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Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

A headline with the phrase "Leading the Fight to Protect America" encourages skepticism as well.

TFA, Alperovitch, and one supposes the ruling party as well, can't seem to make up their mind about Alperovitch. For a security dude, he seems to make a lot of political judgments. Maybe that's a natural part of the whole attribution "know thy enemy" shtick, but it does undermine the impartiality of his attributions. Then again, maybe they do need some help with diplomacy:

Administration officials asked Alperovitch to attend a meeting to consider what to do. He was the only native Russian in the room.

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> He was the only native Russian in the room.

An ugly bit of trivia. This sentence would actually sound different to a Russian speaker than to an English speaker, particularly an American one. In English, "Russian" can mean both "of ethnic Russian origin" and "a citizen/national of Russia". In Russian, those two concepts have different words.

With antisemitism still being strong in Russia, and in the context of the article, many Russians (as in both ethnic origin and citizenship) would be quick to point out that Alperovitch is not a "native Russian" in both of these senses like them.

Russia probably isn't unique in that sense, although progress continues everywhere. I've actually been pretty shocked that no one in the current Missouri governor's election has brought up the fact that the "not a politician", "I like to blow shit up", "like Trump without the creepiness", "I donated to my nonprofit before I took a 6-figure salary from it", Navy Seal, Republican candidate Eric Greitens is Jewish. Of course, if he were running as a Democrat, I imagine someone would have printed some "educational" flyers.

If you're to take the article at face value, I find the following interesting.

>"You have to let them save face," he told the group. "escalation will not end well."

Why is it these so called Russian friends always encourage everyone to do nothing, it's always something like "best not to do anything and just let it go".

Seems like that would just encourage more of the same.

Now who knows what was really said and this is just an article that isn't any official report. Its not like the Administration is going to tell Esquire their plans. Never the less if that is what he said I would be hesitant to trust such a person.

I really don't agree. The interests of USA citizens would not be served by going to war with Russia over the pretext of hacked emails.

> escalation will not end well

This seems like a good moment to differentiate what we want to do from what we can do. One reading of this is "just ignore the bully and they won't make things worse", which I agree is silly. But the other reading is "holy shit guys, don't set a norm of publicizing state hacking efforts, we will not look good."

Granting the claim that Russia did this, it's worth following up with the possibility that the Equation Group auction was done to embarrass the TAO and the US more broadly. A few people I've seen (including the grugq, who is hardly a partisan) have suggested that it was revealed to threaten escalation if the US keeps pushing to embarrass Russia over hacking.

In which case, the compliance argument may be totally reasonable. It wouldn't be giving in, it'd just be counseling politicians that maybe they don't want to take the moral high ground here.

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