WaPo still a credible medium after their "no pardon for Snowden"?

Also, when will the US Oligarchy stop blaming everything on Russia. Sloppy server security? It's Russia. Private e-mail server used for government business? It's Russia.... Nearly 20 trillion dollar debt? It's Russia.

OK, US Oligarchy needs an enemy for a new war. A war that would hide the fact that this neoliberal system is about to hit the wall. A war that would fill the troves of the military industrial complex.

Says a "conspiracy theorist" George F. Kennan, former US ambassador to Moscow and distinguished Council on Foreign Relations member: "Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy."

Good Night, and Good Luck.

>Is WaPo still a credible medium ...

No but notice how even otherwise highly intelligent Americans collapse under the spell of 3-lette-agency propsganda. Its amazing!

This is why I sympathise with regular US American citizens, they are equally a victim as the rest of the world. Their soldiers are not bringing "freedom, democracy and human rights" but death and destruction. And they themselves come back home - some dead, many destroyed. And for what?

Regarding US media being influenced by three-letter-agencies: Operation Mockingbird

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

is alive and well.

What's the evidence?

Personally, I think the Russians were involved. But for consequences to follow, we as a culture need to be certain based the preponderance of the evidence.

> The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises

Strong claim. What kind of evidence would an investigator need to see to make such a claim against a foreign nation? Would it be different than what is needed to make a claim against an individual citizen?

I'm having a hard time taking this entire message seriously. It just feels like empty reassurance.

tptacek addresses this elsewhere in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12663930

Discussion of any topic that mentions Russia (everywhere, including HN) is, unfortunately, dominated by Russian propaganda trolls.

easy, hacker news should block IPs originating from Russia and China. they're mostly just state sponsored posters anyways

Please don't make baseless accusations like this on HN.

This is as credible and evidence based from reliable sources as the statements that Iraq had WMDs and was connected to 9/11.

Joint DHS and ODNI Election Security Statement

https://s3.amazonaws.com/files.scribblelive.com/2016/10/7/14...

What I don't get is how the Obama administration thinks it can point a finger at Russia and claim interference in the democratic process yet not look hypocritical for not also pointing the finger at Rep. Debbie Wasserman and claiming the same.

Do they realize how absurd their position sounds right now?

If you're familiar with the DNC leaks I have no idea how you could claim equivalence in good faith.

Russia has a fairly well known "troll brigade" as well. Search a bit about Russia's army of Internet trolls and propagandists. It's interesting.

Of course I'm sure the USA does a fair bit of this stuff as well. Every major nation does propaganda.

What sort of evidence do they have to back this? I've seen nothing discussed about that, anywhere.

The only thing they seem to go with is that Guccifer2.0 links to Russia.

To me this whole thing is based on nothing more than an educated guess.

> What sort of evidence do they have to back this? I've seen nothing discussed about that, anywhere.

The attribution by CrowdStrike was discussed in the news (and on HN) previously. While the government may have additional evidence from intelligence sources beyond what CrowdStrike was looking at, it probably includes the same things at a minimum.

An even more interesting problem is how HN will deal with 55 Savushkina Street

Do you blame them? Russia is only trying to protect themselves from gettimg dragged into unnecessary aggression and war with Trump as Commander.

"However, officials said those attempts could not be directly linked to the Russian government."

Clearly this article is a hit job.

But why?

It's very bizarre. My take so far is:

- Russia's actual "state sponsored" capability would allow it to have hacked the server without being traced.

- Thus if Russia did it, the trail was left intentionally.

- Only if the "missing" emails contain a major smoking gun would it make sense for the HRC campaign to use this finger pointing as misdirection.

- Only if some PR aim was beneficial would HRC's campaign have turned the hack's alleged origin into a campaign rallying cry, rather than letting the officials currently in office handle it through official channels. This point is strengthened by HRC's status as a former sec-of-state.

Hypothesis 1: The HRC team is fully expecting an email to surface containing a smoking gun, and this is part of a preemptive misdirection strategy.

Hypothesis 2: This is part of an ongoing misdirection strategy with the full knowledge that no smoking gun will emerge from any of the hacked/leaked information, intended to keep everyone occupied with intrigue and speculation to avoid settling on any other focal point that might harm the campaign.

Hypothesis 3: Russia is doing a low-sophistication mischief campaign and has ineptly made itself a scapegoat and fomented outrage over this hacking which has become a rallying cry for HRC's campaign.

They're upping the accusations now for at least two reasons that are convenient. The growing conflict between the US and Russia in Syria and the embarrassingly weak, flailing campaign of Hillary Clinton.

I'm not remotely a fan of hillary clinton, but she's currently blowing out Donald Trump in the polls (538 currently has her as a 4-1 favorite to win)

Considering how much of a disaster Trump and his campaign has been, this is still pretty underwhelming that he was close to matching her 50-50 as much as 1-2 weeks ago.

Even if Trump is not being funded, influenced etc by Russia he's amateur at best. I almost compare Trump to a Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany. Not a great statesman and would create a terrible political environment and make major mistakes. :( It only takes one weak president and combined with a horrible congress and we're gonna have a bad 4-8 years.

> Considering how much of a disaster Trump and his campaign has been, this is still pretty underwhelming that he was close to matching her 50-50 as much as 1-2 weeks ago.

The best he has gotten has been a tie, when he had a really good week and she had a really bad few weeks. The normal state of the race has been a commanding lead for Clinton.

I think mbfg got it right.

translate: US government diverts attention away from new wikileaks dump of clinton emails.

I accuse the government, and the political parties, of gross incompetence.

Trump reminds me of Kaiser Wilhelm.. Good luck America!

Smaller countries are on the receiving end of advanced hacking for a long time.

This one is about some old private server...

I don't think it would be a major international incident or even be particularly unexpected for them to hack the rnc and dns and anything else they could get their hands on. In fact, they'd be failing at their jobs if they weren't trying their hardest to do that.

The problem is that they released the data. And they are fairly blatantly attempting to tip the scales in an ongoing election. That's not something that the US can politely ignore. It threatens the entire political system of the US.

Да, мы единственно не смогли хакнуть трансгуманистов.

They're trying to make sure Trump is the one so he brings down the country without Russia or other powers haha.

- ignorant person speaking

This is certainly one of the more peculiar incidents of late.

It's been my impression that the US and Russia conduct various sorts of covert mischief such as this, but it's usually under the radar.

"Hacking" an insecure email server configured by campaign volunteers or other non-technical people is not exactly what would qualify as a "state sponsored attack".

(edit: if you disagree please explain why rather than simply downvoting)

Actually this is a pretty clear sign of a state sponsored attack, most attacks including the ones that the US does are not technically sophisticated but they are executed near flawlessly with a very good operational methodology, the other aspect of state sponsored attacks is protection; even the criminal elements of the security/hacking community stays out of military and government networks usually unless they have a pretty strong patron they can run to, no one wants to experience rendition or a drone strike both of which are very real threats hackers that attack government networks face.

Really? Can you name one hacker targeted in a drone strike? I'm pretty sure that only happens in your mind.

Hillary wanted to drone Snowden. I don't think it's too far off you're going to see these batshit crazy political elities start droning anyone that opposes them.

Snowden did no hacking.

Assange, for one. Of course she declined (did not recall) and suggested it might have been a "joke".

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/782906224937410562

http://www.wsj.com/articles/hacker-killed-by-drone-was-secre...

Obviously ISIS hackers will get killed in drone strikes, that's a war. But nobody is going to drone strike a hacker in Russia, Germany, or the USA. Let's get real here.

> Actually this is a pretty clear sign of a state sponsored attack

So are you saying that the Russian government either unintentionally left a trail (IOCs) on the server, or intentionally left a trail because it wanted to be detected?

Or are you simply claiming that "Guccifer 2" is on the payroll of the Russian government?

(or some combination of the above)...

I'm not saying it was Russia, I'm saying that anyone these days that hacks such a high profile target and then parades around and does show and tells has a sponsor.

The fact that some of the leaked emails/information of from the "Guccifer" et al. hacks have also been tampered with in order to achieve a specific political goal also hints at a higher objective which isn't something one usually associates with cybercrime or even hacktivism.

Criminals would steal, sell and run and hide (not that you could hide these days if you break into a US government network), hacktivists would not usually tamper with the information they release as it goes against their own philosophy.

> have also been tampered with

What tampering has occurred?

The documents were edited, to what extent/purpose it is unknown.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-36913000

http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/06/guccifer-leak-of-dnc...

The emails released in 2013 also show some signs of tampering, there were incidents of duplicate headers and the times of some of the emails were strange (mostly related to Benghazi ironically) this was a copy paste error but again no one knows to what extent the "content" if and was tampered with.

It seems as if anyone who had actually hacked the server would have the emails in a more raw format which could be authenticated in the event that one or more of the emails are newsworthy.

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