Obama close to announcing measures to punish Russia for election interference
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
How is this achievable? Russia is not a tiny third world country. It's a huge nth world one. Its oligarchy/government couldn't care less about any additional inconvenience applied to the general population. People are cynical beyond the touch point of any such measures.
Also, how about attempt to identify and correct the results of the interference?
This punishment business sounds like wagging the dog -- not doing anything that matters, just populistic noise.
Apologies if this sounds harsh, had to get it off my chest.
not sure if you read the article but they (allegedly) hacked into pentagon and released information to wikileaks that painted the democratic nominee in a bad light which was then cycled over and over in the news. don't think this can be corrected
For international law, we have had in the last year quite many hacking scandals involving the NSA and a common comment here on HN is that such activity is legal. If the country from where the hack originate has laws that permits it, then many view that as making every computer a fair target.
That leaves the interference aspect, and we saw quite a few examples during the election. There were a 7 years old non-published camera recordings which was used, without the consent of the recorded person. Is that form of interference permissible during an election?
Then we had news articles about allegations of crimes for which no court or judge have seen. Is publishing anonymous statement of such allegations a form of interference, and if so should it be legal?
Or should it only be legal if the entity that do the interference is located in the nation that holds an election? If so, what about international news agencies, many which originated in the US but is now, often for tax reason, located elsewhere. Should a news agency located in Ireland be permitted to interfere with the US election?
Sanctions achieve nothing except making the US hated around the world.
It sounds like your main complaint is that "punish" has... an ownership or parental connotation?
Doesn't make me feel better.
edit: https://theintercept.com/2016/12/14/heres-the-public-evidenc...
The fbi and even lynch said there was no evidence. Everything is so vague and speculative, its too similar to the iraq has wmds fake news.
There are so many ironies here. The US has been involved in interfering and over throwing governments for decades. The public should not be upset that the truth was exposed, but rather should be calling for more truth to be exposed. Let's expose the Republican corruption as well.
Perhaps - but having the "truth" be "exposed" by a foreign government undermining your electoral process and waging a propaganda campaign on behalf of one party exclusively is not something the public should be calling for. The interests being served by that exposure will always be those of their government, and not your own, and certainly not "the truth" in any objective sense.
Otherwise, one could just as well say that the governments the US has interfered with ought to be grateful that we "exposed the truth" in their case as well.
>Let's expose the Republican corruption as well.
You mean, let's hope it's in the national interests of foreign governments to expose Republican corruption, and that they choose to be honest about doing so.
There are two separate issues here, which often seem to be conflated for political purposes, or implied to be in conflict - the value of the integrity of the electoral process and the value of an informed electorate.
If we presume that the only way to achieve the former is to destroy the latter, then we're implicitly conceding the legitimacy of our own state.
>Otherwise, one could just as well say that the governments the US has interfered with ought to be grateful that we "exposed the truth" in their case as well.
The US doesn't interfere by exposing the truth. Not comparable.
>You mean, let's hope it's in the national interests of foreign governments to expose Republican corruption, and that they choose to be honest about doing so.
No, I'm just stating that in this instance, this is actually what we should be more concerned about. The fact that we don't know all the truth. The fact that it is inconceivable now knowing the corruption in the DNC that is is likely that comparable corruption likely exists in the RNC and WE should expose it.
>If we presume that the only way to achieve the former is to destroy the latter, then we're implicitly conceding the legitimacy of our own state.
If our government is already corrupt we never had legitimacy to begin with. Nonetheless, this is not a call for foreign state actors to do what we should do.
The whole point is that if a burglar broke into a house and discovered children who had been abducted. We would be focusing more on the crime of the abduction. We would realize despite the burglary it served us. We would not ask for more burglaries, but we would call for exposing more abductions if we thought more existed.
I can't imagine any situation whereby uncovering the truth undermines democracy.
That sounds distinctly Orwellian, in fact.
Can you imagine a situation in which the truth uncovered by a foreign government or some unaccountable agency like Wikileaks is not, in fact, actually true? Or where, as with Wikileaks, the selective exposure of some truths and withholding of others is meant to serve an explicit political purpose and to bias, rather than inform, the electorate?
Yes. All that would achieve would be to undermine wikileaks' credibility.
They literally would just have to do it once and every leak subsequent to that would be suspect.
The main reason why wikileaks has had such an effect is because they haven't yet released any lies.
>Or where, as with Wikileaks, the selective exposure of some truths and withholding of others is meant to serve an explicit political purpose and to bias, rather than inform, the electorate?
If you were the subject of such leaks you could offset this problem by releasing the rest of the information to the media rendering its selectivity pointless.
The only way selective exposure as a means of propaganda works is if you actually wield a large degree of influence or control over the media (which does undermine democracy) and can 'bury' stories.
The DNC can make a claim to that (CNN, CBS, Viacom) as can the RNC (Fox) but wikileaks doesn't wield any influence over those corporations.
You're assuming that the accuracy of the information Wikileaks releases is crucial to its influence or credibility, but I disagree. A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can put on its shoes, after all.
I submit that Wikileaks is more influential because of political bias than it is because of objectivity.
>I don't doubt that the mainstream media would hammer home the point that they released lies in the past from that point onward.
Many Americans have been trained to mistrust the mainstream media and to assume they are biased, corrupt and bought by corporate and political interests.
People who would be susceptible to political influence from sources like Wikileaks would likely also reject the credibility of the mainstream media, so the intended effect of influencing partisans wouldn't really be countered by MSM rebuttals.
The question is whether the set of such people is large enough to actually influence an election.
>If you were the subject of such leaks you could offset this problem by releasing the rest of the information rendering its selectivity pointless.
Yes ... and your releases wouldn't be believed, because many people have been trained to assume that politicians are corrupt and that their denials regarding accusations of scandal are lies.
Also, guaranteeing that anyone who leaks inaccurate information will be answered with a leak of accurate information probably doesn't set a good precedent regarding the integrity of classified material.
>The only way selective exposure as a means of propaganda works is if you actually wield a large degree of influence or control in the media.
I present to you the recent US Presidential election in rebuttal, and argue that selective exposure as a means of propaganda worked quite well in that case. Not because of Wikileaks' influence over the media, but because of their influence over social media and the cynicism of the electorate.
It did real harm to Dan Rather and CBS's credibility when they did it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy
Wikileaks' position is even more precarious than theirs since unlike CBS they own no distribution channels. If the mainstream media choose to ignore them then they're toast.
>I submit that Wikileaks is more influential because of political bias
This doesn't even make any sense: the average Trump voter and Assange do not see eye to eye.
>Many Americans have been trained to mistrust the mainstream media
They've got plenty of reason to mistrust them but that doesn't always stop the truth from being believed.
What has trained them to mistrust the mainstream media in any case, is lies. If they care about that (and all evidence points to the contrary), they can start by lying less.
>People who would be susceptible to political influence from sources like Wikileaks would likely also reject the credibility of the mainstream media, so the intended effect of influencing partisans
Partisans don't decide elections and the stupidest part of this post-election hand wringing has been the complaints about the idiocies they believe and how they were influenced.
What killed this election for Hillary was low turnout by non-partisans, not Trump.
>assume they are biased, corrupt and bought by corporate and political interests.
No need to assume. Plenty of evidence for this.
>Yes ... and your releases wouldn't be believed
I think if the DNC released their own emails they wouldn't have much trouble getting people to believe that they're real.
If they released actual evidence about Russian hacking then likewise.
>many people have been trained to assume that politicians are corrupt and that their denials regarding accusations of scandal are lies.
Again, there's no real need to 'train' people for this because it's self evident and relatively more truthful and scandal free politicians (e.g. Sanders) do have a greater tendency to be believed.
>I present to you the recent US Presidential election in rebuttal, and argue that selective exposure as a means of propaganda worked quite well in that case.
I present to you Hillary Clinton: the most compromised, scandal ridden politician that the DNC could possibly run and the only person who, under the microscope of wikileaks, could actually end up making Trump look good.
If Sanders was the nominee Wikileaks wouldn't have had anything of substance to leak.
Life is tough for the man on the street in Russia, they wouldn't be happy knowing the entire government is profiteering at their expense.
All the US would need to do is flood vkontakte, news comment boards etc, with repeated facts of corruption, as Russia has been doing many years now in the West.
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/putins-palace-this-russian-presiden...
They might tolerate it if they themselves were getting better off, a social contract of sorts. But if people are worse off, and they know it's at least partly due to oligarchs and Putin enriching themselves, at their expense, Putin may find his grip over the people isn't as ironclad as he may think.
Why do Russian oligarchs move their money outside of Russia?
Have you considered all sides of the argument?
I'm not suggesting Russia is any better or worse than the US or any other country but scientific data and other known facts can lead others to conclude differently.
The fundamental flaw for humanity is the belief that hierarchical forms of governance are best, when all the science shows that people in power become corrupted especially when they set the laws that allow the deniable op's and other coverups.
Perhaps the best metric to consider for a balanced least corrupted society is the difference between the richest and poorest in that society. In other words, the less social cohesion you have the greater the corruption. Considering the US has the richest people in the world, the data suggests the US is the most corrupt nation on the planet.
And with the US now hacking the world whilst it tries to hack Russia whilst blaming Russia, I refer back to my analogy about being forced to play for the school sports team whether you like it or not. Its the same problem migrants face, no one asked to be born and no one asked to be born in a repressive country or a country where the psychopaths rule the roost.
So does the above now make you think these sociopaths who like winning popularity contests (what else is an election) enjoying tricking and misdirecting people who dont think through the consequences?
Perhaps its high time to start Questioning More as the Russia Today tag line suggests. In other words dont be so easily led or to put it even more bluntly stop behaving like a dog fetching the stick your master keeps throwing you.
I dont know what will happen after, but this election has been framed as "tampered" and the language and posturing in all media does seem indicative of creating a narrative that will over turn the results
However the aftermath of openly question the authenticity would be devastating to the country - and therefore unlikely to be attempted. The best strategy - given where we are is to build enough doubt to weaken Trump's mandate, yet not enough to throw the entire system into chaos. Though even that is an extremely risky game.
But the NSA continued commercial cyberspying against Petrobras. These people are not to be trusted.