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Blame the Russians is probably too convenient to not be used. It is a useful PR story because it has multiple benefits - it deflects blame "don't read the emails, worry about the Russians hiding in the bushes ready to attack instead", and it takes a jab at Putin. Him and Hillary specifically, are not very good friends. They've battled over on Syria ("I'll set a No Fly zone there!"), but goes back probably as far as Bill Clinton involvement in the Balkan Wars. Of course also by Hillary severely criticizing his own rigging of his election.

During the debates, along all the other entertaining stuff I saw (from both sides), I remember Hillary mentioning how not less than 17 intelligence agencies checked and told her it was the Russians. If you listen to the news, that's how you know something is a lie - they overemphasize stuff. If she is saying Coast Guard Intelligence went out of their way to investigate and tell her the Russians did it, you know it is probably time to stop worrying about Russians and worry about other stuff. (Another example, Cuomo from CNN said "it is illegal to read these documents, you have to come to use for interpretation", I knew, those documents have to be read, probably paying close attention...)

Looking at it from technical aspect, I would imagine any state actor who is not stupid, probably managed to hack into that server. Russians are good but they don't somehow have magic others don't have.

The point Hillary made was there was a consensus among the 17 agencies. A join statement was made representing these agencies: https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/10/07/joint-statement-departme...

Exactly. So there was never 17 separate agencies each checking and finding out Russians did it. Which is what that statement meant to imply.

Moreover, note that James Clapper, the head of the OCI also lied to Congress about NSA in a very blatant manner: http://www.hasjamesclapperbeenindictedyet.com/

Also note from your source: "However, we are not now in a position to attribute this activity to the Russian Government."

"Russia" is a much better explanation than "we're not sure who hacked us, we have many enemies and terrible OPSEC"

"why not hack a wider range of targets?"

They need to have 'plausible deniability' so it's hard to do without fully leaving your tracks and showing your hand.

But let's red-team it for a second and think about who you would go after if you were Russian and wanted to hand the election to Trump. There's a lot more people on that list worth going after than the folks that "Guccifer" did manage to get a hold of.

I've been thinking along those lines for over a year and a half since Hillary's email server was leaked by the NYT. Based on the fact that her email was not state.gov, that would have made the server a target. To get her detailed info - along with Bill's - that would have been useful.

In all honesty, can you imagine what's sitting in Bill's email? Or worse, browser history?

Further, why just drop Podesta's email? While he's important in political circles, the average American has no clue who he is.

I think if you really wanted to take down Hillary, you'd release all the nasty, snarky, etc email that you know she sent to people. Not just the nasty things she said about Republicans but other Democrats. Convince her colleagues that she'll insult and sell them out in a heartbeat and enthusiasm dips from both them and their supporters. With enthusiasm goes funding, rally attendance, and turns into a loss.

EXACTLY what I've been thinking...If the Russians really wanted to take her down, they did a pretty crap job about it. Especially if you think about the ways they have taken down their enemies covertly before - in much much smarter ways.

Also, while I get that the Russians have always been way better at HUMINT than the West is at SIGINT (or better at playing dirty?), it doesn't seem quite as successful any more. I accept there is definitely an element of "known unknowns" but the quality of access obtained by the past few Russian spies who have been uncovered has been pretty poor.

Who says they didn't get more and just not release it? Also, the utility of Bill's emails, from an intelligence standpoint, isn't super useful these days as he hasn't been in office for roughly 16 years. Still might be some useful bits, but not a treasure trove

As for showing the world that Bill allegedly gets off to some freaky stuff or that Hillary is mean: Nobody cares. Hell, Supergirl (CW show), with their episode where Cat Grant gets hacked, summed it up pretty well with (paraphrased) "Oh whatever. I've said worse than that to her face"

Posting that would just get downplayed with genuine interviews with the wounded parties where they say "Okay. I am a professional adult. It hurts me that Hillary would accuse me of wetting the bed, but that doesn't really influence anything professionally"

Because once you become a "grown up", you kind of acknowledge that even your friends, let alone just your coworkers, might be jerks at times. It hurts, but you move on. Maybe you stop hanging out after work, but you don't let it impact work.

Whereas, stuff like the Podesta emails and the "anti-Sanders" campaign plays to a large portion of the Dem base as well as independents and lets them confirmation bias their way to the conclusion they made months ago. Sanders didn't lose because his appeal was very limited and even a lot of his supporters felt he was better as a senator than POTUS. He lost because of a conspiracy against him and bullying by people he thought were his friends.

All of which hurts the dems a lot, plays well to the news media, and motivates the trump-base by showing "she stole one election, don't let her steal ours"

This is PSYOPS not OCO.

Russia's goal was to create the perception that they're meddling in this election, so as to delegitimize the electoral process itself.

Wow, do you have any kind of evidence for this? look up "pied piper" in the emails, then you will know what went (badly) down.

See CEPA paper: http://cepa.org/reports/winning-the-Information-War .

Quote:

A third element in the Soviet (and now Russian) toolkit is “active measures” — direct intervention by clandestine means in the politics of another country. Active measures may entail the following:

* Influencing the policies of another government;

* Undermining confidence in its leaders and institutions;

* Disrupting its relations with other nations;

* Discrediting and weakening governmental and nongovernmental opponents.

Especially given the pre-election polling predictions, I have to think the risk vs reward would've been very low for Russia. Trump may not want to think of them as the enemy, but even an 'anti-Russian' administration allowed them to march into Crimea and bomb Syria uncontested.

Yeah, plus I think while Trump (can't believe I'm saying anything positive about the guy) might actually be good for resetting relations with Russia, might reduce their paranoia etc - Russians tend to prefer opponents/friends who have predictable stability, and he certainly is not that. I feel a sensible Russian policy would have preferred the devil-we-know of Clinton.

I have nothing but disgust for Putin and his henchmen but at the same time I think there is a lot of value in reading/watching his full speeches directly. There is a lot of poor reporting these days in our Western media and it easier to make better predictions about his frame of mind by seeing exactly what he is saying - then monitor his actions. Many of the direct translations of his speeches about Trump are different from what has been reported. The Russians feel surrounded (by NATO expansion), by NATO intrusions of jets, submarines, Ukraine government change and they also feel humiliated from the 90s, Kosovo, Iraq etc etc. It's important that more people make a real effort to understand and internalise that understanding of Russian fears if we are to avoid a full on renewal of the Cold War...I severely doubt the Trump Administration has people who will be happy to walk back and reset things.

This is important to note regardless of your feelings on the election and of current US and Russian Politics. Despite what was picked up by many US media outlets, publicly, Putin has been much more diplomatic and even-handed in his assessments of both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Privately, who knows what his intentions and relationships are. But since the media relies pretty much on only public statements from Putin, it seems only fair that we reserve any further judgement aside from that. Prior to the election, Putin expressed that he was glad to hear that Donald Trump wanted better relations. In the very next breath, he also cautioned that "who knows what will actually happen though if he's elected." In nearly the next sentence, he also expressed worry about Hillary Clinton's aggressive stance, then immediately countered with "but maybe she will change once elected to look for better relations." Of course, the media on all parts of the political spectrum overwhelmingly reported this as "Putin respects Trump", omitting his full, far more diplomatic statements.

I've been living in Russia for almost 2 years, and one thing I have learned on politics is that you really need to separate the Russian people from the Russian Government; your average Russian distrusts all politicians - most grew up during a time with very open corruption and when your political opinion could actively ruin your life if it was found out. They are very distrustful of the government, and in turn, tend to rely only on their family and friends. They believe government will do what it will do, and the Politicians here seem to be fine with that perception. There's far more focus on bring economic power back to Russia than there is on trying to stick it to the US. A few politicians for local elections tried to run on a "blame the US" platform, but they were largely ignored for the idiots they were. If there's some master plan from Russia to disrupt US Democracy, the end-goal isn't really clear from Russia's side.

Why you think Trump is pro-Russian? Republicans are anti-Russian, AFAIK.

How do you know that the election wasn't decided by foreign intelligence? A good hack is one that no one notices. Creating a black out on election day wouldn't change the outcome. Leaks and planted stories could.

This fast drifts into conspiracy theories, but it seems that the outcome of the election was at least partly determined by stories floating around on Facebook.

Not saying that any of this was influenced by the Russian government (I don't think so). But there is certainly not enough information to judge what they did or if it was effective.

How do you know it wasn't done by US intelligence? You don't. My guess is the best leaks came from people inside the US govt. who couldn't stomach the Clintons back in power.

What are you talking about? The methods worked perfectly well.